Changing the Climate on the Climate

Data-Driven Story Strategies Can Save the World

Climate change is real; it’s been real for a while, and we’re not doing anything. That’s partly because this is a collective action problem. Appeals to economists’ “rational actor” don’t work because the rational actor is not a thing, and, this time, it’s not even a convenient fantasy. Each of us individually benefits more from doing nothing than from sacrificing to fix the problem.

If we are to convince people to act together and, you know, save the world, we can’t appeal to the rational actor. We have to change the culture.

The rational actor appeals to social scientists because it’s easy to predict what we can do to change her mind. We need a system with the same simplicity and the same truthy appeal as the rational actor that makes it easy to predict the behaviors that might arise from specific situations.

I use a framework that is simple, truthy, and — unlike the rational actor — actually true to write stories that acknowledge our cultures, understand their goals, and meet their needs. We’re not going for a set of “messages” or the “issues” that move voters. We’re going for a new normal where climate change action is on the route to everyone’s goals.

Fundamental human needs provide a logical architecture for storytelling.

Connecting climate change stories to fundamental needs is easier if we use a theory, and Shalom Schwartz’s theory of universal human values is a useful foundation because it is specific about what values are, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to behavior. In particular, he proposes a ‘circumplex’ that I will call the Wheel of Values.

The first important thing about the Wheel is that it starts with a simple structure based on innate human needs and then layers on more complicated cultural constructs. The Wheel actually starts with just two dimensions (his names are different, but I like mine better).

Simple and truthy–easy to predict from–the Wheel is made of two fundamental tradeoffs.

The first tradeoff is ubiquitous in science under different names. Fight or flight, approach/avoidance, gain/loss, and promotion/prevention are all ways of talking about the tension between holding back to protect ourselves and putting ourselves out there to make gains.

The second tradeoff is also baked right into our genes: the tension between differentiation (being me) and belonging (being part of us): I need to get things for myself, but I also need to work with my tribe to get the things none of us can achieve alone.

Basing a theory in basic needs that drive even our most primal behaviors means that it is certain to hold value for predicting behavior.

Values map to needs.

This is a good place to start, but the needs alone don’t have enough clues to help shape stories. Culture adds a layer of specific goals or values onto this primary map that we can use to add meaning to our messages. Schwartz has published a few different versions of the more complex map, but it’s interesting to derive our own from more than 300,000 survey responses to the 21-item Portrait Values Questionnaire from the European Social Survey conducted in dozens of different countries. The empirical positions of the values are a little different from Schwartz’s original circumplex, but the order is surprisingly robust across surveys and across cultures.

Writing a story using the Wheel means founding the plot in the most fundamental human needs, and the Wheel also supplies the conflict that moves the stories forward. Values that are opposite from each other are in conflict. So if I’m an achievement-focused (It is important to me to be rich) person, and I receive a universalism appeal (Climate change is hurting us all), I won’t respond.

Values that are close to each other are natural allies. A power appeal (We need to act now to ensure that we lead the conversation on climate intervention) or a hedonic appeal (Addressing climate change means more tropical vacations.) is more likely to move Wall Street me.

Values profiles are cultures.

Culture change is more than messaging. We are not writing message frames to get people who disagree with us to agree. We are co-writing a shared vision for a future where everything is not on fire.

How do we decide if we can collaborate on a shared vision with somebody? Trust. That someone like me feeling comes from more than liking and from far more than a demographic match. That feeling comes from the belief that we see things the same way. Groups of people share profiles of values.

These are the three big profiles in the European Social Survey data:

The most important thing about these patterns is how strongly they emphasize the circular structure of the values. There is no group that values both Self-Direction and Conformity. Each of the values profiles occupies a series of values that are close to each other.

The three values profiles in Europe are:

• Pursuit of Wellbeing. Cultures with this value orientation are generally promotion-focused for the self and the group.
• Social Dominance. Cultures with this value orientation are focused on prevention and the social structures (personal acquisition and obedience to authority) that can protect them.
• We First. Cultures with this value orientation are focused on the collective, both the prevention values such as Tradition and the promotion values such as Benevolence.

To demonstrate that this kind of data-driven values profiling is real, I provide an exercise in stereotype confirmation below. This is the percent of people in each European nation included in the survey who fall into each profile.

The cultures in America are likely different from these. What’s great about this model is that, no matter what profiles we discover, we can connect those through their shared goals to the fundamental human needs.

We can use data to drive our strategies.

We will shift all our American cultures toward a shared vision for action on climate change when we write a climate story that serves our goals — our values. That will mean using this set of tools to support the measurement and creative work in:

Acknowledging our cultures. Some of the people who need to protect the climate are tree-hugging hippies. But some of those people are suburban moms, and some are Wall Street power brokers. We cannot change people’s cultures; they are where they are.

Understanding their goals. Cultures are made of values, and values are goals. The stories that work are the stories where our audiences get to be the heroes striving for the good of the forests, for work life balance, or to land the big deal.

Meeting their needs. Underneath those goals are those fundamental tensions: approach gain/avoid loss and me/us. By definition, we can’t meet all those needs at the same time, but a great story ends with a happy ending for me or for us, with a big payoff or a safe and sound happily ever after.