By Tom Crompton on September 9, 2009

Identity campaigning in the US health sector

This blog was originally posted at Identity Campaigning.

Joe Brewer, a contributor to this site, has just publicised some work he’s done on ‘cognitive strategies’ in the health sector in the US. I think the ideas he develops are really import for identity campaigning, on several counts:

- they serve to draw a sharp distinction between a health campaign based on economic self-interest and one based on caring for others.

- they highlight the problems of conflating frames: whilst a ‘vision’ statement may assert that human dignity should motivate health care reform, communication materials deploy a “cost-savings” strategy.

- implicitly, they draw attention to the need to adopt the right frames across the full panoply of public policy. Environmentalists need to be concerned about the deep frames that health care policy helps to establish. As do those working on a range of other issues, from animal rights to third-world debt.

What Joe doesn’t do (but could easily do) is to draw attention to the evidence that appeals to more intrinsic and self-transcendent values and goals are more likely to motivate people to publicly voice a concern about health care policy.

Tom Crompton

About Tom Crompton

I'm Change Strategist at WWF-UK. For five years I headed WWF-International's Trade and Investment Programme (working on World Trade Organization issues, for example). While I was (and still am) convinced that international trade policy is crucially important in sustainability terms, I was frustrated by the glacial pace of change on this agenda - and the fact that even those trade negotiators I got to know who were personally quite 'radical' nonetheless felt impotent in a system where there was so little political space to pursue the changes that are needed. This led me to ask how organisations like WWF might begin to work to help create the political space for more ambitious change. What leads to more vocal expressions of public concern about sustainability issues? What motivates people to bring more pressure to bear on their elected leaders? These questions led to work with social psychologists and political scientists, and the publication of a series of reports: "Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads" (2008); "Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning" (with John Thogersen, 2008), and "Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity" (with Tim Kasser, 2009). These pieces of work culminated naturally in our new report, "Common Cause".
  • Joe Brewer

    Tom,

    Good point about the role of intrinsic motivations. When I drafted that strategy brief, we hadn’t worked quite so closely together yet. Now I realize the importance of incorporating evidence from motivational psychology into the frame analysis.

    Also, the interested reader can find a wealth of additional materials on the cognitive dimension of health care here:

    Exploring Health Care

  • Jim Mitchell

    Our preoccupation with narrow self interest (rather than the wider sort- it is definitely in all of our self interest to have a healthy planet!) can be seen also with the current debate about state spending cuts. Tax rises could also meet our national debt, but politicians and the media continue the need to talk about cutting spending, and the debate about a substantive tax rise (for middle and high earners) isn’t even on the table. Does anyone know of any work looking at how people would value societal changes based on their ability to pay? E.g. How much extra % would you pay for a high speed train network across Britain? Or how much to ensure a more efficient health service with more immediate access to services?