Crying is for all - Cry for a better you

The problem & why is it important?

Crying is often seen as a sign of weakness and unacceptable for men in some cultures (Becht & Vingerhoets, 2002). Men are expected to express emotions associated with dominance, power, and competence, especially in competitive contexts, whereas women are expected to display powerless emotions like fear, sadness, and shame (Timmers et al., 2003; De Haan and Vos, 2003).

A research found out that women cry about 3 to 5 times more frequently than men in a month (Nyklícek, et al, 2004). Menendez (2013) in his research findings also suggested that men cry less frequently and intensely than women; especially in expressing anger. 

(Menendez, 2013)

It is really due to social pressure and expectation that shapes men’s attitudes and behaviour towards crying (Van Hemert, 2011). Branney (2008) suggested that ‘Boys don’t cry’ is an example of how developing boys being socialised into becoming emotionally inarticulate men, where they are forced to conceal their emotions (e.g. boys who do cry, they will be bullied and boys who do cry, their parents will quickly tell them to stop because they should not cry) (Hendriks, Croon & Vingerhoets, 2008). One of the effect from this social norm is that when men have depression, they are less likely to express them and as a result it is hard to detect the problem at the early stage - end up it become too late to treat; hence, there are more men than women in suicide attempt. 

Hence, it comes to our concern that CRYING is indeed for everyone, but we make it look like it’s not! Crying is a way that allow you to release your stress, sadness, grief, anxiety and frustration. Also, you can cry for joy, say when a baby is born or when a student passed a difficult exam. What is more, tears of relief feels cleansing, a way to purge pent up emotions so people do not lodge in their bodies as stress symptoms such as pain or fatigue. To stay healthy and release stress, people are encouraged to cry. For both men and women, tears are a sign of courage, strength and authenticity (Rottenberg, Bylsma & Vingerhoets, 2018).

Crying is the manifestations of our emotions that we have the right to express it or not. There are a lot of research focuses on the benefits of crying and the negative effects of not crying, but there is still a lack of awareness of it among the society we are living in. 

Our project is aiming to spread the awareness that it is okay and it is a good thing to cry by sharing a poster about it with informational captions on our social media accounts. Through our project, we share with our audience the benefits of crying and how can holding back your tears become a disadvantage for us. Lastly, we are not enforcing people to cry publicly but rather to cry their emotions out wherever and whenever they want to, be it under the rain, in the shower, or on the pillow :) 

Our targeted audience

• Social media users
• 12 years old to 25 years old
• Asian Culture (our social media followers)

Our poster project will be posted mainly on all of our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Weibo). Thus, our friends and followers are mostly among 12 to 25 years old and are from Asian cultural background (as we are from Asia ourselves). We all know that young social media users are not found to read long information :p In order for us to ensure that our friends read through the poster; we create an attractive, simple and concise poster where they will need an only short time to view it! 

Our Intervention

Before we did a poster related to this issue, we do a random survey on Twitter to understand about our audiences' view on crying:

Then, we did a poster about this issue focusing on;

• Crying is a way of help-seeking since we are a baby, but why do we stop as we grow up?
• The benefits of crying as a sign of in need of help, and releasing body toxins
• The disadvantage of crying which is associated with poor help-seeking.
• We encourage our audience to cry it out wherever they felt comfortable, as long as they cry it out!

Basically, we want to focus on how crying is not a sign of weakness, but it makes us stronger to search for help when we need one. Even though you cry it out privately and no one is there to help you; you will feel better and are more at ease to search help from others. People who are used to hold back their tears will have a hard time to understand themselves when they really need help - holding back tears is like denying that you have a problem. As a result, when you have a problem such as mental health problems; you do not know that you need any help and you are less likely to seek help.

Then, we share the poster together with some research findings to support our claim through social media platforms:

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Instagram

• WhatsApp

We share the project to different WhatsApp groups:

Our friends also shared about our projects on their WhatsApp Status:

• Weibo

Psychological and persuasion techniques used in our project

The first approach we used was based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). 

This model states that there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route of persuasion is a likely result of the person’s careful consideration of the information at hand and involves a high level of message elaboration and cognition about the arguments at hand. The peripheral route of persuasion involves the person making simple inferences about the merits of the position in the argument, and are more related to positive and negative cues in the stimulus.

• For the poster, we used the Peripheral Route of Persuasion
• Highlights the important points only and uses the image of a man crying to make the poster interesting and attractive
• The poster consisted of fewer words which does not require the audience to spend much attention span on it

• However, we also used the Central Route of Persuasion
• We focused on the elaboration of the points we provided in the poster in our social media’s caption/status
• We will include the research papers reference to strengthen our arguments on our stance
• We wanted to cater our audiences who are interested to know about this topic - so we need to provide enough reliable evidence to persuade them

Many other users share information that is related to our followers/consumers and throughout the net; acted as a cue for internet users/consumers to process information online - they are more likely to read/view the content (Teng, et. al, 2014)

We used the Yale Attitude Change approach

This approach can be described as “who said what to whom”. Who: the source of the communication. What: the nature of the communication. Whom: the nature of the audience (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). According to this approach, plenty of factors affect each component of persuasion. The sincerity and quality of the source, the technique of expression, the medium, the attractiveness of the message, and age of the audience can affect an audience’s attitude change with a persuasive communication.

• Who
• We included few researchers to support our findings which act as authoritative figures in our Behaviour Change Project
• What
• We focused on ‘Crying’ which are very relatable to everyone as it is one of the ways people express their emotions. 
• Focusing on the benefits of crying and disadvantage of not crying might attract people’s attention both who regularly cries (supporting their behaviour) and those who choose to not cry often (can understand the implications of their choices)
• How
• We use social media to spread the messages by sharing the poster we made accompanied by informative captions/status
• The poster is very simple and concise which can attract people to view it quickly
• While the information provided will give them strong evidence for those who wanted to understand more about the issues
• Whom
• Our audiences are social media users - they are more open-minded as they are always exposed to new issues every day through their social media 
• Aged 25 years old and below; they are susceptible to changes as they are still building their mental representation

We also applied one of Cialdini’s Persuasion Style

The social proof principle we used claims that we tend to have more trust in things that are popular or endorsed by people that we trust. 

• Familiarity/Social Proofing
• By using social media, our poster will repeatedly appear on people’s timeline (i.e. shared on Facebook, retweeted on Twitter)
• People will always bump into it and will eventually persuade to believe and influenced by the ideas that we highlighted.

Lim & Lee-Won (2017) found out that Twitter retweets have a positive effect on persuasion

We also included the Attribution Theory

Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the causes of behaviour and events. According to Fiske and Taylor (1991), Attribution theory deals with how people use informations to display a causal judgment for the event. It examines what kind of information is gathered by the audience and how it is combined to form a causal judgment. 

• We acknowledge our audience as different individuals who have different personality; some are introverts, some are extraverts.
• We attributed them as having different preference on where to cry - some people prefer to cry publicly and there are those who like a private one.
• So, they might felt the issues are relevant to information posters are mentioning things that they do

When crying is attributed to a positive working performance, workers show a positive attitude towards the behaviour of crying at work (Becker, 2017)

Our recommendation and conclusion

One of the possible efforts to do in relation to increasing awareness of this issue is to create a social media account focusing on this matter. Through that account, we can continuously share information about crying such as tips on crying effectively, the do’s and don’ts, and many more. Also, we can provide a medium for people to share their thoughts on the issues and even their stories on improving their emotional regulation. However, for this effort to be effective, we need to make sure to ask for professional opinions and always refer to them before posting information. This is to avoid sharing unreliable contents.

Lastly, it is hard for us to measure the behaviour change of our audience in this project, but we believe that the more people share the poster across the internet, the more people can get the benefit from it and maybe one of them can apply it to their everyday life. We really hope people can get some benefits from our project. 

We need never be ashamed of our tears. Do not apologise for crying :)

Thank you! 

Reference

Becht, M. C., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2002). Crying and mood change: A cross-cultural study.  Cognition & Emotion, 16(1), 87-101.

Becker, W., Conroy, S., Djurdjevic, E., & Gross, M. (2017). Crying is in the eyes of the          beholder: an attribution theory framework of crying at work. Emotion Review, 1-13.

Branney, P., & White, A. (2008). Big boys don’t cry: depression and men. Advances in          Psychiatric Treatment, 14, 256 - 262.

De Haan, W., & Vos, J. (2003). A crying shame: The over-rationalized conception of man in  the rational choice perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 7(1), 29-54.

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.

Hendriks, M. C., Croon, M. A., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2008). Social reactions to adult crying: The help-soliciting function of tears. The Journal of social psychology, 148(1), 22-42.

Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion.

Lim, Y. S., & Lee-Won, R. J. (2017). When retweets persuade: The persuasive effects of      dialogic retweeting and the role of social presence in organizations’ Twitter-based communication. Telematics and informatics, 34(5), 422-433.

Menendez, M., S., & Campbell, A. 2013. Sadness and anger: boys, girls, and crying in          adolescence. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 4, 400-410.

Nyklícek, I., Temoshok, L., & Vingerhoets, A. (Eds.). (2004). Emotional expression and          health: Advances in theory, assessment and clinical applications. Routledge.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In      Communication and persuasion (pp. 1-24). Springer, New York, NY.

Rottenberg, J., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2008). Is crying beneficial? Current        Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 400-404.

Teng, S., Khong, K., W., & Goh, W., W. (2014) Conceptualizing persuasive messages using  ELM in social media. Journal of Internet Commerce, 13 (1), 65-87.

Timmers, M., Fischer, A. H., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2003). Ability versus vulnerability: Beliefs about men’s and women’s emotional behavior. Cognition & Emotion,17, 41–63.

Van Hemert, D., A., Van de Vijer, F., J., R., & Vingerhoets, A., J., J., M. (2011). Culture and    crying: prevalences and gender differences. Cross Cultural Research, 45 (4), 399 - 431. 

#NewYearNewMe?

The Problem

For many, the start of a new year brings the desire for change. People all around the world create their own ‘New Year’s Resolutions’: an undesirable trait/behaviour that an individual seeks to change. Despite the widespread desire to bring about individual change, many people are unsuccessful in achieving their goals; Research shows that only after 1 month into the new year, around 50% of people fail to meet their goals (Norcross & Vanarelli, 1989) and after one year a staggering 88% of people end up failing to follow their resolution (Wiseman, 2007). As new year's resolutions are normally self-initiated, most of the failure can be attributed to the individual. Research shows that individual willpower and motivation is one of the most common factors predicting an individual’s success in achieving their resolution (Norcross & Vanarelli, 1989).

Why is this problem important?

Creating and achieving new year’s resolutions can influence an individual’s mental health. As new year’s resolutions are personal goals, failing to achieve them can be debilitating to an individual’s self-worth and self-esteem (Wolfe & Crocker, 2003). Personal goals are also positively correlated with wellbeing, studies show that goal commitment and goal attainment positively impact one’s subjective and psychological well-being over time (Brdar, Rijavec & Miljkovic, 2009; Brunstein, 1993). The negative effects of failing a new years resolution can be looked at in more detail when looking at specific goals. Research shows that some of the most common new year’s resolutions involve losing weight/eating healthy, visiting the gym, and quitting smoking (Wiseman, 2007). Starting a resolution to increase your exercise/go to the gym has been shown to improve mental health: physical exercise has been shown to reduce depressive symptoms for people with depression (Cooney et al., 2013). Furthermore, going to the gym and achieving personal body goals can also increase a person’s self-esteem and self-confidence (Ekeland, Heian & Hagen, 2005). Research also shows that healthy eating behaviours are a protective factor for depression, whereas a diet consisting of unhealthy foods is a risk factor for depression (Akbaraly et al., 2009). Studies also shows that quitting smoking is associated with reduced depression and anxiety, and has a positive impact on an individual’s quality of life (Taylor et al., 2014). It is therefore clear that common new year’s resolutions such as the ones discussed above have clear implications on an individual’s mental health and wellbeing, and failing to achieve these resolutions can negatively impact it.

