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 Muscle Car from their Muscle Memory.
This week we look, in our Values Lab, at the perception that the world is more threatening or confusing. Which groups are most likely to feel this way, and what does this tell us about the climate crisis?
And of course, there is the house of bewilderment that is Charlie’s Attic, this week, including the history of the Hollywood sign.
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.
Dangerous and confusing
We were interested in this recent Twitter thread from More In Common’s Luke Tryl. It points out the large numbers among the population who agree that ‘the world is becoming more dangerous’. Tryl uses this to explain why climate scepticism is not the default, even for voters who are socially conservative and cautious of change on other issues.
As he puts it: “This is where people go wrong, they assume because this group have socially conservative attitudes on crime and migration, they will also be anti-climate. But they miss that it is threat perception that is the driver.”
The danger posed by global warming, in short, means it is something which socially conservative groups are likely to care about. Liberal segments may scoff at the ‘stop the world, I want to get off’ tendency of those who fear a dangerous future. But isn’t this exactly what we are all trying to do when it comes to the terrifying spiral of climate change?
We thought we’d try and unpack this a little further, by looking at it through a values lens. The heat map below shows agreement with the statement ‘The world gets more confusing’ – a relatively similar question to the one Tryl’s data is looking at.
The findings are not a surprise, with Settlers by far the most inclined to agree. The Settler segment is likely to overlay, almost exactly, with Loyal Nationalists and the other groups most prone to feel that the world is dangerous, according to More In Common.
Yet readers with a keen eye will also note that ‘dangerous’ and ‘confusing’ are not exact synonyms. And it is here that risks start to arise for environmentalists. Climate change represents a mortal danger to us, our children and our grandchildren. But it also represents a new and confusing concept, which was not an issue when many of us were growing up. Indeed, in the midst of a cold and rainy English summer, the idea of global warming is not at all straightforward to understand or explain, even for the committed climate activist. The instinct of many will be to reject the scale of the risk because the concept underpinning it is so abstract and complex.
The challenge, therefore, for those making green arguments, is two-fold: to emphasise the extent of the danger posed, whilst also simplifying and demystifying the concept underpinning it.
And finally, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the Weekly where danger and confusion bid for primacy:
