So here’s a thing…

The lovely Ronan (@suffolkvillage) contacted me over the weekend asking what strategies out of the Copy Copy Copy and HERD playbook which he might employ in the last few days of the campaign to secure his desired outcome (REMAIN).

We discussed a number of things  which you can follow on twitter but the most important step – as ever – is to ask what kind of behaviour are you trying to change?

Take a look again at the classic Bentley-Earls 4 box of choice styles: 

Ask your self how are the people whose vote (or non-vote) you’re trying to change are choosing now. How are they making their decisions? Not just about voting but about which way to vote?

Is it – as we like to tell ourselves – in the NW style? Where individuals are choosing independently of each other but based on the facts? Like a rational agent is supposed to?

Or is it SW? Through habit or guesswork or just what seems most salient as a choice? (This is certainly how many repeated voters or non-voters perpetuate their patterns of behaviour – it’s just ‘what you do’ or ‘don’t do’).

Or are their choices Remain/Leave (as I’d suggest) mostly on the Eastern side of the map: where other people’s opinions and choices are important?

For my money, the really big difference revealed by recent polling (IPSOS MORI I think) between those who favour remain and those who favour leave is that the former are happy to take the counsel of experts of various sorts whereas the Leavers are no longer listening to any experts and authorities, often just citing numbers they’ve heard from peers (as #thatniceMrGove observed recently, his side have had enough of listening to experts). One wag recently noted that we now trust the bloke down the pub rather than someone who’s spent decades studying a complex phenomenon. This is not to say at all that legitimate challenges to the methodologies should be ignored (@yoostin’s comments are worth taking on board). Indeed, the great Phillip Tetlock’s recent book has highlighted how important this is in making good forecasts. And to do it to your own thinking.

While the Remain campaign have definitely overstated their case a number of times, the curious thing about the Leave campaign – for students of human behaviour outside their camp – is how little fact, evidence and authority count and how strong feeling and rhetorical flair matter. Stories and untruths spread like wildfire and are taken as gospel and wisdom. It doesn’t matter how wrong they are, they “feel” right to many people on this side of the fence.

Take this big number (which the UK is alleged to pay every day to the EU).

All the respectable authorities suggest this is out by a factor of at least 100%, if not more.

You just can’t argue successfully with people who are choosing in this way. You can’t use  the normal debating tools with those who are convinced that anything you say, any expert you cite, any widely accepted consensus is further evidence of some cynical attempt to bring the country under the yoke of evil despots in Brussels. They aren’t in the same part of the map as you.

No, their style of choice is all very SE: where your peers and only your peers count; where popularity of a thought is more important than the credibility of the source or the thing itself.

They have their own facts; yours are clearly wrong. Because you come from the same tribe. And your tribe is clearly wrong. (For those of you still struggling to get to sleep, can I recommend Bill Bishop’s monumental Big Sort which describes how this has played out in the US).

To a certain extent though, you could see this as a different kind of NE choice – just a different tribe that has emerged and now refers only to itself.

It’s always been possible – human history has often gone through this kind of loop – but it is amplified by our hyperconnected world.Stuff goes round so fast – we get use to using the minds of others to justify our positions and our feelings.

It’s got to be the place to start, no? Acknowledging how people are choosing before for and try to change which way they vote?

Over the next day or two, I’ll outline some of the things that Ronan and his Remain chums can do to edge over the line.