The Intervention

Our intervention takes the form of several posters, with each one specialised towards a common new year's resolution. Our target audience for our intervention are university students with new year’s resolutions who are struggling to achieve or failed them. We decided to make 3 posters motivating and helping people to achieve their new year’s resolution: one on going to the gym/exercising, one on eating healthy and one on stopping smoking. During the month of February, these posters were placed in areas where people with those resolutions would be most likely to see them. The poster on exercising/going to the gym was put up in the University of Warwick gym/sports hall, the poster on eating healthy was put up around cafes and shops around campus, and the stopping smoking posters was put up around popular smoking areas around campus.

Before making the posters, we conducted a poll on Instagram to gain an insight on the amount of people (particular university students) that failed to follow their New Year’s Resolutions. Halfway through february the poll was posted, out of 132 respondents, 63% of those with new year’s resolutions had failed them (Figure 1).

(Figure 1)

Poster 1 (Gym/exercising)

Poster 2 (Eating healthy)

Poster 3 (Smoking)

Each poster has a QR code which, when scanned with a smartphone, links directly to an online quiz (Figure 2) that gives you a score on how likely you are to achieve your new year’s resolution (http://www.richardwiseman.com/resolutions). The quiz was created by psychologist Richard Wiseman, who studied the factors that influence success in new year’s resolutions. Some of these factors includes creating implementation intention plans, the use of a diary, looking up to a role model and rewarding yourself. Based on the score, the individual can see how likely they are to succeed with their resolution and the steps they can take to increase the likelihood of achieving their goal.

(Figure 2)

Psychological and Persuasion Techniques

Our intervention used several psychological and persuasive techniques. Firstly, our posters follow the ‘central route’ of Petty and Cacioppo’s (1979) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The central route of persuasion relates to information that directly relates to a particular topic in the person’s life. As our posters concerned specific resolutions, the reader would process the information centrally as it will be much more relevant to them. This means that they have the motivation as well as the ability to think about the message on our posters and process it. If, however, the audience’s motivation and ability to process the message is low, there are peripheral cues in the posters that can enhance persuasion. The ‘peripheral route’ from the ELM relies on heuristics and mental shortcuts to influence behaviour. Each one of our posters contained quick, snappy statements regarding the issue that would take little effort to process, but still be meaningful. For example, our smoking poster contained a high statistic on the rate of smoking relapses coupled with the statement ‘be the one to change this statistic’, such information requires little mental effort to understand and reinforces the severity as well as the individual’s responsibility of the issue. Furthermore, the QR codes on our posters are another easy low-effort way of getting information across. The reader simply needs to scan the code with their smartphone and they are instantly directed to the website, where they have the simple task of completing a quiz.

Secondly, our intervention also followed Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). This theory argues that one’s attitudes towards behaviour, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control shape their intentions and subsequent behaviours. Our posters targeted the individual’s perceived behavioural control in order to make the challenge of achieving their goals seem easier and less difficult to perform. To do this, we included information in each poster about creating implementation intention plans and the usefulness of them in increasing the likelihood of goal attainment. Implementation intention plans are explicit statements that guide your behaviour in specific situations, they are designed to increase availability and make responses automatic.  Research shows that creating implementation intention plans leads to successful increases in exercise behaviour (Andersson & Moss, 2011), significantly more people quitting smoking (Armitage, 2007) and increases the likelihood of including healthy food in one’s diet (Adriaanse et al., 2011). In addition to information on implementation intentions, we also included a scannable QR code on each poster that links directly to an online quiz that gives you a score on how likely you will achieve your resolution. The quiz asks questions such as ‘will you create a step-by-step plan?’’, ‘will you record your progress?’, ‘will you reward yourself?’ etc. This is designed to tell the individual, based on their score, the areas they are neglecting that is affecting their ability to achieve their goals. The individual can take the quiz multiple times, until they get a perfect score. By doing this, they can learn which steps to implement into their everyday life to increase the chances of succeeding in their resolution. Therefore, we included details on creating these implementation intentions, as well as the online quiz,  in order to make the individual’s perceived ease of performing their resolution higher, which, according to TPB, would influence their subsequent behaviour.

Thirdly, our intervention used persuasive methods from the ‘MINDSPACE’ technique. The mnemonic MINDSPACE, refers to 9 factors that influence behaviour in automatic ways (Dolan et al., 2012). For our intervention, we focused on ‘A’ - Affect. Affect refers to the experience of emotion and emotional responses, which can induce instant and automatic behavioural change. Each one of our posters addressed this aspect of ‘affect’; the poster on the gym cited a statistic that 60% of people fail their new year’s resolutions coupled with the statement ‘don’t let this be you’ which would make the individual feel guilt. Our healthy eating poster argued the statement that an unhealthy diet ‘can take years off your life’ which can induce fear. Also, our poster on smoking has a picture of a healthy person’s lungs, compared to a picture of a smoker’s lungs, which could also induce feelings of fear and disgust. By evoking experiences of emotions in our posters, automatic decision making reactions should ensue, prompting the reader to make behavioural change.

Conclusion/Future Ideas

The posters we created were designed to help, motivate and persuade people to achieve their new year’s resolution. We hope that, by putting these posters up in the relevant areas around campus, we brought about change and persuaded people into achieving their goals. However, it is worth noting that we focused on the more common new year’s resolutions (quitting smoking, eating healthy and exercising/going to the gym). In the future, another way of tackling the problem of failed new year’s resolutions would be to focus on more resolutions, such as drinking alcohol less and studying more.

References

Adriaanse, M. A., Vinkers, C. D., De Ridder, D. T., Hox, J. J., & De Wit, J. B. (2011). Do implementation intentions help to eat a healthy diet? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical evidence. Appetite, 56(1), 183-193.

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211.

Akbaraly, T. N., Brunner, E. J., Ferrie, J. E., Marmot, M. G., Kivimaki, M., & Singh-Manoux, A. (2009). Dietary pattern and depressive symptoms in middle age. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 195(5), 408-413.

Andersson, E. K., & Moss, T. P. (2011). Imagery and implementation intention: A randomised controlled trial of interventions to increase exercise behaviour in the general population. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 12(2), 63-70.

Armitage, C. J. (2007). Efficacy of a brief worksite intervention to reduce smoking: the roles of behavioral and implementation intentions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(4), 376.

Brdar, I., Rijavec, M., & Miljković, D. (2009). Life goals and well-being: Are extrinsic aspirations always detrimental to well-being?. Psihologijske teme, 18(2), 317-334.

Brunstein, J. C. (1993). Personal goals and subjective well-being: A longitudinal study. Journal of personality and social psychology, 65(5), 1061.

Cooney, G. M., Dwan, K., Greig, C. A., Lawlor, D. A., Rimer, J., Waugh, F. R., ... & Mead, G. E. (2013). Exercise for depression. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, (9).

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.

Ekeland, E., Heian, F., & Hagen, K. B. (2005). Can exercise improve self esteem in children and young people? A systematic review of randomised controlled trials. British journal of sports medicine, 39(11), 792-798.

Norcross, J. C., & Vangarelli, D. J. (1988). The resolution solution: Longitudinal examination of New Year's change attempts. Journal of Substance Abuse, 1(2), 127-134.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1979). Issue involvement can increase or decrease persuasion by enhancing message-relevant cognitive responses. Journal of personality and social psychology, 37(10), 1915.

Taylor, G., McNeill, A., Girling, A., Farley, A., Lindson-Hawley, N.,&  Aveyard, P.(2014). Change in mental health after smoking cessation: Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Medical Journal, 348,1-22

Wiseman, R. (2007). Quirkology: How we discover the big truths in small things. Basic Books.

Wolfe, C., & Crocker, J. (2003). What does the self want? Contingencies of self-worth and goals.

The Social Media paradox: How the most connected generation became the loneliest

Problem

Ironically, we live in a world that is more connected than ever, yet individuals are more socially isolated and withdrawn in society. This paradox is especially pronounced in young adults (aged 16-24); they are the most connected on social media, yet in recent years, the prevalence of depression, social isolation and loneliness in this group has become a growing public health concern. Young people have replaced face to face social interaction with the use of social media. In the wider sense, social media dependence, as described, may be linked to the current suicide and mental health epidemic in this age group.

Justification

How connected are we really?

Globally, it is estimated that currently there are more than 3 billion social media users and more than 5 billion people worldwide are estimated to have a mobile phone (Kemp, 2018). Considering there are around 7.6 billion people living on earth today ("World Population Clock: 7.7 Billion People", 2019), one person, theoretically, has social access to more than half of the world. As far as records go, one may argue that there has never been a world that is more connected than the world we live in today.

Who are the most connected?

The most connected demographic is 16-24-year-olds, with more than 70% of 18-24-year-olds (in the US) using Snapchat and Instagram daily (Smith & Anderson, 2018). In the UK, nearly half the time spent on Instagram is by 18-24-year-olds who account for 77% of the users on this platform (Battisby, 2018).

So we like to talk a lot online, what's the big deal? Nothing. Social media and communication online is not inherently a bad thing at all, in fact, research suggests it can be positive (David, Roberts & Christenson, 2018). However, according to a growing body of research, these issues emerge when social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram are consistently used as a potentially inferior alternative to face to face social interaction (Lin et al., 2016; Lepp, Barkley & Karpinski, 2014). Two noteworthy studies have found young adults who used more social media platforms than others were at a higher risk of having both depression and anxiety (Primack, Shensa & Escobar-Viera, 2017) and that excessive Facebook usage was negatively associated with psychological well being, whereas face to face interactions had the reverse effect (Shakya & Christakis, 2017).

Wider implications

Overall, the literature suggests that the negative consequences of social media dependence may indirectly play a part in the public health concern: a growing epidemic of mental health problems and suicide attempts in this demographic. It should also be noted that (in England) 83% of the undergraduate population and 64% of the postgraduate population are aged 16-24. According to the NHS Digital Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey (2016) the proportion of 16-24-year-olds experiencing common mental health disorders rose by 25% from 1993 to 2014 and in the last 17 years, suicide rates of higher education students have increased by 52% in England and Wales. Importantly, the above statistics may be an underestimation of suicide attempts as they only refer to suicide deaths, excluding non-fatal attempts at suicide (Kisch, Leino & Silverman, 2005; Eskin, 1993a, 1995, 1999; Evans et al., 2005 )

In summary:

1. The most connected demographic on social media networks are 16-24-year-olds.
2. There is a growing body of research which highlights that social media dependence in this demographic can have negative psychological consequences ( Lin et al., 2016; Lepp, Barkley & Karpinski, 2014).
3. The current public health concern of mental health disorders (such as depression) and suicide attempts in this demographic can be associated with their social media dependence. Firstly, research shows that depression is directly associated with suicide in this age group (Gröholt, Ekeberg, Wichström, & Haldorsen, 2000; Liu & Tein, 2005; Sourander, Helstelä, Haavisto, & Bergroth, 2001; Thompson, Mazza, Herting, Randell, & Eggert, 2005) and secondly, individuals who commit suicide often experience loneliness, social withdrawal and social isolation (Dieserud, Roysamb, Ekeberg, & Kraft, 2001; Koivumaa-Honkanen et al., 2001; Stravynski & Boyer, 2001; Waern, Rubenowitz, & Wilhelmson, 2003).

Considering the above, it is not far fetched by any means to state that the epidemic of social media dependence can be linked to the growing number of mental health and suicide cases in the demographic of 16-24-year-olds.

Cool. So what now?

Solution

So what's the solution?

We believe that acts of compassion between strangers that are a part of the same in-group (e.g. University students) will increase a sense of belongingness between them. Moreover, we expect this will manifest as a sense of “camaraderie” between Warwick students; even if they are strangers. We hope that this will help alleviate issues associated with the well-being crisis amongst University students which seems to play a pivotal role in increased suicide rates - a pressing public and higher education institutional health concern.

What is the evidence supporting our solution?

To begin, Baumeister and Leary (1995) claimed that feelings of social isolation is largely a manifestation our core human need to belong, not being fulfilled. Building on this theory, Joiner (2007) coined the interpersonal theory of suicide, which states our need to belong is so strong that, if neglected, can increase the risk for suicide. For example, Durkheim (1987) suggested suicide is partially the result of a society that has failed at promoting social interactions between its members, including strangers. Furthermore, research has found that even among strangers a sense of self and identity can be cultivated in large groups. For instance, we know from social identity theory that groups can be formed from arbitrary criteria (Tajfel, 1970). A large scale example of this is a study found that when a local college football team was successful at national competitions, the suicide rate of that town was lower. This paper proposed that the teams’ success resulted in the town “pulling together” as they all identified as one in-group, resulting in camaraderie between strangers and meeting each individual's need to belong in some capacity (Joiner et al., 2006).

What we did:

We thought that by approaching students and simply ‘just asking’ (Hills, 2014) them “How is your day going?”, would help to promote a sense of compassion. We realised this is a strange request as it would be weird for a stranger to randomly walk up to you, right? However, this is an example of the Pique Technique which proposes that a strange request arouses the targets curiosity and allows them to focus their attention on the strange appeal, which disrupts the possibility of refusal (Santos et al., 1994). Gaining their attention meant that we had a ‘foot in the door’ (Burger, 1999), therefore once we engaged them with the first question of “How is your day going?”, it was easier to get their feedback from the second question which asked: “If more strangers did this, would the world be a better place?”. In every case we proposed the final question after explaining the intentions of the project, asking their permission to directly quote or paraphrase what they have said.

Given the similarity effect (Burger et al., 2001) we hypothesised in the event that the questioner and participant were the same race and /or gender, the compliance rate would be higher. We recorded the proximity of participants to us by noting whether the people we approached on campus were friends of ours, acquaintances or strangers. We predicted, based on social identity theory, that students who were friends of ours would be more willing to have a conversation with us. However, because of evidence found during our literature research, we made an effort to intentionally engage with strangers rather than those we know.

What we found

How close were the participants to us?

Below you can see a pie chart which depicts our proximity to all participants. As you can see 89% of our respondents were strangers

                      Figure 1. Proximity to the participant.

What would you do if a random person came up to you and asked you about your day? Probably wonder if you know them, right? You may reply but still think it's weird, and for many of our subjects, this was the case. This may be because the social cost not to respond is greater when you ignore someone than when you answer them (Flynn & Lake, 2008).

Does similarity matter?

Based on the literature from which the “similarity effect” emerges, we expected a difference in compliance requests. Namely, we’d expect to see higher compliance to our first and second request when the recipient was the same gender or ethnicity as the respondent (Burger et al., 2001). The pie charts below show the similarity effect based on gender and ethnicity, for each we labelled whether the person we spoke to was similar or different to us.

                      Figure 2. Similarity effect based on gender

                     Figure 3: Similarity effect of ethnicities

For us, the similarity effect did not determine whether people were more likely to comply or not. In fact, much to our surprise, although at first reluctant, people were willing to comply. When collecting data, we found that guys did not seem to find this a strange request at all and were more willing to speak to us, whilst girls were more inclined to request an explanation. We believe the nature of our questioning was overridden by the Pique technique. When the request was proposed to participants they were caught off guard and steared by their curiosity which naturally inhibited their desire to refuse (Santos, Leve & Pratkani,1994). In fact, all 65 students replied to our initial question “how is your day going?”, whilst a further 91% expanded and explained why they thought the world would or would not be a better place.

Overall, 88% of people thought that the world would be a better place if more people asked each other about their day. Some people thought it would be beneficial as “if done genuinely it’s cute” because “nowadays people don’t see people as people just faces”. Furthermore, people thought that asking each other about their day is worth the awkwardness because “people would feel less lonely”, you can gain more “more contacts” by communicating with one another and most of all you can be “the highlight of someone’s day”. Some students thought that social interactions with strangers are part of our human nature as “in other countries people normally greet each other and it’s a nice experience”. One person even commented on the potential for our project to be used to change society in the future as “you could make a little bit of an impact that can have a ripple effect in the long run”. Lastly, the most informative finding came from the one participant who actually was not a student. He said that “I barely get eye contact walking around campus...I make eye contact but a lot of people shy away. I think it’s social media, everyone’s got their head down on their phone”

On the flip side, only 12% of students thought that the world would not be a better place if more strangers showed compassion by asking about their day. Participants who did not feel like it would be beneficial for people to ask strangers about their day thought that it was “weird and not needed”, whilst others thought that “...for those who are less sociable it wouldn’t really be nice”. Guess you can’t please everyone, right?

Taking this further

In our project, we established that the majority of students we spoke to believed that compassion in the form of social interactions between strangers is beneficial for society. To begin, one of the most informative pieces of information was from somebody who was not a student at the university. This person stated that “I barely get eye contact walking around campus...I make eye contact but a lot of people shy away. I think it’s social media, everyone’s got their head down on their phone”. This is key as he critiques the current generation, of which he is significantly older than, suggesting that they are too focused on social media thus, reducing their ability to socialise face to face in society. This is the epitome of how we defined the problem earlier: the current generation of 16-24-year-olds have diminished the value of social interactions in the real world by depending on social media.

Secondly, we found that interestingly some people state social interactions with strangers at the university would make people “less lonely”. Again this is evidence for how we defined the problem earlier, that in the most connected generation, loneliness is the consequence of a lack of face to face interaction. This is further evidenced by people mentioning that speaking to strangers is common in different countries. Although we didn’t find the similarity effect to be an issue in university, this may be explained by the in-group advantage as we are all students and therefore belong to the same in-group in some sense.

We believe that our project can serve as a pilot for a larger initiative. The need for this is evidenced by the majority of those who thought it was beneficial, and anecdotally, the comment which states “you could make a little bit of an impact that can have a ripple effect in the long run”. To take this project further we would use the concept of social contagion which refers to the potential for the behaviour exhibited by one person to be copied by others in their close vicinity (Stephenson & Fielding, 1971). We would execute using a social Influencer (e.g. a YouTuber with a high amount of followers) and asking them to film themselves doing what we have done. By social contagion, we believe that their act of speaking to strangers would proliferate and influence their followers to do the same.

We’ve finally come to the end (phew) but isn’t this idealist?

Yes, this does sound idealistic but we know that in this era of social media, social movements go ‘viral’ overnight. Now, with this in mind, we are convinced that social change in the future will be the result of a cascade of dominoes falling - which first began with one domino that defied the norms by falling.

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