Switch - Chip Heath [62]
In 1988, the government gave Butler full citizenship and later awarded him the St. Lucia Medal of Merit, one of the country’s highest honors. He had shown St. Lucians what it meant to take pride in their identity, and in the process, he’d become a St. Lucian himself.
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Other people noticed what Butler accomplished. In the mid-1980s, a board member from Rare, a conservation organization, asked Butler if he would come to St. Vincent and do what he had done in St. Lucia. Intrigued, Butler joined Rare, working alongside St. Vincent’s forestry division and its chief forest officer. Within a year, the island passed laws to protect its own native parrot.
Butler and the other leaders of Rare realized they had cracked one of the most pressing problems of conservation. It’s very difficult to protect the precious areas of the world without the support of the residents of those areas, but Rare had proved it could inspire those residents to care about their environment. So Rare conservationists resolved to launch similar projects, which they began to call “Pride campaigns,” all around the world. By 2009, Rare had successfully launched 120 Pride campaigns in 50 different countries from Panama to Indonesia. (Full disclosure: Inspired by this work, Dan Heath joined Rare’s board of trustees in 2009.) Pride campaigns focused on animals ranging from the loggerhead turtle to the Napoleon wrasse, a brilliant blue fish whose habitat is coral reefs.
We’ve seen that one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel “big” relative to the challenge. But here we’re seeing something different. Paul Butler didn’t shrink the change. Instead, he grew the people. He made the St. Lucians swell with pride over their parrot—a species that exists nowhere else. He inspired them to feel more determined, more ready, more motivated. And when you build people up in this way, they develop the strength to act.
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Rare’s success in motivating people in fifty countries suggests that something universal is at work here. Confirmation of that comes from the research of James March, a professor of political science at Stanford University. March says that when people make choices, they tend to rely on one of two basic models of decision making: the consequences model or the identity model. The consequences model is familiar to students of economics. It assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh the costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that maximizes our satisfaction. It’s a rational, analytical approach. This is the approach that Paul Butler knew would fail with St. Lucians, because there simply wasn’t a strong cost/benefit case for the parrot.
In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what’s missing: any calculation of costs and benefits. The identity model explains the way most people vote, which contradicts our notion of the “self-interested voter.” It helps to shed light on why an auto mechanic in Oklahoma would vote against a Democrat who’d give him health insurance, and why a Silicon Valley millionaire would vote against a Republican who’d cut her taxes.
Generally, when we use the word identity, we’re talking about an immutable trait of some kind—such as a racial, ethic, or regional identity. But that’s a relatively narrow use of the term. We’re not just born with an identity; we adopt identities throughout our lives. We aspire to be good mothers or fathers, devout Catholics or Muslims, patriotic citizens, and so on.
Or consider a professional identity, such as being a “scientist.” Clearly, you’re not born a scientist. It’s an identity you seek out and one that others, such as your professors and mentors, consciously cultivate in you. As you develop and grow in that identity, it becomes