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 Zeigarnik Effect from their closure.
This week we ponder, in our Behaviour Change section, whether it’s a mistake to over-use or mis-use certain language such as gaslighting, triggered and so on. Following an article by Time Magazine, we ask if doing so furthers social causes or risks crying wolf.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, this week featuring the US Mullet Championships and an article by our very own Chris Clarke (the Godfather of TCC) setting out how the Thames Estuary is often the first area where political earthquakes are felt.
Mis-used words and social causes
We were interested in this recent article by Time Magazine, which identifies a number of words people are persistently – and sometimes dangerously – mis-using. The words include ‘Traumatised’, ‘Triggered’, ‘Gaslighting’, ‘Narcissist’, ‘Love bombing’, ‘Grooming’, ‘Antisocial’ and ‘Toxic’.
What struck us about the words chosen was how many come heavily laden with culture war connotations. ‘Triggered’ is often used by the left, for instance, in a way that leads the right to accuse them of being ‘snowflakes’. And ‘groomed’ is sometimes deployed by the right as a sensationalist dog-whistle, in relation to the promotion of LGBT rights (as the piece points out).
Why is this? At the risk of wading into a debate we can’t wade out of, it strikes us that a lot of the culture war rows of the last few years come down to thresholds for what people do and do not think society should condemn or tolerate. A majority may agree that bigotry is bad, but standards vary wildly when it comes to what level of words or actions constitute bigotry. When progressives talk about feeling ‘unsafe’, for instance, they are criticised for crying wolf or being over-sensitive by conservatives. They retort that this is a reductive view – the implication of which is that only the worst forms of violence and bigotry should be called out.
The words identified by the Time piece are interesting, because most are pegged to an exact scientific or psychological benchmark. Their meanings do not subtly alter as societal norms change and it is particularly conspicuous, as a result, when they are over-used.
What lesson does this hold for those trying to further progressive causes? It is a hard one, for all of the reasons mentioned above. But there is arguably a sweet spot, when it comes to winning hearts and minds – which pushes people to consider the implications of certain behaviours, without using language in such a way that credibility is undermined.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin that does what it says on the tin each Friday:
