The Problem:
Bees are extremely important pollinators. Some pollinations occurs from wind and other bugs and animals, but bee pollination in particular is responsible for around 70% of all fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts that we eat. They also pollinate around 80% of wildflowers in Europe and are essential for the health of our ecosystem seeing as many other animals rely on bee pollination for food.
Since 2006, bee populations have been rapidly declining. There are many reasons for this, including pesticide exposure, impacts of climate change, habitat loss and disease.
Despite the importance of bees for our ecosystem and food variety, many people continue to fear and dislike bees, or at least stay passive and don’t engage in bee-friendly behaviour. We feel it’s important to spread awareness about the importance of bees to our ecosystem and about the bee decline in order to encourage bee-friendly behaviour.
Why the problem is important and evidence:
It’s difficult to predict the full impact that bee decline or extinction would have on our planet. Some people believe that bees are so important for our ecosystem that humans would actually die without them. Others take a less drastic approach and believe other pollinators will be enough for us to survive. There is general agreement however, that at the very best, bee extinction would result in the world’s crops being in vital danger, resulting in less food variety. We’ve already seen 76% of plants preferred by bumblebees to decline across Europe in recent decades, and we have to act fast.
We know that spreading awareness about bee decline can aid the problem. Support to charities such as “friends of the earth” has resulted for example in the government backing new restrictions on bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides in 2017. Behaviours such as planting more wildflowers and giving sugar water to struggling bees in addition can help maintain wild hives struggling due to the lack of wildlife diversity in urban areas.
Our Audience:
We chose to target our project towards students, like us, who might be interested in what Warwick University is already doing in aid of nature conservation and who might want to join in. We hoped to encourage students to go home, plant seeds and tell their families about why bees are important. A university campus is filled with a diverse array of students from all over the country (and beyond), so when we ask them to spread the word, it could be far-reaching. This is important as bees aren’t only important for Warwickshire, they are a global necessity.
We also know that younger people tend to be more open to behaviour and idea changes, which means they are our perfect audience (Krosnick, & Alwin, 1989). Therefore, we went across campus convincing students to plant seeds and share the message to ‘bee kind’. We also promoted our site across university online platforms by tweeting the university SU and university page and sharing across Facebook.
Our Intervention:
We started by creating a website with information on the issue we’re facing, how to help, why bees are important and even how to help if you’re bee phobic! We also created a video, for our website, of us going around campus talking to students about why they should care and just asking them to spread the word, plant seeds and visit our site. We shared this website across university Facebook and Twitter pages to get a varied and extensive outreach.
Additionally, we are in the process of organising a bug hotel and bee sanctuary on campus grounds in the Westwood plots, this will hopefully be achieved in the springtime when the bees will be able to get the most out of it.
Psychological and Persuasion Techniques used in this project:
We based our approach to this project on the Yale approach to attitude change (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953): we aimed to refine and strengthen the three aspects of this method (essentially source, content and audience) in order to provide the most effectively influential message possible.
Who:
By default, we were able to use similarity as a factor to make us a more appealing source, as we shared several characteristics with our target audience (e.g. age and university). Research suggests that similarity increases a source’s credibility (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953), and improves the likelihood of compliance because the asker is liked more (Byrne, 1997) which additionally increases a person’s inclination to like things the asker is invested in (Heider, 1958). To emphasise these shared factors, we aimed to incorporate a variety of indicators about ourselves into our methods: these included photos of ourselves on our website, recordings of our voices and selves in the video we made, and using words such as ‘our’ and ‘we’ in our video, to reinforce the idea that we resided in our audience’s in-group. We also personally spoke to other students encountered around campus, which would obviously make clear our resemblances to listeners. Our resources were then shared on social media via our personal accounts (rather than a faceless account made specifically for the project). These all were done with the overall aim of making us appear more tangible and friendly, to increase similarity and appeal of ourselves as much as we could.
Our other main strategy for demonstrating the credibility of our source was that of a perceived majority – although only three people are required for social influence of the majority to have an effect on behaviour, we aimed to increase the power of this apparent majority by recording a larger number of people for inclusion in our video. We ended up including eleven people, which would thereby imply that many agree with our project’s viewpoint, and would increase the likelihood of a person’s engagement with the points we made.
What:
According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, people’s changes in attitude or behaviour are more likely to endure over time, be resistant to change, and be more predictive of behaviour if they process the message’s content via central processing (involving deeper scrutiny and greater reflection upon the information presented) rather than peripheral processing (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; McNeill & Stoltenberg, 1989). As such, we aimed to maximise the likelihood that our audience would process our resources’ information via this central pathway. According to Petty and Cacioppo, one of the greatest factors increasing this change was a recipient having sufficient motivation and ability to attend to and process the information. We therefore aimed to make the message personally relevant to the audience, by introducing a small amount of personal threat – outlining the terrible implications of bees going extinct. However, fear by itself has negligible persuasive benefits, only resulting in a fight-or-flight response (Janis & Feshbach, 1953): in fact, the stronger fear a message provokes, the higher a person’s resistance to persuasion. Accordingly, we aimed to provide a solution (of how to help save the bees), which would, according to Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983; Witte, 1991) accommodate for the fear, resulting in an optimally effective framework of threat for motivation in persuasion. This would increase the likelihood that people would internalise and consider our message via their central pathway.
