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 that there are some people who are simply impervious to communications which appeal to intrinsic values. We’ve argued that this is unlikely, because we all express all these values at different times – life, afterall, is a ‘dance around the values circle’!
But the original group of people who supported the Common Cause report – from COIN, CPRE, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and WWF – wanted to test this further. So we enlisted the help of some psychologists (at Cardiff University, and Knox College, Illinois) and linguists (at Lancaster University).
We have published the results of this research today. This report, Communicating bigger-than-self-problems to extrinsically-oriented audiences, demonstrates that a simple process of asking people for whom extrinsic values are of particular significance to reflect on the importance that they attach to intrinsic values can lead to marked changes in the way that they subsequently talk about bigger-than-self problems. For example, once their intrinsic values are engaged in this way, people who are normally more extrinsically-oriented are more likely to voice concerns about equality and justice, the moral imperative to address bigger-than-self problems, or to express a feeling of responsibility to others. Conversely, they are less likely to invoke self-interest or financial concerns.
Of course, none of this is to suggest that we can afford to be indifferent to variations between audiences. There are many ways in which different approaches might be used to engage different audiences on intrinsic values. But it does provide further evidence that it is wrong to imagine that people for whom extrinsic values are particularly important can only be engaged through communications focused on self-interest, wealth or social-status.