Light Touches and Heavy Hand

Amy Cuddy Ted Talk

• Power-Pose intervention

  • Psychologically, people feel more confident and powerful

• Light-touch intervention

• Although it may only make you feel more confident for a few moments, the outcomes may make you more confident overall

Perry Preschool Study

• Heavy-handed intervention

• Low-income, racial minority families

• Systemic disadvantage, less access to education

• Statistically at risk for drop out, unemployment, arrests

• Intervention -- High quality preschool eduction

• Compontents:

  • Validated interactive education model

  • Daily classed for age 3 and 4

  • Teacher and assistant for 16-20 kids

  • Regular home visits

  • Regular assessment

• Results:

  • More ready for school

  • Did better in school -- Less drop outs

  • More employed as adults

  • Less likely to be in the CJS

Light-Touch Interventions

• Derived from social psychological interventions -- Tweak something that is small and psychological, that can have a fairly meaningful consequence

• Small, psychological interventions or behavioural “nudges” that require minimal action, low cost and low resources required

• Nudges, Wise Interventions, Subtle Persuasion

Strengths of Light-Touch Interventions

• Easy to do

• Personal choice

• Low cost

• Can be shown how easy change can be

• Psychological mechanisms

• Norms -- Ripple effects; inspire collective action

• Appealing to policy makers

Limitations of Light-Touch Interventions

• “Too good to be true”

• Done in isolation

• Usually small benefits

• May cause victim blaming

• Less attention to structural/societal mechanisms

• May not change norms

• Easy changes may divert policy resources from hard changes

• Without fundamental educational structures and cultures in place, light touches will have a minimal impact

Heavy-Handed Interventions

• Complex, detailed, resource heavy, do something to change the structural resources available

• Large, multi-component (involves many different activities), requires substantial investment (time, staff, resource-intensive)

• Structural change, Intensive Education, Large-Scale Programs

Strengths of Heavy-Touch Interventions

• High impact

• Multiple stakeholders

• Changes norms

• Meaningfully alters context

• Alleviates inequalities/barriers

• Multiple components -- More impact

• Address problems at its source

Limitations of Heavy-Touch Interventions

• Requires buy-ins

• Competing interests -- Support may change when stakeholders/politics change

• High cost and needs sustained resources

• Hard to provide to everyone -- Ethics

• Hard to measure precisely/immediately

• Less theoretical precision

• Takes many years to assess outcomes

Text Message Nudges

• Control group 1 -- Regular reminder emails

• Nudge group 2 -- Same communications plus formal weekly text reminders

• Nudge groups 3 -- Same communications plus personalized, friendly text messages encouraging reply

• Results:

  • Rates were highest for group 3, second highest for group 2 and lowest for group 1

The Allure of the Light Touch

• Cuddy on posture and body language:

  • I want to offer you a free, no-tech life hack and all it requires is that you change your posture for two minutes

  • if you could tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change how your life unfolds

• Low-cost and good consequences

• Emphasized how easy, fast, and low-cost they are

Kim, Fitzsimons, and Kay

• Learning about empowerment:

  • Light touch, “lean in” confidence builders for women

    • Increased the perception that women were responsible for workplace gender gap problems, and could solve it on their own

• Learning improves confidence and results

Keep America Beautiful Campaign

• Set of Ads created by corporations in America that were being criticized because of their contributions to increasing levels of waste

• Pressure to regulate corporations’ increasing impact on waste -- S-frame

• Created campaign to try and get individuals to stop littering -- I-frame

I-Frame

• Individual-Frame

• Targets changing the individual

Issues with Excessive Focus -- I-Frame

• Focusing too much on I-frame can reduce focus on S-frame

• Changes individuals but doesn’t change the system

S-Frame

• System-Frame

• Changing the system

Debate

• Whichever one is being focused on tends to stop us from paying attention to the other parts

• Pay attention to one but do not forget the other

Band-Aid Solutions

• Help the individual and then go find and address the root causes