Experts have marked World Breastfeeding Week in the usual way, by calling for social attitudes to breastfeeding to change in the UK. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has also released a short myth-busting film. It’s a worthy campaign. But is there any evidence that it will work?
Highlighting “regrettable” public attitudes in an effort to correct them is a familiar tactic among organisations that want things to change. Experts on everything from child health to climate change wring their hands over society’s faulty understandings and how this impedes progress. “British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows” proclaimed one of my favourite headlines of recent years. Information and awareness campaigns often follow, providing accurate information to set the record straight and tell people how it really is.
But here’s the rub: this doesn’t work. It’s now well documented that telling people that their attitudes are wrong doesn’t change them, and providing information that contradicts someone’s view very often backfires, making them more entrenched in their position. Anyone who’s attempted to argue a friend or family member down from a dubious position will recognise this “backfire effect” all too well.
And yet communications campaigns on all sorts of topics are based on the premise that we need to take on false beliefs directly. We’ll prove them wrong with sound logic and compelling data, generate wide-reaching epiphanies and win the day.
Shaun Helman, head of transport psychology for the Transport Research Laboratory told me that attempts to provide teenage drivers with accurate information about the risks of driving fast on rural roads can actually increase the likelihood of risk-taking.
“When it comes to road safety there’s a perception that telling people stuff is better than doing nothing,” he said. “We know that this is very often not the case.” One reason is the tendency of campaigns to highlight the prevalence of “undesirable” behaviour. This can normalise the very actions communicators seek to stamp out, making them more, not less, likely. I wonder if many decades of headlines about the UK’s woefully low breastfeeding rates may have in fact added to the problem.
But there have been some huge – and welcome – shifts in public attitudes and behaviours in recent decades, which shows what’s possible. The reduction in drink driving between 1979 and 2009 is estimated to have saved thousands of lives. This didn’t happen by chance. Legislation and enforcement were combined with sustained investment in public communications that worked with, not against, the ways our brains process information and make decisions. The campaign countered our tendency to see drink drivers as different – as “drunks” – meaning drivers failed to see their own behaviours as part of the issue. It connected the issue and its consequences to familiar actions and scenarios, forcing people to see the relevance to themselves.
Another seismic attitudinal shift has been public thinking about same-sex relationships. An important factor has been a reframing of the argument by LGBT campaigners in the US. They shifted their language from emphasising gay rights to talking about love and relationships. This highlighted our shared humanity, values and connections to society’s institutions. It made the issue one that people could identify with rather than argue against and distance themselves from. It paid off in June 2015 when the supreme court made equal marriage the law – something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.
A similarly improbable shift took place here in the UK when smoking was banned in public places in 2007. In just three years the proposal went from being seen as “controversial” and “extreme” to an accepted reality. Once again, a deliberate and evidence-based use of language was key to persuading policymakers and members of the public to back this bold move. A new story was told in which second-hand smoke was the bad guy, leading people to blame the system – not individuals. Reframed in terms of unsafe public space, better regulation became the sensible solution.
Breastfeeding is a divisive and emotional topic with huge scope for finger-pointing messages that don’t change anything, and have the potential to make matters worse. There are growing numbers of mothers sharing painful feelings of shame when they “fail” to feed their babies. There’s a clear need to focus on the structures and systems that support mothers to breastfeed their babies. But “normalising” breastfeeding requires properly analysing our deeply ingrained ways of thinking – such as the cultural pressure for women to “get their lives back” – that impact on society’s perception of breastfeeding.
There is a science to changing hearts and minds that experts and campaigners in different fields routinely overlook. Embracing this offers experts and campaigners the opportunity to make huge strides forward. But it means changing and resisting the very human instinct to simply speak out and tell it like it is, to correct faulty logic and bust myths.
• Nicky Hawkins is a communications strategist for the FrameWorks Institute
