Feedback: Art or Science?

As I thought about what to write for the subject of feedback, I started chatting with my roommates about what came to mind when they thought about the topic. One of my roommates had an immediate negative reaction to the notion of feedback that I was surprised by. He mentioned two things that are particularly relevant to the concepts we’ve discussed in class: feedback in groups and positive versus negative feedback.

1) Feedback in groups

What is the difference between giving a person feedback in a group setting as opposed to in an individual setting? My roommate described an experience in which he received feedback in class, surrounded by peers. For him, this experience was incredibly anxiety inducing and relatively ineffective as he was more focused on the impressions of his peers than on the specific feedback he was receiving. To me, this sounds like an issue of directed attention. The distraction of his classmates’ perceived judgement was too overwhelming and left minimal capacity to focus his attention on the comments of his professor. Feedback in a group setting can also interact in interesting ways with norms, as feedback that is similar to that of your peers may feel more desirable than unique feedback. I’m curious if anybody has any examples of times when they received feedback in group settings, and how effective it was?

2) Positive versus negative feedback.

The second point that my roommate raised was the issue of negative feedback. He mentioned an experience in which he had received negative feedback, which, rather than incentivizing a change in behavior, caused him to disengage and shut down. His reaction sounded a lot like psychological reactance in that rather than take the feedback and adjust his behavior, he ignored it and instead adopted a generally negative opinion of the entire process of receiving feedback at all. We’ve talked a lot in this class about the power of positivity and the danger of using negative emotions to affect behavior change, and his experience seemed to reinforce what we’ve learned. When it comes to environmentally responsible behaviors, then, what is the best way to deliver negative feedback about a person’s actions? Is it to always focus on the positive, or is there a way to effectively deliver negative feedback that doesn’t elicit reactance. I’ve heard of the idea of “sandwiching” negative feedback, meaning leading with something positive, ending with something positive, and delivering the negative feedback in between. Are there any other ways to do it effectively? Is it possible to provide negative feedback in more subtle ways, or is any negative response to a person’s behavior going to risk all of the potential dangers associated with negative emotions?

Goal Setting and Environmental Behavior Change

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the idea of goal setting and its application towards encouraging more environment-friendly behaviors. When setting a goal, typically you have a desired outcome in mind (i.e. learning a new skill, saving money for a vacation, getting in better shape, etc.) and are in some way “committed” to achieving that goal. However, in between creating that goal and actually achieving it, there can be significant roadblocks, one of which is that the goal seems too vague, abstract, and daunting, and you may not know where to start. Something that usually helps is to create several smaller, more concrete goals that you can accomplish in the short-term. For instance, if you have a goal of writing a novel, it may be easier to have smaller goals of writing a certain number of pages or chapters per week, which is a more specific and concrete goal that is limited in time. Because the conditions of the short-term goals are clearer, it is often easier to visualize how you can get there, and thus, make it more likely you will take the steps needed to reach the goal.

In a similar manner, having shorter-term goals may help promote pro-environmental behavior change. Some environmental messages, such as recycling more, driving less, buying local food, and conserving water may seem vague and/or too much of a lifestyle change for someone who isn’t already engaged in those behaviors. Would encouraging more short-term and time-sensitive goals help in this regard? For example, saying “take the bus or bike to school/work two times next week” and “use 20% less water by shortening shower time” can provide someone who is new to these behaviors with a concrete, short-term goal in a limited time-frame. This can help to lessen the “barrier to entry” effect that may occur when presented with a longer-term, more abstract behavior goal.

Do you feel we use short-term goal objectives enough when trying to change environmental behavior? And what are some other ways we can make larger environmental goals more accessible? 

Amplifying norms in family relationships?

As most of you know, my life has been consumed with my daughter and granddaughter lately (she's actually on my lap drinking a bottle right now) and so I have been thinking about everything within that context. When my daughter decided to move back home, one of the things I was really happy about was the fact that she would be exposed to a different set of social norms. Up in Canada, staying up late was one of the normal behaviors.  Additionally, no one was modeling how to be a new mother and no one around her had a new baby, much less a new baby with special needs. My family tends to focus more on stability, education, and personal growth so I thought that just being present in that changed environment would alter her behavior. However, just a few weeks after returning home, my daughter slipped back into her old schedule and no matter how our family and I try to tell her and try to show her that the norm is for a mom to sleep at night and get up during the day with the baby, she rejects the message. So, I was trying to figure out if there was a way to amplify the norm for her or if this is something that is near impossible to pull off for family members and perhaps she needs more outside influence.

