Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills @thomhills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Go Out Without


Our project relays the message to embrace your natural beauty to young women all around the world. We began with this idea as it is something ingrained in both of us, that young women should not feel the need to wear make-up, or feel the need to use it as something to hide behind, or as a tool to increase security.

We begin with showing images of articles where women from the media - celebrities - are embracing their own natural beauty and not falling towards that a woman should be presentable and wear make-up. The issue we face now is that young girls are not wearing make-up for the right reasons, rather as a means of covering up their insecurities. Now the message here, we both want to make clear, is not to force every woman not to wear make-up, but to make people aware of whether they are wearing make-up for a healthy reason. For example, if a young girl wants to be a makeup artist, by all means, she has every right to express her love for make-up by wearing her favourite brands etc.

Now this issue, much broadcasted in the media, has been very prominent in celebrities movements. The anti-makeup movement has been around for the past few years and so we decided to engage 'watchers' using the persuasion technique of 'Celebrity Endorsement'. We begin with images of influential women promoting natural beauty and sending images of themselves not wearing make-up.

Secondly, the use of a hashtag denotes the use of the foot in the door technique, something Cialdini (2007) refers to as 'Commitment and Consistency'. We decided to add this as a way to include people as part of a movement and secondly, to initiate a sense of commitment. Once women, using social media, hashtag our catch phrase 'Go Out Without', there is a desire to remain consistent and follow through with the behaviours. Secondly, by showing images of people complying with the behaviour change means they are more likely to commit.

This leads onto the persuasion technique Cialdini refers to as 'Social Proof'. We provided people with an idea of what others out there are currently doing; tweeting our hashtag, promoting natural beauty through little to no use of make-up in celebrities etc. Social proof implies that people are more likely to comply to behaviours if they see someone who they can easily relate to complying. We purposefully attempted to get the hashtag trending amongst everyday women from the University of Warwick. This meant that there was little gap in reliability between the women complying with the behaviour (the ones tweeting) and the target audience watching. 


Furthermore we tried to increase people's perceived behavioural control (one of the key aspects of the theory of planned behaviour) by using everyday young women to make clips of themselves outside without makeup on. This was to ensure that people still felt the behaviour was attainable.

Madeleine Bosman
Liah El-Fadel


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.