Treating people as consumers boosts materialistic values

“One of the most profound changes in our modern vocabulary is the way in which ‘We the People’ are defined”, observes the academic David Rutherford. “Not so very long ago, we ‘pictured’ ourselves as citizens. … Today, we are most often referred to (and therefore increasingly inclined to ‘see’ ourselves) as consumers.” Too true. There […]

What about people for whom extrinsic values are particularly important?

A great deal of the research that we have brought together on this site points to the advantages, on aggregate, of appealing to intrinsic values in communicating to people about social and environmental problems – and the potential costs of appealing to extrinsic values. But, of course, people aren’t all the same, and it may be […]

Value Modes and Common Cause: The dangers of appeals to money, image and status

There is much about the Common Cause approach which is in agreement with the ‘Value Modes’ approach advocated by Chris Rose and Pat Dade:  both approaches draw from a similar body of empirical work, recognize the tensions that exist in people’s value systems, and acknowledge the need to tailor different communications to different audiences. But […]

Don’t mind the gap between values and action

Professor Greg Maio of Cardiff University has written a short and helpful briefing on the value-action gap. He concludes: The upshot of all this is that, in working to tackle environmental and social problems, we overlook the importance of values at our peril. It is true that we may be able to overlook values in […]

Launching the Common Cause Handbook

Tomorrow sees the launch of The Common Cause Handbook at Action for Children in London, along with the Values and Frames website. We hope you find them both useful resources. The Common Cause Handbook was basically designed to be a slimmer, lighter version of the original Common Cause report published by WWF. In it we […]

Skip to content