Smarter strategies for social change.

More media companies are producing films and documentaries to inspire social change, and I have urged their social action campaigns to start putting the emphasis on empathy and compassion in order to engage a target audience to get involved [see Media Psychology Review, 7, 1)

Through the lens of positive behavior change, further research is needed to make media social action campaigns more effective. Others in education, science, and business have already put forth a culture of empathy to bring about positive change. In fact, empathy was found to be a necessary, although not sufficient condition in describing intentions to create a social venture (Mair & Noboa, 2003). At present, social science theories such as transportation theory, topic modeling and language processing techniques, are being used by data scientists to study media impact, and they are being adopted by organizations in the film issue space. For instance, these media makers measure how a story transports an audience as a way to gauge its impact. Research centers scrape data from the web to track frames that create a context around a situation in order to quantify different impact, and suggest this is a way to learn to create new, more effective stories. The idea that data leads to innovation has been echoed in the non- profit sector as well (Kanter & Paine, 2012).

In their research of media, Barrett and Leddy (2009) came up with a number of ways to gauge impact from a quality film. The authors list public awareness, public engagement, social movement, and social change itself, which they define as policy change, or shifts in public dialogue or behavior. This research demonstrates that films can lead to different impacts.

Participant Media produces movies to inspire social change and has developed their own metrics to measure the effectiveness of their social action campaigns targeted at the millennial generation. The Participant index (TPI) measures the number of people who view their movies and campaigns and how their audience reacts, or scale plus behavior, as their standard measure (Boettcher, 2013).

It can be said that both profits and non-profits in the film issue space can expand the theories and measures already in use by turning to social science research that is aimed at behavior design. Lasting social change is an important distinction based on research that explains the stable states (called attractors) that social systems are drawn to. Long lasting problems, or solutions, can be the cause of developing a stable equilibrium. Praszkier et al. (2010) have noted that real change is created by building new attractors to which systems drift, rather than by disrupting the state of a system. I view this as important to the field of social change, and a perspective that can be been adopted in the film issue space. The current focus on policy change and political influence could lead to systems returning to their previous equilibrium once the pressure (i.e. the legacy part of a media social action campaign) is removed.

When sociologist Jeni Cross (2013) talks about behavior change, she begins by debunking certain myths. The first myth is that education will change behavior. It is not information alone, but how it is presented that makes a difference. Furthermore, social interaction is an important tool, and information needs to be tangible and personalized. Another myth is to change behavior one must change attitudes. Cross claims social science research has shown that attitudes follow behavior. Therefore, you want to connect change to values. This perspective suggests that making individuals aware of an issue is not automatically going to change their behavior.

Here is an alternative to get the millennial generation to take action: Scientist B.J. Fogg believes that there are two ways to change behavior in the long term: create habits or change environments. He suggests that individuals are triggered to do something they want to do and are able to do. Trigger, ability, and motivation are the components in his behavior design model. To be really successful, Fogg claims that organizations need to put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.

To understand media impact, the current emphasis is placed on outcomes. What about a shift to understanding human psychology, persuasion, and positive behavior change to make issue oriented content more effective?