Persuasion and Influence: Warwick Chains of Altrusim

The aim of this project was to promote altruistic behaviour. Not only do altruistic behaviours make our environments a better place, a great deal of past studies have found that engaging in altruistic behaviours have great benefit to our physical as well as mental health (Post, 2005, Thoits & Hewitt, 2001)!

We came up with the idea of forming chains of people helping one another. We named those chains Chains of Altrusim. A number of persuasive techniques have been employed in this project.We created a webpage to promote the idea of our project and also a Facebook group for people who are interested to get involved and start chains.

How to start a chain?

All you need to do is to do something nice for another person. That can be a friend, your neighbor, your flatmate, or a total stranger. Once you've done something nice for someone else, take a picture or write a post and tag them in the Facebook group - Warwick Chains of altruism. Ask them to return the favor, not to you, but to another person. That way good deeds are passed from one person to the next!

In order to get the project rolling, we cooperated with the societies 'Warwick Effective Altruism', as well as 'Warwick RAG - raising and giving'. We got the agreement of their respective presidents and promoted the project on their facebook group pages.