The subjective nature of reality

On 18th January 2017, newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump blasted news channel NBC for claiming that the returning of jobs to the US by large companies including Ford and Lockheed Martin was nothing to do with his election. Trump disputed this, branding NBC’s report as “Fake News”. However, a wealth of industry evidence suggested that the job return was set in motion long before Trump’s presidency. Whilst many attribute Mr Trump’s behaviour to a brash attempt to boost his own appeal, these “Fake News” claims may in fact represent a more interesting aspect of psychology.

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We encounter vast amounts of complex, unstructured information, and making coherent sense of this can be extremely difficult. As a result, we construct small-scale, simplified representations of reality called ‘mental models’. According to Morgan et al. (2002), mental models are “personal, internal representations of the world, which individuals use to reason, make decisions and guide behaviour”. Our mental models can be a confusing mix of legitimate, biased and even completely incorrect concepts, and vary a lot based on our social contexts.

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Changing behaviour by causing the right amount of ‘dissonance’

Presenting information that conflicts with currently held mental models will induce ‘cognitive dissonance’, a form of psychological discomfort that people are motivated to reduce. First proposed by Leon Festinger in 1957, cognitive dissonance has been a prominent psychological theory for many years, but has seen little application in behaviour change. The theory suggests that information that causes high levels of dissonance might be rejected outright, as it conflicts too strongly with the current representation of reality. However, small amounts of dissonance can lead to introspection, and facilitate the path to behaviour or attitude change.

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NBC’s report is likely to have caused strong conflict with Trump and his supporters’ mental models, leading to it being rejected as ‘Fake News’. Social media might have played a role in amplifying this phenomenon, as it provides enough information to justify and reinforce even the least ‘rational’ mental models.

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An example of positive impact using this approach 

When designing behaviour change initiatives, it is important that we consider the mental models of stakeholders and fully understand their subjective reality.

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Insight Dojo recently carried out a project for a pharmaceutical company on a ‘natural’ treatment for menopausal symptoms in a European country. The product’s sales were plateauing despite strong data about its effectiveness, and we were tasked with developing a strategy to boost the performance of the brand.

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The company’s initial belief was that doctors saw natural products as ineffective, and that reaffirming the strong efficacy data would help overcome this barrier. Contrary to this, ethnographic work revealed that the majority of doctors believed that natural products worked well in the therapeutic area. They routinely attended courses to learn about natural treatments, differentiated between ingredients, and matched those to different symptoms. The real barrier was that they did not correctly understand how the client’s product worked.

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Based on this, we recommended that the company provide information that explained how the natural ingredient of the product worked on the well-established underlying cause of the symptoms. This new communication linked the product to an existing mental model, whilst creating a small amount of dissonance that the physicians were able to accept as an incremental change. This led to an increase in recommendations for the treatment, and a brand growth of 40% in the next six months. It is now a leading product in its category.

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In this example, an accurate understanding of the physicians’ current reality led to a completely different, yet authentic, strategy that had a strong positive impact on business.

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In conclusion, when attempting to change attitudes or behaviour, we must first understand the stakeholders’ current reality, and create incremental amounts of dissonance rather than striving for a large change at once. In the case of behaviour change, less may be more.

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References:

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. California: Stanford University Press

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Morgan, M. G., Fischhoff, B., Bostrom, A., & Atman, C. J. (2002). Risk communication: A mental models approach. Cambridge University Press.