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:
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Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Lavender List from their Panama Papers.
This week we look at different approaches to segmentation groups, in Behaviour Change. Plus, we explore whether people prone to feelings of guilt are more trustworthy, in the Engagement Hub, and we drop gambling into the Values Lab.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the high stakes ideas casino where the house always wins. This week’s includes headed ping-pong . . .
As our own Values Modes typology has shown us, understanding different sections of opinion and motivation is vital for changing behaviour. So we were interested by this study from last month, which identifies a new segmentation of four personality types: average, reserved, self-centred and role model. Although the approach is interesting, one drawback of the model, we felt, was that the terms vary so much in how positive they are. Central to creating typologies and groupings, we always feel, should be the idea that all segments are ‘created equal’.
We were also interested in a recent study of US politics, which set out five key voting clusters: Democrat/Independent Liberal Elites (DILE), Democrat-Leaning Working Class, Moderate Younger Middle-Income, Conservative Younger, and Conservative Older. This segmentation is interesting for different reasons. It shows that American politics is essentially undergoing the same process as that in the UK – with the values and class coalitions binding the parties together pushed to breaking point by economic and social change.
Fascinating research suggests that a key predictor of whether people trust you is how liable you are to feel guilt. Guilt-prone individuals are apparently better at getting others to put their faith in them.
This initially feels like a stretch, but when you think about it more it makes perfect sense. A sense of guilt often links to feelings of obligation to others. People who feel guilt more easily perhaps transmit a stringer sense of duty.
Of course, being prone to guilt isn’t necessarily enjoyable for those experiencing it, so more guilt isn’t necessarily the answer! But the finding reveals a more basic truth when it comes to engagement, which is that your sense of responsibility to others often comes through in how you behave.
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 and gambling
The BBC reported this week that teenagers have begun asking for help to deal with bombardment by online gambling companies. We bought we’d put away the Racing Post, just for a moment, and put gambling in the Values Lab.
As the chart shows, born gamblers – or those who see themselves as such – are most common among socially conservative Prospectors. These groups are perhaps individualistic enough to seek the successes and the highs and lows that gambling can bring. But they’re also traditional enough to pursue this in fairly direct and simple ways.
An interesting subsidiary question would be whether those with these values are genuinely more drawn to gambling – or whether it’s really the image of ‘the gambler’ (spontaneous, ostentatious, taking life as he or she finds it’) that explains the source of the appeal…
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the betting pencil behind the ear of the TCC Weekly:
