Do as I say, not as I do?

We were recently engaging with a community where they were asked to express their views broadly for or against an issue. The issue as such was one where people in the office would also take differing views, if only for a spot of light-hearted banter.

The point I made in our discussions was that what was far more interesting was that those who were critical also expressed their views on the benefits and the same applied vice versa. Very few people were either completely for or against on this issue where you could actually express a clear yes or no. Clearly the depth of our engagement showed that people hold complex views on the subject..

I think one of the interesting areas that one discovers within community engagement is the difference between what people say and their actual behaviour: eg people say they disagree with something and then, when given the choice, behave somewhat differently.

We see this in people's views and actions with recycling, gambling, healthy living, using big shops when they say they really prefer smaller local shops etc. The current debate on the future of local post offices is a good example. People say they want a local one but usage is declining as people vote with their feet and use other service provision - some on the internet..

Some of this may be due to people weighing up incentives against what they perceive to be commonly held views. Thus we see people say they like their community to stay the same and will oppose an over-development next door to them, but if a developer offers them £50,000+ on top of the value of their property they don't then say "no, this will ruin the neighbourhood I am moving from, so I won't accept this extra money.

Organisations like the RSA are currently studying the dichotomy between views and behaviour as a driver for challenges such as "private activity, public despair", which we have previously blogged and its an area that there will clearly be more debate. As we are discovering in some areas we are working in, people have very complex views on "entitlement" both for themselves and others. The challenge for politicians and society is how much should we actually restrict people's choices and potentially damaging behaviour or how much should we debate with it in a slower process  of engagement?

In other words - how far do civil liberties go and how possible is it to impose one approach to areas of personal behaviour in a single state, let alone a complex global society where some people in future may see their on-line community as far more important than their local community. .

I used to think you could impose such an approach but now I am not so sure?

This is why social marketing is such an interesting area with much wider applications than what it is being used for at present and why I think TCC are well positioned to be at the centre of that..

I suspect it goes back to the point I made at the beginning that people rarely hold a single view on these issues (see The Political Brain for more info - it has much wider application than politics) and that immediate influences at any point in time are really important.