#TimeToEvolve: Use of Sustainable Cups at the University of Warwick

The Problem:

Coffee cups are not recyclable due to the outer cardboard shell being lined with polyethylene (KeepCup, 2017). Despite these materials being recyclable separately, they cannot be recycled when combined.  With over 500 billion disposable cups being manufactured globally each year, and one million disposable coffee cups being sent to landfill each minute, it is safe to say this is a global problem. Although there are facilities that can offer the separation process and recycle the cups, there are fewer than 1 in 400 coffee chains using this service (KeepCup, 2017). Alternatively, compostable cups are a step closer to being sustainable as they are biodegradable if disposed of correctly, so would not be contributing to landfill.

This problem extends much closer to home as the coffee cups being used at the University of Warwick are neither recyclable nor compostable. This is particularly problematic due to the high volume of cups being used and disposed of on campus, with the University and the Students Union purchasing approximately 1,075,000 per annum, making a significant contribution to preventable landfill waste. Although the University had existing incentives in place, with students receiving a 10p discount when using a reusable cup, we believed this was not largely being utilised by students and could be taken further.

As if this wasn’t a big enough problem, the majority of students believed the coffee cups that were being used on campus were recyclable, as shown in figure one below. This highlighted that not only were cups on campus non-recyclable, they were also being treated like they were and contaminating the current recyclable waste.

Figure One: Pie-chart showing split of 118 students who believe coffee cups are/are not recyclable.

As a result of the previously discussed, we identified three problems to target at the University of Warwick:

1. Coffee cups being used across the SU were not recyclable or compostable
2. Coffee cups being used across the University were not recyclable or compostable
3. The majority of students are currently using non-sustainable cups

The Solution:

In order to address these problems, we took both a top-down and bottom-up approach targeting both the University outlets and the students themselves. Over 75% of adolescents and adults consume caffeine at least daily (James, 1998), so it is safe to say it is considered a part of people's everyday lives. Previous research has associated food choice with the use of system I, acting as a response to stimulus driven incentives (Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). Thus, when students make the decision to purchase a coffee, they are likely to already be in a relaxed, automatic state and thus are not thinking through each aspect of the process, using their system I thinking. Therefore, by getting the University to make the change, we would be improving the student’s behaviour without them needing to engage their effortful, system II thinking. With this in mind, each of the identified problems above will be discussed separately.

1. Coffee cups being used across the SU were not recyclable or compostable.

In order to address the problem of cups within the Students Union, we approached it in a top-down fashion, speaking to the sabbatical officers, SU staff and Sustainability Champions throughout the meetings listed below:

• 4th November: Meeting with SU President
• 17th November: Meeting with Sustainability Champions and Environmental Ethics Officer
• 7th December: Applied for SU Funding Grant
• 25th January: Meeting with Sustainability Champions for All Student Meeting Motion
• 6th February: Proposed motion at All Student Meeting
• 10th February: Motion passed at All Student Meeting

We applied for an SU Funding Grant of £3,000, using the door-in-the-face technique. First proposed by Cialdini et al (1975), the door-in-the-face technique suggests that compliance with a smaller request is more likely if a bigger, more extreme request is proposed first. We applied for the full £3,000 expecting it to get rejected, but hoping that a smaller proportion would be offered to us in compensation. This was successful, and we were offered £200 for the use of promotional materials of our campaign in promoting the use of reusable cups. How we spent this £200 is outlined under problem three below.

We proposed a motion at the All Student Meeting (ASM) stating that the SU should use compostable cups by the end of this term. The ASM is an opportunity for students to propose something they believe should be changed across campus, which is proposed and discussed at the meeting, prior to being opened to students to vote on the motion. This motion was initially rejected, as it was of a high cost to the SU (£2,200 per year) for them to replace their current cups with compostable ones, within a short time frame. As a result we negotiated, and readjusted the motion, mandating the SU to do the following:

1.     To mandate the Democracy and Development Officer (DDO) and Environment and Ethics (EE) Officer to work with SU commercial services to explore the feasibility of introducing compostable cups in all of its outlets as soon as practically possible.

2.     To mandate the DDO & EE Officer to lobby the university for the introduction of compostable bins across campus, simultaneously with the compostable cup introduction.

With this motion being accepted, we proposed it at the ASM as seen in Figure Two. This was then opened to the student vote across the week, in which the majority voted in favour of the motion and it passed (see figure three).

Figure Two: Photo of us proposing the motion at the ASM

Figure Three: Screenshot of ASM motion results

As a result of the motion passing, it is now SU policy that the sabbatical officers will lobby the student union to use compostable cups in its outlets, and to lobby both the SU and the University to introduce compostable bins so the compostable cups can be disposed of correctly. Although this has not been an instantaneous success, we feel confident that this is something the SU will be offering in the close future as a result of our motion.

2)  Coffee cups being used across the university were not recyclable or compostable.

In order to work with the University, again using a top-down approach, we organised a stream of meetings in which we articulated the problem, and began working towards a solution:

• 3rd November: Meeting with head of Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Degree
• 18th November: Meeting with GSD Society
• 30th November: Meeting with Director of University Food and Retail Strategy
• 7th December: First contact with KeepCup, reusable cup company
• 2nd February: Meeting with Director of University Food and Retail Strategy
• 16th February: Meeting with Head of Retail Services, Head of Marketing and Rootes Grocery Store Manager

Having multiple meetings with people in authority across the university campus, we mainly employed the technique of ‘Just Ask’, a strategy Cialdini (2007) identifies as a key ‘weapon’ for influencing behaviour. Just ask has shown to be beneficial in multiple contexts, from more people agreeing to go on a date (Clark & Hatfield, 1989) to being given money when asking for it (Santos, Leve & Pratkanis, 1994).

Using this, we simply asked the various people we met whether they would be willing to replace the current disposable cups on campus with something more sustainable. We quickly learnt through our meetings with the GSD team that recyclable cups were not efficiently in production yet, so began pushing for the use of compostable cups as the next best thing.

We learnt that the University were planning on transitioning to the use of compostable cups and lids eventually but were in no rush to do this. Yet, through our consistent, persistent and informed proposals, the University have now made the transition to the use of compostable cups and lids. Figure Four shows the cups currently now being used across campus.

Figure Four: Compostable Cups now used across Campus

In addition to this, we proposed that the University should introduce and promote the use of reusable cups more than they already do. After conversations with the University, it was agreed between us and the head of retail services that the fund from the 5p charge on carrier bags would be spent on 3,000 University branded mugs for us to give out in Go Green week. The giving out of the mugs marked the introduction of our #TimeToEvolve campaign, and the opportunity to gain a free reusable cup was advertised across campus, as seen for example in Figure Five. We were successful in this and 3,000 University of Warwick travel mugs (pictured in Figure Six) were given out to students on the 6th March 2017.

Figure Five: Sign advertising the free reusable mugs outside Rootes Grocery Store

Figure Six: First day of #TimeToEvolve Campaign, giving out the free mugs!

Additionally, we proposed the sale of KeepCup reusable mugs, a brand which has created the World’s first barista standard reusable cup, with a mission to eradicate the use of disposable cups worldwide (Keepcup, 2017). We picked this brand as they offer a contemporary and stylish design, something which the Director had made it clear he wanted within his products. We are proud to say that from the result of our meetings, the KeepCups were on sale from 7th March across campus’ outlets, and we promoted the sale of the cups in Rootes Grocery store again, as a part of the #TimeToEvolve campaign, pictured in Figure Seven. Please see below, under problem three, how these promotions were used to push the use of sustainable cups on campus.

Figure Seven: the launch of the Keepcups

The sale and the push of the Keepcups has continued beyond our campaign, as the University have created a webpage to continue to promote and sell the Keepcups, as seen in Figure Eight, or by clicking here. This link was emailed to us with the contents of the email stating: 'great evidence for you and the team, of the genuine change made!'.

Figure Eight: The universities webpage promoting Keepcups.

The Director offered us the following quote for this blog:

“Throughout the first meeting I had with Olivia, Izzy, Charlotte and Hannah, I expressed that changing the coffee-cups on campus to be compostable was not something I was opposed to, but was something that had never been asked of me nor had a solution ever been presented.

Over a series of meetings, the students completed research around the subject and presented statistics, including that the majority of current students at Warwick believed that the cups being used were recyclable.

A variety of ideas have been explored between us, from using a collection service to recycle the cups we already use, to swapping to compostable cups, to encouraging the use of reusable cups.

As a result of the input from the students, I am pleased to say that the both the coffee cups and their lids being used across the University Outlets are now compostable. In addition to this there will be an introduction of ‘KeepCup’ reusable coffee cups on sale across the outlets in line with ‘Go Green’ week and the finale of the students campaign. I know they are now working with the Students Union in order to get them to follow the universities lead in introducing compostable cups into their outlets, and to push for compostable bins in line with this introduction.”

3. The majority of students are currently using non-sustainable cups

The fact that the majority of students believed the coffee cups were recyclable could explain why they were making little attempt to use reusable cups. In order to target the high volume of students using disposable cups, we decided to encourage the use of reusable mugs. Thus students would not be required to consider how to dispose of the coffee cups offered on campus. To do this, we used the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) to attempt to change their behaviour, as illustrated in figure nine.

Figure Nine: Theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1991)

In order to change the student’s overall intention to being more likely to use a reusable cup, we first addressed their perceived behavioural control. Perceived behavioural control refers to how much an individual believes they are able to perform the behaviour (Ajzen, 1991).  We targeted this by offering students a free reusable travel mug, so they had the resources to use a sustainable cup in future at no cost to themselves. Secondly, by giving out such a large number of the mugs (3,000) we hope to have induced a sense of subjective norms. Subjective norms refers to the perceived social pressure for an individual to perform a behaviour (Ajzen, 1991). So, by 3,000 students receiving and using a reusable mug others are likely to feel they should do the same. In turn, this should reduce the number of disposable cups used. We were not disappointed when news of our free reusable mugs spread across campus, students were queueing throughout the Rootes grocery store to receive a mug. Finally, we addressed their attitudes. Attitudes refers to the favorability of an individual performing a behaviour, which can be influenced by the knowledge they have of the subject and its perceived consequences (Eagry & Chailen, 1993). In giving them the free mug we conversed with them regarding the fact current cups on campus needed to go into landfill bins, and hence it was overall more beneficial and sustainable for them to be using these re-usable mugs. We also got students’ receiving a mug to sign a written contract committing to use the mug as much as possible, as outlined below. These three components combined should work to positively affect the students behavioural intentions, and encourage them to use more sustainable cups in the future.

By giving students a free mug, we used the behaviour change technique of reciprocation, whereby people are obligated to repay what another person has provided them.   As shown by Regan (1971), people are more likely to perform a behaviour if they have been given a favour beforehand. Therefore, by giving students a free mug, they should be more likely to use the mug in the future.

In addition to using the theory of planned behaviour, we also implemented some further behaviour change techniques using our £200 SU grant we mentioned above. We first purchased 2,000 business cards with a design that can be seen in figure ten.

Figure Ten: Business card design

Firstly, the design on the front of the business card in figure ten, has been designed by an artist to incorporate both dimensionality alteration and pictorial analogy. These are two of Goldenberg, Mazursky and Solomons (1999) creativity templates. The dimensional alteration template shows the impact of a product across time. We did this by showing the coffee cup evolving throughout time, so it can be seen from original non-transportable cups, to the use of polystyrene cups, to the frequently seen today disposable cups to where people should be - the use of reusable cups. A pictorial analogy template uses symbols alongside the advertised product. We did this with the use of the evolving figures which is a well known symbol, alongside images of coffee cups. We are hoping to imply that people should evolve their use of coffee cups in a similar way to how humans have evolved throughout time: for the better. The hashtag has been created to incorporate the use of social media as an advertising element. Hence, the #TimeToEvolve being our catchphrase, implying people should have caught up with the times in using a reusable mug. We were pleased to find students' did find the hashtag, in figure Eleven.

Figure Eleven: An example of a tweet tweeted during our campaign.

These business cards were given out with a free tea-bag, also purchased through our SU grant. This incorporated the technique of reciprocation, with the intention that by us giving students a free gift, they are more likely to purchase a KeepCup in store and again, use the reusable mug. Similarly, students who purchased a Keepcup were offered a free drinks voucher for use in retail outlets, and those who use a reusable mug in the outlets will receive 10p off a hot drink, as an incentive to purchase. The use of incentives has been found to be successful in influencing individuals behaviour in the past, with the gift of a free lottery ticket significantly increasing the number of people willing to donate blood (Gotte & Stutzer, 2008). Therefore, we hoped, and research would suggest, the free drink would encourage people to use their reusable mugs in the future.

In a final attempt to change students behaviour, upon receiving a free gift (either a mug or a tea-bag), we asked them to sign a contract with the following statement, as mentioned above:

“I commit to using my reusable mug as frequently as possible, and am therefore helping to save the planet.”

Asking students to sign this contract upon receiving a free mug was enforcing the use of written commitment. As shown by Katzev and Wang, (1994), people are more likely to perform a behaviour if they have verbally and publicly committed to it. We had over 1,500 students sign the contract, pictured in Figure Twelve, and thus they are more likely to use their reusable mug in the future. The following day, we commented on the people we saw using the mugs, and one of the responses we received was “Of course I am using it, I signed to say I would!”

Figure Twelve: The signed contracts

In addition, we also used the foot-in-the-door technique. As demonstrated in research by Freedman and Fraser (1966), people have a desire to be consistent with their previous behaviour, and thus are more likely to comply with a bigger request if it follows a smaller, related request. During the Keepcup launch, we asked people first if they were willing to sign the contract, the smaller request, before asking if they would like to purchase a Keepcup, the bigger request.  We can confirm that 60% of people who signed the contract, also bought a keepcup on the 7th March.

Figure Thirteen: Our advertising campaign on the big screen

Figure Fourteen: Our posters used to advertise

In order to promote our campaign for Go Green week, we advertised on the Big Screen in the piazza (see figure thirteen), and stuck posters around campus to advertise the cups people could claim. These designs can be seen in figure fourteen, whereby the #TimeToEvolve design is consistent across all of them. Tellis (2003) has shown advertising to be successful in encouraging people to do what is advertised and these effects can be long lasting. Therefore, we can hope that the effects will be long-lasting and people will continue to use their reusable mugs now our campaign has ended.

Conclusions

We are proud to summarise our achievements as the following:

• The University of Warwick outlets are now using compostable cups and lids
• There is now policy that the SU are to work towards an introduction of compostable cups and bins in their outlets and across campus
• 3,000 students and staff now have a University of Warwick travel mug
• 60% of those who committed to using a reusable mug, bought a KeepCup
• Over 1,500 have written to commit to using their reusable mug as frequently as possible

We can now confidently say that the current University of Warwick student population is more aware of the problem of disposable cups, and will be working towards reducing the 2.5 billion disposable cups used in Britain each year. Although there is a long way to go before University of Warwick can say it is sustainable in this respect, it is definitely one step closer.

Charlotte Cartwright, Hannah Freeman, Olivia Gillard & Isabel Nelson

References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behaviour. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50, 179-211.

Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: Collins

Cialdini, R. B., Vincent, J. E., Lewis, S. K., Catalan, J., Wheeler, D., & Darby, B. L. (1975). Reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The door-in-the-face technique. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 31, 206.

Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 2, 39-55.

Eagry, A. H., & Chailen, S. (1993). Psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcour Brace Jovanovich.

Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4,196-202.

Goldenberg,J. Mazursky, D., & Solomon, S. (1999). The fundamental templates of quality ads. Marketing Science, 18, 333-351.

Gotte, L. & Stutzer, A. (2008). Blood donations and incentives: Evidence from a field experiment. IZA Discussion, 3580, 1-31.

James, J. E. (1998). Acute and chronic effects of caffeine on performance, mood, headache and sleep. Neuropsychobiology, 38, 32-41.

Katzev, R., & Wang, T. (1994). Can commitment change behaviour? A case study of environmental actions. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 9, 13-26.

KeepCup (2017). Fast Facts, Retrieved on March 7th from http://www.keepcup.com/impact/fast-facts

Regan, D. T. (1971). Effects of a favor and liking on compliance. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 7, 627-639.

Shiv, B, and Fedorikhin, A. (1999), Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 278–92

Santos, M. D., Leve, C., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1994). Hey buddy, can you spare seventeen cents? Mindful persuasion and the pique technique. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 755-764.

Tellis, G. J. (2003). Effective advertising: Understanding when, how, and why advertising works. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

savetheanimemes

Our aim for this project was to help endangered animals. This cause is important as through deforestation, pollution and destruction of habitats, humans have caused a large amount of species to go extinct. Over the course of our 100-day project, between 15,000 and 20,000 species of plants, insects, birds and mammals went extinct. This rate is nearly 1000 times higher than the natural expected extinction rate (Vidal, 2016). We felt that as this was a problem solely caused by the selfishness of humans, the best way to combat it would be to draw on the generosity of humans.

But how to do this? We're constantly bombarded with adverts encouraging us to help the homeless, give aid to Africa or provide refuge to refugees, and we felt these constant pleas were overwhelming and becoming counter-productive. Viewers of these adverts may well have suffered from compassion fatigue (Moeller, 1999; Abendroth & Flannery, 2006), a phenomenon which causes empathy levels to drop after witnessing consecutive cries for help. We sought to find a new way to engage a younger audience.

As Instagram has over 500 million active users, many of whom are under 35 years old (Parker, 2016), it is an ideal place to try and acquire a new generation of charity givers. Instagram is a social media site dedicated to sharing photos, and because of its various search features, these pictures can be viewed by potentially millions of people every day. It offered our project a quick and easy way to get our message across to a large audience.

One of the most popular types of images to post on Instagram are memes. They take the form of images which are overlaid with text and are often humorous or satirical. Memes develop within pop culture, and often adept commentaries of the current state of the world (for example, there has been a sharp rise in Trump-related memes in the last year). By using memes on Instagram, people can like our memes, tag their friends in them, and be inspired to make their own. Our memes took the initial approach of being funny, by using puns or funny images, but then struck a serious tone about the message we were trying to get across.

So, over the course of 100 days, we created and posted 100 memes onto our Instagram account. Here they are beautifully presented in video format;

One of the main persuasive techniques used in our project is humour (in the form of memes). In terms of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), humour aids persuasion by taking the peripheral route (Lyttle, 2001), and has been found to be effective in numerous contexts (Berlo & Kumata, 1956; Wallinger, 1997; Conway & Dubé, 2002). A possible explanation for the effects of humour on persuasion is that humour creates positive affect (Kuiper & Martin, 1995), and that people are less likely to disagree with a message when they are in a good mood (Freedman et al, 1978). They are also more likely to rely on peripheral cues (Bless & Schwarz, 1999). Furthermore, humour may help to increase liking of the source, as a shared sense of humour may hint at shared underlying values (Meyer et al, 1997), increasing chances of persuasion.

For the duration of the project, we posted one meme per day for 100 days. The reason for posting so frequently and for so long is because of mere-repeated-exposure and the availability heuristic. Mere-repeated-exposure to a stimulus can change preferences towards an object, even if people do not engage with it (Zajonc, 2001). The availability heuristic, a cognitive shortcut involved in peripheral decision making (Tversky & Kahneman, 1978; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), helps us to recall information that is presented in higher frequency and that is more available to us. So, by posting 100 memes in 100 days, followers of @SaveTheAnimemes on Instagram should hopefully have been exposed to enough stimuli at a high enough frequency to change their attitudes towards endangered animals.

One goal that we strived to keep consistent throughout the project was posting on our Instagram daily, including during the holidays. The reasoning behind this is an effect known as the ‘sleeper effect’ (Hovland & Weiss, 1951; Cook & Flay, 1978). The ‘sleeper effect’ suggests that participants become more persuaded by a message over time. Hovland et al. (1949) suggest this is because the audience forgets where the message came from and only recall the merits of the message. While this effect often displays an initially low uptake of the intended message, as receivers gradually begin to forget the source, their overall persuasion is increased.

Within our memes and messages, we aimed to vary the language used. All of the memes deployed the use of humour, as humour is an effective tool for drawing attention towards our message (Chan, 2010), but we aimed to vary the type of humour used. Some of the memes were topical; we used several that referenced Donald Trump as this would draw even further attention to our message. We also used rhetorical questions such as “So you’re telling me you love animals, but you won’t donate to help save them?” Messages such as these attempted to employ cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962). We aimed to persuade our followers to donate by creating an uncomfortable feeling within them, implying that they love animals, but do little to help them. Subsequently, by offering them the opportunity to donate to our cause, we were also offering them a means to rid themselves of this inner conflict.

Other memes used humour and empathy to attract attention as empathy has also been shown to have a predictable and unique effect on persuading an audience (Shen, 2010).

Another technique of persuasion we attempted to utilise is commonly known as the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). This theory states that when people are presented with a large request, they are more likely to comply if they have first complied with a smaller request. In Freedman and Fraser’s original study, this was shown by asking varying degrees of compliance of Californian housewives. In solitude, the ‘large’ request of asking the housewives if they would be agreeable to 6 men coming into their homes to classify their household objects was unlikely to be agreed to. However, if preceded by the smaller request to answer several questions about which household products they used, they were far more likely to agree. This was illustrated in their findings: only 25% of participants agreed to perform the large request in isolation, compared with 50% subjected to the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique. Applying this to our own project, we decided not to ask our followers for donations until day 14 of our 100-day project, by which point most had already been following for some time. Before this point, the only request we subjected our followers to was asking them to ‘like’ our pictures, an effortless task which, when compared with the far larger request of parting with their money, appears very small. As many of our followers had been liking our pictures daily for two weeks, we hypothesise that this made them more likely to comply with the larger request when we eventually exposed them to it. This is demonstrated by the amount of money we raised.  

In conclusion, our chosen format could provide us with a quantifiable method of determining whether we produced change. Our Instagram account displayed how many followers and ‘likes’ we attained, demonstrating how many potential patrons our posts could reach, and our JustGiving page conveys an unaltered, monetary sum which is sent directly to the WWF.  At the time of writing this blog post, we have managed to amass 6550 likes, 636 followers and have raised £134.76 for the WWF. While this did not quite hit the £200 target we initially set ourselves, we still managed to raise a significant amount of money, and the number of followers and likes indicates that even though not everybody donated money, it caught the attention of many people. This is something that we hope caused, if not monetary donations, an increased thinking time about the problems we as a species are causing in the endangerment of animals. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please feel free to donate to our JustGiving page below if you feel compelled to help our cause.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/savetheanimemes

All figures correct as of 02/03/2017

References

   Abendroth, M., & Flannery, J. (2006). Predicting the risk of compassion fatigue: A study of hospice nurses. Journal of Hospice & Palliative Nursing, 8, 346-356.

   Berlo, D. K., & Kumata, H. (1956). The investigator: The impact of satirical radio drama. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 33, 287-298.

   Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (1999). Sufficient and necessary conditions in dual-mode models: The case of mood and information processing. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.) Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 423-440) New York: Guilford Press.

   Chan, F. Y. (2011). Selling through entertaining: The effect of humour in television advertising in Hong Kong. Journal of Marketing Communications, 17, 319-336.

   Conway, M., & Dubé, L. (2002). Humor in persuasion on threatening topics: Effectiveness is a function of audience sex role orientation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 863-873.

   Cook, T. D.; Flay, B. R. (1978). "The Persistence of Experimentally-Induced Attitude Change". Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 11: 1–57.

   Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.

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

   Freedman, J. L., Sears, D. O., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1978). Social Psychology (3rd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

   Hovland, C.I., Lumsdale, A.A. & Sheffield, F.D, Experiments on Mass Communication: Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: Volume III, Princeton University Press, (Princeton), 1949.

   Hovland, C.I., Weiss, W., "The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness", Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol.15, No.4, (Winter 1951), pp. 635–650.

   Kuiper, N. A., & Martin, R. A. (1998). Laughter and stress in daily life: relation to positive and negative affect. Motivation and Emotion, 22, 133-153.

   Lyttle, J. (2001). The effectiveness of humour in persuasion. The Journal of General Psychology, 128, 206-216.

   Meyer, J. C. (1997). Humor in member narratives: Uniting and dividing at work. Western Journal of Communication, 61, 188-208.

   Moeller, S. D. (1999). Compassion fatigue: How the media sell disease, famine, war and death. Psychology Press.

   Parker, S (2016, November 3). A Long List of Instagram Statistics That Marketers Need to Know. Hootsuite. Retrieved from https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/
 
   Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration-likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.) Advances in experimental social psychology. (Vol. 19, pp123-305). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

   Shen, L. (2010). Mitigating Psychological Reactance: The Role of Message‐Induced Empathy in Persuasion. Human Communication Research, 36, 397-422.

   Tversky, A, & Kahneman, D. (1978). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 207-232.
 

   Vidal, J. (2016, August 16) Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/16/nature-economic-security   

   Wallinger, L. M. (1997). Don’t smile before christmas: The role of humor in education. NASSP Bulletin, 81, 27-34.

   Zajonc, R. B. (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 224-228.

Project completed by Tom Mason, Will Gray, Rory Flanagan and Josh Nicolini