However, the notion that this alone would generate a change in people’s behaviour is contradicted by the criticisms of the Deficit Model of Science Communication (Wynne, 1991; Jenkins, 1994; Sturgis & Allum, 2004), which suggests that informing someone about a topic is enough to change behaviour – this rarely works, however, which connotes that a solely factual approach would not be sufficient to instigate behaviour change. Consequently, we employed a multifaceted approach to our project, each using different persuasive techniques:
1) Seed & flyer distribution
When speaking to students around campus, we handed out flyers and packets of seeds with the proposal that they plant them, in order to provide flowers for bees. This was done to appeal to the Norm of Reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), whereby people would feel more inclined to do something for us in return for us providing them with something first. Building upon this, we aimed to increase the likelihood of people actually planting the seeds through the use of the Pique technique (Santos, Leve, & Pratkanis, 1994), in which people are more likely to comply with a request if it involves an unusually specific amount of something. In our case, we asked people to plant 32 seeds, which hopefully would be a memorably specific amount. Furthermore, by speaking to one person at a time (effectively singling them out), the bystander effect (Darley & Latané, 1968) was circumvented, as otherwise the risk remained that they may hear about the problem of bees being endangered, but may leave it to others to initiate a solution.
2) Our blog
The majority of our purely factual information was written up in our blog on our website, which was then shared via various social media, such as on Facebook publicly, on Facebook in Warwick-specific pages, and on Twitter. This ensured that the resources of our project would reach as many people as possible; indeed, our post was endorsed by @warwickSU (with 12.3k followers) and @CoventryUpdate (with 10.9k followers), which both spread our ideas to a much wider audience than we would otherwise have been able to obtain, and also increased the credibility of our message by essentially being figures of relative authority.
The blog itself employed a variety of persuasive techniques, including aiming to increase self-efficacy through the use of motivational messages (such as “you can help!”), making use of the technique of legitimising paltry contributions (Sargeant, 1999) through the use of messages such as “Give even a penny to local charities”, and employing consistent humour through the use of bee-related puns, which has been found to have a significant effect on changing people’s behavioural intentions (Walter, Cody, Xu, & Murphy, 2018). The blog also went into detail about the consequences of bees becoming extinct, outlining the household products we would lose without bees, and making it clear that we would probably see bees die out within our lifetimes if we did nothing. This would both appeal to people’s attentional biases for negative information and loss aversion, and would promote behaviour initiation via limited-time scarcity (Gierl, Plantsch, & Schweidler, 2008).
3) Our video
Aside from the factual information included in this, for similar effects to the blog, we aimed to use this resource in a slightly different way to promote our desired changes in behaviour at a highly personal level. To quote Professor Thomas Hills himself, “Part of persuasion is getting memories into the system that can then guide future behaviour”: we therefore asked people to plant their seeds on camera (ensuring they’d be more self-aware of their actions – Duval & Wickland, 1972), which would give participants the memory of themselves already engaging in bee-friendly behaviours. If by this point they weren’t fully engaged with our message, then this would create cognitive dissonance – they would have to ask themselves why they helped, may come to the conclusion that they must care about bees, and this would thus shape their future behaviour (Brehm, 1962). Finally, we enabled viewers to form implementation intentions, as we specified several actions that they could do “today”; this would also increase self-efficacy, increasing likelihood of going ahead with the new behaviours.
4) Multimedia approach
We also aimed to highlight our project’s most important points by both stating them
when face-to-face, again asserting them in our blog, and again outlining them in
our video. This was done with the intention of employing the dual-encoding
model (Bucci, 1985), ensuring the ideas would be more memorable if they were
encoded via multiple modes. According to the dual processing model, this resultant
mechanism enables easier recall, due to the fact that there are multiple routes
by which the points can be remembered; in turn, this would result in recipients
benefitting from the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) in
internalisation of the message content, in that ease of recall would indicate
importance and prevalence of the issue. Furthermore, it would promote
familiarity through repetition, as a repeated single opinion can sound like a
prevalent one instead: hearing the same message multiple times from the same source
can be persuasive, as it feels like the message is being heard from multiple different
people.
Whom:
Our target audience were Warwick undergraduate students, mostly between the ages of 18 and 24. Reportedly, this demographic are greatly likely to be more influenced by our project: people under the age of 25 are most susceptible to persuasion; these students at a highly-ranking university are statistically likely to be highly intelligent, therefore being able to consider the evidence rationally and logically; and they’re more likely to care about the environment, as research has found almost all students want their universities and colleges to actively embed and promote sustainable development (NUS, 2018), suggesting the presence of strong prior beliefs in this regard. As such, we felt that this was the area in which we would have to modify our project the least, as the audience already benefitted our chances of promoting substantial, resistant and enduring behaviour change. However, we decided to target the personal aspect of our individual audience members, through incorporation of phrases such as “so many of you are willing to help”; this, while potentially further increasing the perceived majority, would suggest to people that they fit the demographic of those who would be willing to help, possibly causing self-reflection and ultimately deeper engagement with the substance of our message.
How the project can be expanded in the future:
We’ve loved this project so much that we intend to keep posting blogs and see our bug hotel/bee garden through to the end! More than this, this project could expand around Warwickshire, creating more bee-friendly spaces and encouraging people to bee kind.
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