COMMON ROOMS AREN'T SO COMMON

The Problem

The Psychology Common Room. The place to relax and unwind after a brain exhausting 2 hour lecture. Hot water at the ready for me to make a warm cup of hot chocolate. The comfy chairs which I sink into, ready to enjoy a few moments of peace before the challenge of going to another lecture dawns on me. Also the perfect opportunity to study or complete some work among my fellow psychology students who may even be doing the same thing. For many years, the luxury of the Psychology Common Room has been enjoyed by many Warwick psychology students, old and new. However, this luxury is not available to everyone at the university. Some departments do not have a common room installed which can be used by their students.Therefore, they miss out on these benefits.

Why is the problem important ?

The students from departments who do not have a common room, have been left with no other choice but to try and use the facilities in available common rooms designated for students of a specific department. This is an important issue because this has caused departments with a common room to be very protective in restricting those who do not belong. Many common rooms have door locks or other systems in place to prevent other students from having access to their common room. 

Hence, the addition of a common room for students to access during their free time, is something that we believe can really add to a positive experience for students. We chose to specifically focus on trying to add a common room to the history department as we often heard other history students expressing that they did not have a common room and that it is something they would like to have. The reasons they wanted a common room were often related to having the facilities to heat up food they wanted to bring from home via a microwave which would stop them spending money buying food on campus. They also explained that they would like to have somewhere comfortable where they could socialise with fellow History students. Laurier (2008) found that commuters on their way to work enjoyed being around like minded people when visiting coffee bars. In addition, having an informal space for studying is another aspect enjoyed by students. Lefever and Bashir’s  (2011) findings from Bradford University found that students valued having informal places to study because it was somewhere they could discuss work without being controlled by the stricter regulations of  a library or lecture theatre. 

Research such as this highlights some of the benefits of a common room which history students are currently unable to experience. Therefore, we decided to try and bring this to the attention of academic staff who we hoped would see the need to implement a common room in the history department.

The target audience

Our target audience includes history students, as well as other students from other departments on campus who may have a common room, and so know the benefits of having one. Our target audience are also academic staff within the history department, we wanted this matter to be brought to their attention so they could realise its importance. We aimed to tailor this project to all university students, not simply history students as we tried to encourage everyone to participate (despite the subject they studied) and support a cause that could genuinely have a positive impact on some students' university experience. Therefore, this project was open to students from all subject areas.

Our Intervention Aims:

1. Raise awareness concerning the importance and benefits of having a common room
2. Get the History department to address this problem and hopefully show the intention of helping their students in the future. 

The Intervention

We started by contacting the head of the History Department as well as the Director of Student Experience. We also contacted a student representative for the History SSLC and the Warwick History Society. We did not receive responses from academic staff or the Warwick History Society. However we received a reply from the SSLC representative, and we decided to set up a meeting where we discussed our ideas and plans. 

During this meeting, we discussed our plans with the SSLC representative, that we wanted to approach the head of departments with evidence that history students wanted a common room in their department. Furthermore, we shared the benefits we had as Psychology students because we had a common room with facilities that really helped us feel comfortable and allowed us to socialise as well as study. These ideas were supported by the representative who agreed to help us, we therefore asked if they could bring up these points during the next SSLC meeting. Also, if they could share our petition so we can gain names to show that a common room in the history department is something that is wanted by the students. 

The petition we designed was to be shared between History students as well as fellow Warwick Students. They were asked to add their name so that we could present this petition to the Head of Departments, showing that this is something that a common room is desired by history students, but is also supported by the wider university. We also created an infographic outlining the steps we took to try and influence the behaviour of students and academic staff, so that we could gain support for our project.

 Psychological and persuasion techniques

1. Just asking
2. Foot-in-the-door technique.
3. MINDSPACE framework (Salience)
4. Incentives

 In our project, just asking was a technique we used in order to gain support from other students. Research has shown that people will often agree to carry out a request due to social pressures and to avoid the awkwardness that could be created if they denied the request (Bohns et al 2011), this makes compliance more likely to occur. Some studies have shown this, such as that by Santos et al (1994) where confederates posed as panhandlers and asked passersby whether they could spare 17cents or 37cents. They were 60% more likely to be given money when they asked for an exact amount. This technique is shown in our project, when directly sending the petition to other students we asked them if they could please add their name to which they accepted. In addition to our direct requests of asking, the petition also asks people to ‘please add their name’, so they are still being asked to comply with a request even if it is not directly through contact. This is most likely to have been the case when the petition was shared on social media. This method has allowed us to gain names which we can use to show that a common room in the history department is wanted by history students and is also an idea supported by other Warwick students. 

