Values and Frames

A short explanation given for the Alternatives to Economic Growth, Cambridgeshire Green Parties, 18th February 2012.

While there is nothing ‘new’ in this approach, a number of threads have been bought together by WWF and Oxfam and others. I’m an engineer, but I am going to tell you about a social psychology experiment.

Tim Kasser, Social Psychologist at Knox College, http://www.knox.edu/tkasser.xml, Intrigued by a flyer for a college car share scheme, which talked mostly of saving money and time, set up a small experiment to probe the values involved:

He took 3 groups. One shown a flyer with all the positive reasons: meeting people, helping others etc. (but nothing environmental), selfish reasons: saving money, time etc. and a mixed control group. After asking the subjects to design a logo Tim watched where they disposed of their paper. A higher percentage of the students who had had intrinsic engagement put their paper in the recycling!

I am no psychologist, I am an engineer. I have worked in the area of energy in buildings since the 70’s because I thought it was important and that things should not just be done better, but in some way done right. I spent a lot of time thinking that if people were given good advice, they would make the correct decisions. We talked about ‘whole life costing’ or ‘cost benefit analysis’ An information led approach. But did clients and developers build any better buildings?

The 80’s and 90’s, saw a changing ideology driven by Thatcherism, New Labour and Neo-liberalism stressing the power of the market. Did a market based approach to housing development make any difference?

Cambridge Carbon Footprint initially drew on advice from social marketing experts and worked on training volunteers to think about the audience in terms of marketing typologies and targeting messages to their concerns. If your contact is acquisitive, stress the money saving from not overfilling the kettle.

But we also realised that to change the way people behaved also needed them to change the way they saw things. That they could only deal with frightening ideas if they felt that others were there with them. Persuading people how to fill the kettle was not going to lead to cultural or systemic change. Carbon Conversations was our contribution.

The work of Tom Crompton, (from Oxfam) shows how values may lie at the heart of much of how we act. http://valuesandframes.org/download/reports/common_cause_report.pdf Values are our guiding principles. Research has shown that there are a number of clearly identified values that are common to a wide number of societies and cultures and that their relationship to each other are also common. The big map(below) shows how this works.

Interestingly, we also see that people hold all values to some extent , but the relative importance may change with time and context. But all the same, if one value is being engages, the associated or adjacent values may also be engaged and of course the antagonistic values will be subdued. The map shows the groupings that have been identified and the pie chart –the circumplex – shows another way of thinking.

The key concept is that on the top right we see labels Universalism and Benevolence, grouped as Self-Transcendence by the academics and Intrinsic by campaigners and ‘bigger than self’ by engineers like me.

At the bottom left is self enhancement, or extrinsic values related to power and achievement.

Linked to this is the concept of ‘Framing’. Here we are recognising that all communication puts the subject in a conceptual frame. George Lakoff in the evocatively titled Don’t think of an elephant (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Think-Elephant-Values-Debate/dp/1931498717/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329592290&sr=1-1 )reminds us how the metaphors we use frame the values that we link to the concept.

National insurance contributions vs. taxpayers money
Tax relief vs. tax cut
Charity, Rogue trader

And the metaphors: Nanny State Mother Earth

So my message is to be careful of what you wish for.

If we sell insulation because it saves money, we have activated frames and values to do with money and self interest. The same frames used by cheap airlines.

Andy Brown, andy@goldfin.co.uk