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 survivor’s guilt from their buyer’s remorse.
This week we explain what the Trump gorilla hoax tells us about engagement, and what 12th century migration patterns tell us about 2017 attitudes. Plus, we enter the Values Lab to test which segments the Conservatives’ new green policies will appeal to.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the perennial hole in the TCC Weekly ozone layer.
David Evans
Director
Twelfth century immigration attitudes
A great piece of research this week, which is free until mid-February, shows the link between migration patterns 800 years ago and contemporary hostility to immigration. It finds that “anti-immigrant sentiment in the twenty-first century…is correlated with patterns of immigrant settlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”
This raises big questions for those trying to tackle hostility towards new groups, suggesting attitudes can be deeply culturally engrained. But it also demonstrates that, through understanding an area’s historic relationship with ‘outsiders’, we can start to develop narratives around demographic change that are area-appropriate. Our own work with Webber-Phillips, using Origins data to track levels and types of change, is just one example of how insights about an area’s historic relationship with immigration provide the clues to tackling cohesion in the future.
On a lighter note – while keeping to the theme of mapping history – we really enjoyed the below map, showing 1899 levels of drunkenness. Big thanks to Majeed Neky for sending it to us!
The high-profile publication of The Fire and the Fury, Michael Wolff’s book about life inside the Trump administration, prompted a lot of discussion this week. But one of the most interesting aspects of this was the so-called ‘gorilla hoax’ – a fabricated extract from the book that went viral online. An example of the fabulous but false gorilla story being shared can be seen below.
The excerpt is certainly entertaining – and one can help wishing it were true. It satisfies a desire to feel outraged and scandalised. And herein lies the true moral of the story – at least as far as engagement in a post-truth era is concerned. Irrespective of their politics, many people are ready to believe the ‘fake news’ that backs up what they already believe. Contempt for Trump meant there was an army of people predisposed to believe the gorilla story. Really engaging with the public to stop misinformation involves drilling deeper, to the question of why they were predisposed in this way. Only by doing this can leaders and institutions create genuine trust.
Also worth checking out this week, on the topic of trust, is this article, which suggests swearing in public is likely to increase the perception that you’re honest!!
A day in the life of...a council officer
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.
Green values
Michael Gove this week said the public were willing to pay more taxes to protect the environment. This was part of a wider emphasis by May’s government on green issues and reducing plastic waste, which was widely interpreted as an effort to reconnect with the younger voters who abandoned the Tories last June.
We thought we’d put the environment in the Values Lab, to see which groups Theresa May’s new emphasis will really reconnect with.
Pioneers
Prospectors
Settlers
% who strongly or very strongly agree that “this country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment”
40%
30%
33%
The findings are interesting here, showing that Pioneers are, unsurprisingly, the most likely to agree. Meanwhile, socially conservative Settlers – who packed in behind Theresa May in June – are less hostile than might be feared. However, the most interesting group, in relation to Gove’s assertion, are Prospectors. This group are the least likely to agree with the statement and, as economic pragmatists who value money in their pockets, are likely to be the hardest to convince. They’re also more likely to be swing voters. So, the real challenge will be convincing this aspirational and individualist segment that an issue as abstract as climate change is worth paying higher taxes to prevent.
Elsewhere this week, this piece on the myth that Americans don’t have passports is interesting. As the chart below shows, the amount with passports is actually rising. This is in part thanks to “experientialism” – the post-materialist phenomena that means millennials would “rather put their money into experiences than consumer goods.”
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, your weekly passport to Pimlico:
