Using success factors to design a powerful story

Willingness to help depends on psychological factors

Why are we willing to spend more money, time and effort to help identifiable victims? What are the reasons, the psychological forces in play? Dan Ariely answers these questions in his book “The upside of irrationality”.

Try the following thought experiment:

Imagine you leave your home for a walk and find an injured and exhausted bird on the sidewalk. What would you do? Chances are you wouldn’t think much and you would take the bird home to take care of it or take it to a vet or rehabilitation centre.

Your decision to help is caused by three psychological factors:

1. Closeness
2. Vividness
3. Drop-in-the-bucket effect

Closeness

First, there’s your proximity to the victim, a factor psychologists refer to as closeness. Humans are much more willing to support a cause that feels close.

Vividness

The second factor is vividness. Dan Ariely explains: ‘If I tell you that I cut myself, you don’t get the picture and you don’t feel much of my pain. But if I describe the cut in detail with tears in my voice and tell you how deep the wound is, how much the torn skin hurts me and how much blood I am losing, you get a vivid picture and you will empathise with me.’ The opposite of vividness is vagueness. If you are told that an endangered species is at risk, your emotions are not engaged. Seeing a bird that needs help is a strong and vivid image.

Drop-in-the-bucket effect

The third factor is what psychologists call the drop-in-the-bucket-effect. Do you have faith in your ability to help solve the tragedy? In the face of large needs and given the small part that we can personally solve, people tend to shut down emotionally and conclude: what’s the point? Helping one bird seems effective. Saving an ecosystem seems wishful thinking.

Implications for communication for conservation action

What does this imply for communication aimed at conservation action?

Speak to our emotions instead of our rational mind

Be careful to awaken the rational mind when asking for support or influencing people to change behaviour. Realise that humans are not designed to care about large ecosystems far away with many species we don’t know. When you want to engage people, an emotional appeal is far more effective. Stories are a powerful instrument for this cause.

Create a Happy Ending instead of an Apocalypse

A good ending is crucial too. People don’t want to listen to factual knowledge about our nature being terminally and irreversibly destroyed. You target audiences will tune out and lose interest when you bombard them with negative messages. The happy ending might be in the future, but hope for the best is a must!

Make your story close, vivid and effective

To sum it up, keep the following in mind when you develop your own story in Key subject 4 of this course. Make your story close, vivid and effective.

Make it close: Nature isn’t just a big area miles out of the city. It’s your local park, your garden, your window box. Closeness does not have to be literal, a feeling of closeness can be stimulated in many creative ways. Your target audience needs to be able to identify with your cause. So make it personal. Using individual species can for instance be an effective ‘hook’. Consider giving a few animals and trees in a protected area a name and create a story about them. Think of happy feet’s webcam attracting a quarter million followers. A good story about nature conservation activates the reader by identifying with the characters and plot.

Make it vivid: Avoid abstract concepts and vagueness. Help people to experience nature. Use moving stories to make nature live in our hearts. Tell a story which awakens all senses to create deep understanding. Keep away from generic or scientific terms when trying to get your target audiences on board.

Make it effective: Motivate people into action by showing that their effort will really make a difference. Avoid the ‘drop-in-the-bucket’ effect. For example, help to maintain a local beauty spot or the habitat of a local endangered species. Or sponsoring a specific area of a park or buying a piece of rainforest. The right story convinces your target audiences that their conservation action will be effective. Faith in a happy ending activates people.