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 handshaking from their handbagging.
This week we bring you the latest twist on the psychology classic that is the Marshmallow Test, and we mark World Emoji Day with the psychological take, as well as a quick quiz in the Attic. Our Values review of the election continues with the Tory vote over time, and we find out what stuck in our mind from the two big parties’ campaigns.
As always, we complete our round up in the cosy confines of Charlie’s Attic, the psephological tomb where remnants of history’s most forgettable campaigns are preserved. This edition includes a French marching band impressing Macron and Trump with a Daft Punk medley, and the embarrassing demise of a robot cop.
David Evans
Director
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A Cameroonian and a German walk into a sweet shop…
While that headline might sound like the opening to a cringe inducing joke, rest assured it’s leading to a serious message, around one of the best known psychological experiments, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test – in which a child is left in a room alone with one of the sickly spongy sweets, and told that if they resist the temptation to eat it, they will be rewarded with another.
Researcher Bettina Lamm compared the performances in the test of urban middle-class German and rural Cameroonian kids. The latter did overwhelmingly better, and the researchers put this, in part, down to the contrasting upbringings of the two groups of children. The behaviour of those from Cameroon reflected having been brought up to respect and obey elders and value group solidarity, while the Germans had been weaned on freedom of choice and self-expression.
It’s a great example of how our core values and motivations affect how we respond to different approaches to influence our behaviour, and this is as true of grown adults as it is of four year olds. It’s a reminder that interventions will only work if they are designed to appeal to the motivations of their audience, and in many cases multiple approaches will be required for different groups.
Also this week:
It was World Emoji Day this week, and the idea that the little icons are changing the way we express ourselves is something behaviour changers are increasingly having to grasp
New research argues that we can come across less like jerks by avoiding counterproductive presentational tactics like back-handed compliments and ‘humblebragging’
A campaign to remember
For some the general election might seem a distant memory, for others it’s still all too recent. But what has stuck in our minds about the campaigns of the two main contenders?
New YouGov insight released last week reveals what respondents remembered best about the Conservative and Labour campaigns, and the results are unsurprising on the face of it when we consider the fallout from the result. The top answers were ‘bad campaign’ and ‘good campaign’ for the Tories and Labour respectively.
It’s interesting reading that these blanket positive and negative assessments were accentuated among the parties’ own supporters, and of the big slogans, the ‘bad’ campaign’s ‘Strong and Stable’ was far more recalled than the ‘good’ campaign’s ‘For the Many, not the Few’.
It gives an interesting insight into the idea of policies vs. personalities, and what constitutes a good campaign in today’s world. What seems certain is that campaigns that resonate properly with people do still matter when it comes to persuading people to get on board.
Also this week:
Online voter registration is increasing in popularity, particularly among the young, but did some vote twice?
Where do Britain’s political parties get their money from? Channel 4 News has been finding out
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.
Did the Tories turn back time?
As we hear the atmosphere in the Cabinet is turning a little tetchy, David Davis’s name has been thrown around as a possible party leader. It’s not the first time of course – he was beaten to the top job by David Cameron back in 2005. So what’s happened to the values of the Tory voter base in the intervening decade and a bit?
To demonstrate this, we’ve got a bit of a visual assault of heatmaps below, starting with the 2005 Tory GE vote in the top left, circling anti-clockwise through 2010 and 2015, to the 2017 vote in the top right. What it all suggests is that the Conservatives have done a 360 (or is it 180) degree turn in terms of their base. Michael Howard’s 2005 vote came largely from the socially conservative Settler core, but Cameron’s detoxification agenda expanded the vote into the more pragmatic Prospector zone, a winning tactic in 2010 and particularly 2015.
But after Brexit, the rise of May and the fall of UKIP, that values coalition of voters has been shed, and the 2017 vote comprised the same hard core of Settlers that backed Howard 12 years earlier. It’s another indicator that a polarity of values, not interests, dominated this year’s election.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the only venue that promises 2005 theme nights on a weekly basis:
