The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Slade from their Slade Farm.
This week we unearth a disturbing wartime event in the shape of the Great Pet Massacre, and ask whether we can put the social psychology behind it to good use. We also take a look at genuine resident-led community action in Birmingham, where it’s been harnessed to rejuvenate an abandoned neighbourhood.
Our weekly Values Lab visit looks at the group formerly known as Mondeo Man, and we finish in Charlie’s Attic, home to TCC’s Sinclair C5 Man. This week it includes the post-modern gibberish generator, and the TV appearance of a familiar TCC face, former CEO Graeme Wilson, who left the bright lights of Croydon to run a family farm in Wales.
David Evans
Director
If you see a link that belongs in The Weekly then email it to us and we’ll give you a free TCC exclamation mark to say thanks.
You might not be aware that the immediate casualties of Britain entering World War II included household pets, but bizarrely that is the case. Over the first few days of war, 400,000 pets were euthanised, but why, asks Hilda Kean in The Great Cat and Dog Massacre.
While Kean argues that the decisions to give animals ‘the gift of sleep’ were motivated individually in each household, rather than by some mass panic mentality, Hal Herzog reckons it may have been down to social contagion, or the spreading of behaviour throughout a social group or generation. In other words, it was a sudden fad. Social contagion also affects which pets and breeds are fashionable, Herzog goes on to argue, but can this phenomenon be put to good behaviour change use?
Recent analysis of running habits in over a million people suggests exercise itself is contagious. As this LA Time article explains, the study suggests how profound an effect social networks and contagion can have on behaviour change. Crucially, influence on each other is not uniform or consistent; we react more strongly to certain people in our network depending on a variety of factors, so effectively harnessing it will depend on ever-increasing understanding of what, and who, makes us do things differently.
Also this week:
Is it better to take notes by hand than on a laptop? Find out here
An inspiring example of residents leading the way in improving their community surfaced last week, as a new housing development in a formerly abandoned area of Birmingham was unveiled. Stockland Green residents got together in 2013 with the aim of improving their local community, transforming a site left cut off by Spaghetti Junction.
The development has been helped by the resident group and its determination over years of meetings, visits to other developments around the country, fundraising and partnership with a housing provider. The group is chaired by a local councillor, Penny Holbrook, and shows what can be achieved by empowering communities to do more.
This is covered in Pillar G of the New Conversations Guide, From needs to capabilities, which acknowledges that building community capacity isn’t easy, but can be done when councils listen carefully and engage earnestly.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Values of the crucial C2 voter
Matthew Goodwin wrote in the New York Times this week on the familiar topic of Labour’s identity dilemma, arguing the common denominator in both political rebellion and electoral victory is those categorised as C2s – skilled and semiskilled workers. This group were the driving force behind election victories for Labour and Tories alike, as far back as 1945, characterised along the way as ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Mondeo Man’, and most recently acted as a driving force behind Brexit.
So, should Labour now be wooing this group, and what do we know about their values? We opened up the Values Lab to find out the values of this C2 group.
As Goodwin argues in his article, the Values Modes take suggests this group are indeed socially conservative-leaning, with a slight majority in the upper half of the values map. There is a particular concentration in the socially conservative Prospector segment – in the top left of the map – whose attraction to power and even appetite for social disorder makes them perfect candidates indeed for driving political rebellion.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the frustrated political rebel’s light relief:
Catch up with TCC’s old boss Graeme in the latest episode of Channel 4’s A Year on the Farm