Perhaps reciprocation could be utilized by appealing to her sense of fairness? If I get up early and take care of Ana one morning, allowing her to sleep in that day, would she be more likely to agree to getting up early and caring for her the next day?

Consistency is not much of an issue for me. I tend to be rigidly consistent because unscheduled changes affect me negatively due to an anxiety disorder. I am pretty strict about keeping my commitments as well. However, my daughter seems to have figured out that if she refuses to give an affirmative response to a request to take care of something, it means that later she can say she never agreed to anything. So getting a promise or commitment out of her is rather difficult.

Because she is spending most of her time lately playing a video game with others, who in all likelihood do not have children or the same responsabilities that she has, she receives mixed signals with descriptive norms. Half of the time she sees what I model and the other half what her online friends model. This makes social validation of the types of norms I want her to be exposed to less salient. I'm certain she feels like she gets a lot more out of her interactions with her friends than she does out of praise from me for doing the dishes or getting up at a descent time in the morning. This is where I wish I could get her to socialize with other new moms in the area or other moms of kids with AMC but, my daughter also has a lot of social anxiety which makes that type of intervention more difficult to employ.

In regard to liking, it's no big surprise to me that I would have this factor stacked against me. I know my daughter loves me and she probably does like certain things about me and wishes to emulate them but I think the fact that she dislikes me "telling her what to do" and feels "we have nothing in common" is much harder to overcome. She still acts like a 16 year old rebellious child in many ways and so cooperation can be more difficult for us to accomplish. I can see how this would be an issue within many family dynamics.

However, it is true that she is sensitive to the authority at the same time. Not just my authority but my mother, her aunts, her step-mother, etc. I believe anytime their message backs up my message it gives the takeaway more salience since they are all "elders" and have that experience and credibility. I also see how this is more effective when clarity and efficacy are low because she is much more inclined to listen to me or fall into an action that is normal for our household when she is too tired to argue or doesn't feel like she has to fight for something she feels strongly about.

Finally, scarcity could certainly play a role in amplifying messages to her and this is one place where I could potentially be undermining myself, by being so available and accommodating. If I weren't watching Ana in the mornings so often, would she get up more frequently? If I made her keep her with her in the evenings instead of taking her when I get home, would she stay off of the video game more? My experience over the last few weeks tells me no but since norms change slowly, perhaps I haven't given it enough time?

Have you all had similar experiences with difficulty sending or receiving normative messages among family members? What could I do to stage a normative intervention in my home?

Fiction

I really enjoyed the framing and stories lecture and how the way we communicate our messages can define how our receptors perception of the content of them. In the De Young & Monroe article about the fundamentals of engaging stories, the authors highlight how considering some elements (coherence, problem resolution, mystery, characterization, concreteness, imageability, challenging previous knowledge) when building stories to frame environmental messages can help to create interestingness and "hook" readers or listeners (De Young & Monroe, 1996). Since fictional literature is what got me interested in environmental studies in the first place and we didn't had much time to talk about stories, i want to talk to you about two significantly different writers, how they framed environmental messages in their writing and my personal interpretations of their work.

Alejo Carpentier, was a cuban writer and he is significant to latin american literature for creating the concept of "lo real maravilloso" (the marvelous reality), that eventually evolved into the Magic Realism sub-genre. Most of his work revolves around the cultural gap of Latin America's indigenous and euro-western worldviews. To make the gap more concrete and coherent, he applies "lo real maravilloso" knowing that we as readers (and he as writer, for that) see indigenous civilizations as a mixture of myth and magic so he shrouds the interaction of the outside man (the characters but also the readers) with magic and mystery. Gabriel Garcia Marquez use the same device in the sub-genre’s most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (that probably some of you read) where the Buendia family’s interaction with the gypsy Melquiades and other external and mystical characters usually have supernatural connotations. As with Carpentier’s work, when a magical phenomena happens the characters do not recognize it as magical even if they don’t understand it. It’s magical or marvelous, but it is also real.

