Consumerism and Identity Campaigning
Last month, an interesting discussion arose about identity campaigning.
As Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser of identitycampaigning.org write, the project grows out of an effort "to examine more publicly how certain aspects of human identity are associated with environmental problems."
The back-and-forth started with a post by Solitaire Townsend, director of Futerra Communications:
The notion of changing the audience rather than the message is at the heart of the ‘identity campaigning’ concept led by WWF. Identity campaigning argues that we shouldn’t accept the basic psychology of our audience – but seek to change it.
This means re-programming people’s values away from consumption, status and selfish desires and towards collective awareness and a closer relationship with our place in the natural world. Actually this drives us bonkers, especially because implicit is the message ‘if only everyone else thought and acted like us everything would be okay’.
That makes our skin crawl a bit, and we know the majority public audience hates environmental worthies suggesting there’s not only something wrong with their footprint: there’s something wrong with their personality.
A series of responses followed at the Identity Campaigning blog. Some highlights:
Joe Brewer
[W]e are advocating for campaigns directed at social change (which includes environmental campaigns and efforts in many other issue areas) that recognize the deep aspects of identity that shape how people think, feel, and act. Current campaigns remain mostly at the surface and fail to engage the value-systems, moral worldviews, pro-social tendencies, and cultural narratives that are part of the “culture wars” in political discourse.
Rosemary Randall
If you engage more deeply with the hairdressers and the blokes in pubs you will find that like most of us they are pulled in several directions and that it sometimes requires support and confidence before they will speak from the part of themselves that is uncertain or unhappy about consumerism - that’s the power of the dominant culture. Helping people get in touch with the best of themselves rather than the worst is important. We can do it through outreach work in the communities we are part of, but it also requires leadership - at all levels of society - that makes clear that this is an issue about justice, fairness, morality and the kind of society we want to live in.Identity is not fixed, but it is fragile, and without both leadership that inspires confidence and support that rewards action, we are unlikely to make much progress.
Joe Brewer
As a process comment, I’ve noticed a particular frame that often comes up in our discussions here that might be worth unpacking a bit for our own clarity. The chicken vs. egg debate around whether to create new values or engage existing values seems to keep emerging in one form or other. I tend to think of this in the same way the nature-nurture debate continued in academic circles for years after it was actually resolved… by a transcendent understanding that human development is a combination and integration of innate and learned that is mischaracterized by the creation of distinct categories for reasoning about development. This kind of frame effect, the tendency to reason within concepts that assert particular structures to one’s interpretations of the world, is going to happen in every conversation - including this one.
To ameliorate the influence of such frame effects, we can be more clear that we all tend to agree that there exist cultural values and narratives that can be engaged at a deep level. We can also agree that some of these values and narratives lead to harmful outcomes for society. And we can agree that some key ideas and values may be largely absent from social discourse such that they need to be introduced effectively as we go through the difficult transitions that lie ahead.
Tom Crompton
The extensive evidence that identity campaigning draws together from psychology research makes it clear that campaigns for ‘green consumerism’ are likely to contribute to undermining the emergence of systemic concern about ‘bigger-than-self’ problems - like climate change (or, for that matter, world poverty or racism).
However conciliatory we might seek to be, there is no ducking this.
Tim Kasser calls this the ‘iatrogenic’ impact of campaigning for green consumerism solutions - you think you’re helping to fix the problem, but you are inadvertently making it worse.
