Switch - Chip Heath [96]
Winsten and his team at Harvard made it their goal to create a social norm in the United States: If you were going out drinking, you would pick a designated driver who would commit not to drink for the evening. How do you create a social norm out of thin air? Winsten’s inspiration was that you could make the behavior contagious by repeatedly exposing people to it, in many different contexts, even if those contexts were fictional.
Winsten and his team collaborated with producers, writers, and actors from more than 160 prime-time TV programs, sprinkling designateddriver moments naturally into the plots. Segments featuring designated drivers appeared on Hunter, The Cosby Show, Mr. Belvedere, and Who’s the Boss? On an episode of the smash-hit 1980s legal drama L.A. Law, the heartthrob lawyer played by Harry Hamlin asked a bartender to call his designated driver. A designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on Cheers.
“Jay’s crusade was one that we could do something about fairly easily, unlike a lot of other worthwhile causes,” said Grant Tinker, then a vice president of NBC, who introduced Winsten to dozens of writers at all the major networks. Winsten always requested just “five seconds” of dialogue featuring the designateddriver idea, not a whole episode or even a whole scene. “Considering the simplicity of it all,” said Tinker, “it was very hard for us to feel our independence was being challenged.”
Notice how smart Winsten was: He used the power of the Path to change the public’s behavior, but he used the power of the Rider and the Elephant to change the network executives’ behavior. With his five-second requests, he was directing the Rider by describing a simple action that could help on a complex problem, and he was motivating the Elephant by shrinking the change.
In 1991, three years after the campaign launched, nine out of ten people were familiar with the term designated driver. And they were behaving differently as a result. Thirty-seven percent of all Americans reported having acted as designated drivers, and 54 percent of frequent drinkers had been driven home by one. The behavior change saved lives. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities declined from 23,626 in 1988 to 17,858 in 1992.
Winsten used the power of television to simulate a social norm. But you don’t need Hollywood to create a herd. When Steven Kelman, whom we discussed in the “Shrink the Change” chapter, took over the government’s procurement reform efforts, he realized that one of his best strategies was to “unleash” change. By that, he meant that he needed to send signals to the people who already supported procurement reform. Kelman knew he needed to tell the supporters, “It’s safe to get vocal now.” In the beginning, he didn’t need to create new believers so much as he needed to unleash the believers he already had.
In the fall of 2007, a group of public-health and AIDS experts had a chance to get involved in a situation where change needed to be unleashed. The setting was Tanzania, and the subject was sugar daddies.
4.
In Tanzania, “sugar-daddy” relationships are common. You know the drill: An older man pursues a younger woman; they start having sex; and as part of the “deal,” the young woman receives gifts or favors—a cell phone, money for school tuition, clothes, and so on. This is hardly a unique feature of Tanzanian culture, as evidenced by Hugh Hefner and his sextuplet blond housemates.
But the sugar-daddy relationships in Tanzania are more troubling. First, the women are often underage girls—15, 16, 17 years old. Second, the power dynamics in the Tanzanian sugar-daddy relationships often lead women to engage in unsafe sex. (It’s not easy to insist that your partner put on a condom when he’s your elder and your benefactor.) This power dynamic is universal, of course. American teens who date men who are six or more years older are almost four times more likely to get pregnant than teens who date within two years of their own age.
The reality is that when older men want unsafe sex, they tend to