Carpentier invites the reader to reflect on our relationship with nature and with other civilizations. This is most notably clear on his novels The Lost Steps and The Kingdom of this World). In the first one a bored and depressed European music historian travels to Venezuela to find some native music instruments, is enchanted by the indigenous way of life and by an indigenous woman named Rosario, abandons his wife, his mistress and his European life only to miserably lose Rosario and the tribe not being able to find them again. The second one is a fantastical work of historical fiction about the Haitian Revolution, where the narrator's perception of reality is constantly mutating when history is moving forward, taking into account Haitian culture changes and hybridization with the arrival of Europeans and Africans.

On the other hand Nicanor Parra, a chilean poet that frames himself as an antipoet, while constantly gives environmental messages does not tell them in stories but frames them in a very unique way. He started his career with 1956’s Poems and Antipoems a three part collection that slowly deconstructs the concept of a poem and ends with what the birth of the antipoem: a poem deprived of solemnity, written in colloquial language and full of irony, humor and contradictions. This deconstructive path ends with 1972’s Artifacts a work that was presented as a box containing cards with a drawing and a small text that could be considered at the same time a poem, a joke and a meme predecessor. In the 80's Parra's work started to reflect an evident ecological message, including a collection called Ecopoemas(Ecopoems)that mixed beautiful short poems that invite solemn reflection like:

El error consistio

en creer que la tierra era nuestra

cuando la verdad de las cosas

es que nosotros somos de la tierra

The mistake consisted

in believing that the Earth belonged to us

when the truth of all

is that we belong to the Earth

with ridiculous ones whose objective is to function as satirical jokes:

Recuerdos de infancia:

los arboles aun no

tenian forma de muebles

y los pollos circulaban

crudos x el paisaje

Childhood memories:

trees were not yet

shaped like furniture

and chickens circulated

raw in the landscape

How about you? Any fiction authors, books or stories that really influenced or "changed" you in some way?

References

De Young, R., Monroe, M.C. (1996). Some Fundamentals of Engaging Stories. Environmental Education Research, 2, 171-187.

Carpentier, A. (1956): La Guerra del Tiempo, Madrid; Alianza Editorial, 1995

Carpentier, A. (1953): Los pasos perdidos, México: Cía. General de ediciones, 1970

Carpentier, A. (1949): El reino de este mundo; Santiago: Universitaria, 1971

Parra, N. (2006): Obras completas y algo + (1935 - 1972); Santiago: Galaxia Gutemberg, 2008

Parra, N. (2011): Obras completas y algo + (1975 - 2006); Santiago: Galaxia Gutemberg, 2012

I’m prompting you, behavior changers: Think before you prompt!

As we have discussed in class, “prompts” (short, simple reminders to perform a desired behavior, presented in close proximity to the desired behavior) are all around us. We constantly see signs telling us to “turn off the lights” and we receive emails reminding us to “pay your bill!” While prompts are relatively cheap, easy to implement, and have been shown by various studies to have a considerable effect on behavior, other studies have shown negligible impacts (Katzev & Johnson, 1987). Given the unreliability of prompts, should behavior change practitioners be more cautious of utilizing and recommending the use of prompts?  

Given the age of information overload that we live in, how well can prompts really compete for our attention against other information like advertisements (some of which may be prompts themselves), and other environment-related prompts? Do you think we might be more successful in at least combining prompts with other tactics, such as leveraging social norms, feedback, modeling and commitment? For example, in the Aronson & O’Leary (1983) study, prompting alone was only half as effective at increasing water conservation behavior than prompting combined with modeling. Should we also take greater care in considering the influence of various characteristics of prompts, such as whether the prompt is also normative or not? (“Recycle your cup: 80% of the students in this dorm do it!”)

My point is not to say that prompts do not work (there is evidence that they can), or that we should abandon prompts entirely. However, I think it is important to periodically “prompt” ourselves, as current or future behavior change practitioners, to carefully consider whether a prompt (and what kind of prompt) is appropriate in any given situation. We shouldn't simply adopt prompts in general as our “weapon of choice” or always encourage colleagues to use prompts. We must carefully consider the specific situation.

A few tips to help us critically analyze whether a prompt is the appropriate intervention tool for the given situation:

• Are we indeed trying to change a behavior, rather than an attitude or value?
•  Is the desired behavior one that someone might otherwise forget to do? Is the desired behavior relatively easy to do and non-demanding?
• Is the prompt specific in its requested behavior and easy to understand?
•  Can the prompt be placed in a noticeable position close to the point of behavior (both physically and temporally)?

