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 Snowball Earth from their Button Moon.
Still feeling smug from our feature on the rise of the Greens in Mid Suffolk last week, where they eventually won control of the Council at the local elections, we turn our attention away from matters political or royal and focus on more sedate matters. Specifically, we ask will you be going out or staying in this weekend? If you’d prefer to stay home, you’ll be among a solid majority of Brits, according to recent YouGov polling. We ask this week whether there’s a values dimension to staying in.
And of course, there’s the night on the tiles that is Charlie’s Attic, this week featuring a range of Eurovision trivia that makes the argument for staying in on Saturday night hugely compelling. For most of us Europop fans anyway.
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.
A recent poll by YouGov asked the public whether they prefer going out or staying in. The survey found that Brits are three times as likely to favour a mug of cocoa in front of the television to an evening out with friends. We thought we’d close the curtains and pad down to the Values Lab in our slippers, to see why this is.
There is no perfect Values Modes statement to test here. But the one we’ve chosen – ‘I am a quiet and reserved person, I usually speak to others only when I know them’ – feels like a fairly good proxy for the sort of person who’d prefer to stay in.
The results show that agreement with the sentiment is heavily concentrated in the Settler corner – particularly among more alienated Settler groups. This is unsurprising in many ways. Settlers often take a ‘home is my castle’ view and may regard social occasions with suspicion. Prospectors by contrast, almost by definition, are a social animal, enjoying the esteem of others and the chance to look their best. And Pioneers will also be less wary of the unfamiliar – and, by implication, of going out.
One interesting element of the YouGov poll, if you click on the link, is that responses hardly vary at all by age, gender, region or demography. This implies that a preference for staying in or going out is innate – something we carry with us regardless of circumstance – rather than a factor relating to external factors such as cost of living. We wonder if this in turn links back to the core values people have – which are more hard-wired than surface-level attitudes, and which change only gradually over time.
And finally, the psephological party animal that is Charlie’s Attic:
