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:
This week we look, in our Values Lab, at the topic of nostalgia. Which groups would be more likely to reminisce about the good old days – and what lessons does this hold for contemporary politics.
And of course, there’s the look in the rear view mirror that is Charlie’s Attic – this week including a pilot project on pigeon contraception.
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.
We were interested in this recent article for Discover Magazine. It looks at the work of existential psychologist Clay Routledge, who has explored the positive potential of nostalgia. He refers to it as the ability to “mentally time travel.” Routledge is quoted, in the piece, as saying that “When we’re anxious about the future…we can turn to the past as a way of [concluding] ‘Well, I've had a good life, I’ve had meaningful experiences’ and…that’s kind of reassuring.”
Reading this made us think of another article, from last month, which covers the rising trend, on social media, of people sharing memes which evoke ultra-simple memories. Many, as the examples above show, feature inconvenience or even discomfort. Yet they are widely shared and very popular.
We thought we’d take a Values trip down memory lane, to understand why. The heat map below shows support for the statement ‘The world gets more complex and confusing’.
There is an inverted statement, ‘The world gets more complex and exciting’, which we haven’t shown below but which yields almost the exact opposite response. So, the key to the sentiment is about whether a world of increasing complexity is an exciting or confusing proposition.
As the heat map shows, the agreement with the latter view comes overwhelmingly from Settlers – the socially conservative, older group, who made up the ballast of the Brexit vote, and who modern politicians often struggle most to connect with. They do not see changes as opportunities and are sometimes suspicious of those that do. They are, perhaps, disproportionately likely to share memes of the type shown above.
On one level this is no surprise, but on another it is revealing – especially at a time when there is much discussion of Brexit and ‘buyer’s remorse’. It helps, if nothing else, to explain why certain groups would have backed the Leave vote so strongly and explains why Leave voters might have been willing to accept the economic hardship that leaving would bring. Just as those who reminisce about queuing for a phone box are not striving for efficiency or convenience (see image above), economic cost-benefit analyses were never top-of-mind for many socially conservative Brexiteers.
The earlier piece we cited, for Discover Magazine, argued that nostalgia can be a helpful emotion for embracing the future – a source of confidence and rootedness. There is no doubt that, thanks to a host of factors, the world is getting more complex. For those looking to chart a positive course through this, the start-point may be to look for the elements which will remain familiar and ever-present.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where ‘bringbackery’ and ‘whataboutery’ rule supreme:
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