If you answered yes to these questions, a prompt might indeed be an effective intervention tool for your situation. However, due to the overwhelming amount of information (especially visual information) that people are faced with everyday, I would still encourage you to think critically about your audience and whether your specific prompt will be able to rise above the noise that your target is faced with every day. What is your audience motivated by? What is important to them? Can you combine your prompt with other techniques like normative information or portray a messenger in your prompt that your audience trusts and respects?

What are some examples you have seen of prompts that you think are appropriate (or not)? What other characteristics are included in the prompt message that might also make it more effective (or not)? How can we ensure that prompts are not over-utilized to the point where they become too common and thus ineffective?

References:
1) Katzev, R. D. & T. R. Johnson (1987). Antecedent communications: Prompts. (Chapter 2). Promoting Energy Conservation: An Analysis of Behavioral Research. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
2) Aronson, E. & M. O’Leary (1982W1983). The relative effectiveness of models and prompts on energy conservation: A field experiment in a shower room. Journal of Environmental Systems, 12: 219W224.

 

Change like you mean it.

I’m sure that at some point you have lived with other people, and at some point something they did bothered you. So, what did you do about it? Tell them? Stew about it? Passive aggressive notes?

Most of the time, I don’t really mind how things get done, but having spent a lot of time dealing with recycling (both professionally and personally) I can’t help but be disappointed when I find recycling in the garbage and garbage in the recycling. Just the volume of waste in general bugs me, but finding it in the wrong bin provides a target for my dissatisfaction. When it happens in my home, I wonder, "doesn't anyone care about all this %#$@?"

I have tried a few methods to get my roommates to take on better recycling habits. When I find garbage (plastic bags seem to be the most frequent offenders) in the recycling I remind whomever is around that they can’t go in the city recycling, they need to be returned to the grocery store, or better yet, not brought home in the first place. This, I am sure makes me sound like a nag. It also only works for a short period of time, because inevitably every few weeks, I find a plastic bag in the recycling.

I also try to model good recycling habits. I rinse my plastics, I breakdown the paperboard, and I bring the toilet paper tubes from the bathroom to the recycling bin. I can be seen in the kitchen digging recyclables out of the garbage, cleaning them off and placing them in the recycling. And, I take the garbage out of the recycling and put it where it belongs. However, I am still doing these things alone, and still finding recycling in the garbage and vice versa.

I keep meaning to print out one of the Ann Arbor city recycling signs (that shows what can and can’t be recycled locally) to hang over our recycling bin to serve as a prompt and see if that makes a difference. I definitely think one of the weakest parts of our system is that the garbage can is near the refrigerator and the recycling is a good five steps away. For space reasons, this is the best layout. But for someone realizing that they left that big container of yogurt in the fridge too long, tossing it directly into the trash instead of opening, rinsing, and recycling appears to be the most convenient (and least scary) option.

I also think that each of my roommates has a different impetus for making choices and doing things the way that they do. Which makes me think that no single behavior change strategy will be effective for each one. But I realize that I don’t just want this behavior to change, I want each of us to care about the amount of waste we are producing, consider the impacts of our consumption, and realize that when something is thrown away it actually goes somewhere where it sits, forever. I don’t want to preach at my roommates or shame them for misplacing a recyclable, I want them to want to have less garbage and appreciate the difference this can make. So, how can I help our household move beyond the superficial change of habit to a lasting meaningful commitment to thinking about things differently?

This class ultimately focuses a great deal on the dominant values approach. Rightly so, as this approach focuses on common or dominant ways that people make judgements and decisions, essentially what works for all members of our species. In this way, we get the most bang for our buck or in applied terminology, the most behaviour change for our interventions. No doubt, this justification for the dominant-values approach makes perfect sense, but I continuously find myself drawn to the variant-values approaches.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’m the only one. We only need to look as far as the personality quiz popping up in your newsfeed on facebook this morning or the horoscopes that were read off hand at the back of the newspaper. It’s evident that we crave individuality, but also look to find similarities between others and ourselves. We essentially categorize ourselves into different classifications to determine how we fit with others. If we’re so willing to self-categorize then perhaps variant-values approaches to behaviour change can be extremely successful. By using those groups into which we self-classify and indicate as important to us perhaps personal norms (Norm Activation Model) can be changed by other group members. Additionally, the groups into which we self-identify can indicate when we’re most vulnerable to behaviour change interventions. If we’re already going out of our way to highlight our variant-values perhaps researchers should leap at the opportunity too.