Another method we used in our project was the foot-in-the-door technique. This technique involves making a small initial request that once has been agreed, a larger follow up request is made which is more likely to also be accepted (Freedman and Fraser 1966). This has been demonstrated in a study by Carducci and Deuser (1984) who found that people who had been asked to complete a donor questionnaire (small request) were likely to display a higher willingness to be organ donors(large request) in comparison to those that had not been asked to complete the questionnaire. In our project we had sent emails to members of staff in the history department, Warwick History Society and a history SSLC representative. In this email we made an initial small request to simply meet and discuss the ideas that we had. After we had received a reply from the SSLC representative and scheduled a meeting to do this, during the meeting we then made a larger request asking the representative to discuss our ideas during the next SSLC meeting. We also asked them to distribute our petition to other students. As they had previously accepted our small request, it was more likely for them to also accept  this larger request. The representative agreed to discuss the history common room during the next SSLC meeting and also sent the petition to other students, showing their support for our project.

We also used aspects of  the MINDSPACE framework in our project. The MINDSPACE framework includes factors which unconsciously influence our behaviour (Dolan et al 2012). We used the Salience component of the framework to help us influence the behaviour of others. Salience refers to particular features of stimuli which may lead to more attention being directed towards this feature compared to other features (Higgins 2008). Bordalo et al (2012) demonstrated how consumers were more likely to choose the price of wine over the quality of wine because this variance in price was made more salient compared to the differing wine qualities. Therefore, consumers directed most of their attention to the price of wine and consequently chose the cheaper option. In the infographic we designed, we included bright colours to really catch the attention of students, when the post was shared on social media. This was to draw attention to the procedures we undertook in order to influence behaviour as well as encourage people to sign the petition. Sections of the infographic are also highlighted in bold. In particular, ‘Communicating your vision’. This technique allows students to focus on the central aspect of our project as well as encourage them to feel included and engaged. Moreover, the infographic also had a section containing all the benefits of having a common room in your department. This was done as a way of using Incentives as a technique for behaviour change. Mera and Patricia (2015) found out that social and individual rewards were effective in manipulating intention positively towards energy saving behaviors.  We believe that the use of these techniques has influenced behaviour change and made students more likely to sign the petition. 

 How the project can be expanded in future

In future, this project could be expanded to try and get common rooms in other departments on campus that don’t currently have one such as Law and Linguistics. For our project to have a stronger impact we could have conducted interviews with current history students asking why they wanted a common room in their department and filmed this, to provide stronger evidence to support the project. These interviews could also be supported by other students on campus who could describe the perks and benefits they experienced from having a common room.

These could be given to members of staff to also provide more evidence in support of this project.

Limitations to our project, which prevented us from having a greater impact in changing behaviour was because we were unable to get into contact with the history academic staff. This meant that we were not able to present our ideas to them or the evidence we collected in support of our project. However, a strength of our project is that we have successfully raised awareness concerning the lack of a common room. We are pleased that our vision has been taken seriously, and that it has been addressed in the SSLC meeting. We truly believe that is a great achievement that can lead to more impactful results in the future. Therefore, we plan to present our project to members of staff within the history department next term when they have returned, along with the infographic and names on the petition. We hope that this will encourage them to address the need for a common room and although no plans are in place for this year, a commitment can be made to try and implement a common room in the coming academic years. 

 

References

Bohns, V. K., Handgraaf, M. J., Sun, J., Aaldering, H., Mao, C., & Logg, J. (2011). Are social prediction errors universal? Predicting compliance with a direct request across cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(3), 676-680.

Bordalo, P., Gennaioli, N., & Shleifer, A. (2013). Salience and consumer choice. Journal of Political Economy, 121(5), 803-843.

Carducci, B. J., Denser, P. S., Bauer, A., Large, M., & Ramaekers, M. (1989). An application of the foot in the door technique to organ donation. Journal of Business and Psychology, 4(2), 245-249.

Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way.Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277.

Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of personality and social psychology, 4(2), 195.

Higgins, E. T. (1996). Activation: Accessibility, and salience. Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, 133-168.

Laurier, E. (2008). How breakfast happens in the café. Time & Society, 17(1), 119-134.

Lefever, R. (2012). Exploring student understandings of belonging on campus. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 4(2), 126-141.

Mera, G., & Patricia, M. (2015). Effects of Persuasive Communication on Intention to Save Energy: Punishing and Rewarding Messages.

Santos, M. D., Leve, C., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1994). Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Seventeen Cents? Mindful Persuasion and the Pique Technique 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(9), 755-764.