Last year, I wrote a post about Behavior Change in Romancelandia. This was after The Ripped Bodice’s Diversity in Publishing Report came out and I had just read Gone With the Wind. A year has gone by, the updated report from The Ripped Bodice shows that not much has changed, and the recent announcement of this year’s RITA finalists has sparked a round of intense conversation, to put it mildly. Here’s a summary of last year’s social media discussion about the RITAs, which is depressingly similar.
It’s goldfish racism. The box opens, you’re like OH MY GOD THAT IS RACIST I FEEL SICK I NEVER IMAGINED IN MY ORGANIZATION and the box closes and you can’t retain the memory and the next time the box opens you’re like OH MY GOD THAT IS RACIST I NEVER IMAGINED IN MY ORGANIZATION
— Courtney!!! Milan 🦖 (@courtneymilan) March 28, 2019
When I was getting into self-publishing and trying to figure out how to advance my career, I was writing speculative fiction. I considered joining the SFWA. However, the timing coincided with a terrible chainmail bikini on the cover of the organization’s official magazine and a lot of public discussion about sexism in SFF. Then there were several years of the Sad Puppies bullshit in the Hugo Awards.
Meanwhile, I kept hearing about how the RWA was much more progressive. They were accepting of indie authors. They were forging new ground in marketing tactics. Their workshops were awesome. And, as a women-led organization, they didn’t have the sexist issues that the SFWA had. When I switched to romance in 2016, it was a no-brainer to sign up with the RWA and my local chapter.
What I didn’t realize then, of course, was that in lieu of joining an Old Boys Club with the SFWA, I was instead joining a Nice White Ladies Club. But now that I’m in and I’ve been learning about the genre, the industry around it, and the participants in it… Well, since I’m a member of the Published Author Network on the basis of my early self-published work, I’ve had the opportunity to read most of the 700+ posts discussing racism and homophobia inherent in the RWA. As a white lady myself, I’ve been watching it as a master class on when to shut up and listen to the authors whose race and/or sexuality give them experiences I do not have.
As all the reasonable people can agree that there’s a problem and we are looking for solutions, I currently see two contributions I can make. First, a commitment to keep listening to those who have been hurt and helping to denormalize racist and homophobic behaviors. Second, as part of what the organization and membership wants to work on relates to changing behaviors, here’s a modified chunk from my 2010 master’s thesis about changing behaviors.
Understanding Behavior
We are all surrounded by different forces which try to affect our behavior. Companies use internet or television ads to sell us their products; cities use walk signals tell us when and where to cross the street; landlords use leasing agreements to lay out what we can or cannot do with their property; our spouses give us dirty looks because the sink is full of dishes. Understanding how our own behaviors are shaped, especially if we want to change them for ourselves, is key.
1. Giving more information doesn’t change behavior.
We’re not going to fix this problem with Racism 101 courses for the membership. Sorry. Maibach et al. sum up the tendency to focus on giving information very well.
Historically, when people fail to behave in ways that are in their own or society’s best interest—as judged by public health professionals, environmental scientists, and other similar experts—the tendency has been to assume that the cause must be either a lack of relevant knowledge on their part (i.e., an information deficit) and/or misguided attitudes. The prescription that has tended to follow this diagnosis is: to change people’s behavior, we must provide them with the knowledge they lack and/or persuade them to change their attitudes.[84]
This knowledge deficit model, however, has proven overly simplistic.[85] Kotler and Lee describe a six stage model of attitude and behavior change developed by Prochaska and DiClemente in the 1980s and described in 1994. In this model a person may pass through stages of precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance and termination in the process of making a behavioral change.
It is not a one-way road: a person may also regress or stagnate at various stages without completing the change. This model can be compared to a person asleep or in various degrees of wakefulness.[86] (Note: I wrote this before I had ever heard the term “woke”.) While education may increase awareness and help move a person from the precontemplation stage to the contemplation or even preparation stage, it does little to support those who are cognizant of a problem, but missing the tools to complete or maintain a behavior change, just as shaking may wake a sleeping person, but annoy a waking one.
Here’s a nice graphic of the stage model from the internet. Note that there are five stages here: for something like racism, we’re never going to get to a “termination” step in behavior change. We’re always going to need to work on “maintenance.”
Every discussion about whether or not AoC are experiencing discrimination, every Nice White Lady posting “I’m not racist, but…” is a place where the organization is getting stuck at Steps 1-2. If you find yourself feeling upset at the reaction to your posts, it may be because the responses are coming from Step 4 or 5 and they’re wondering why you haven’t moved further along. The focus of a number of the PAN loop threads has started at Step 3 or 4, and then been derailed and dragged backward by the people who are waffling around on Step 2. It would be awesome if we could all get to the Action step.
2. Fear and Guilt are unreliable motivators.
Moser and Dilling find that “[g]uilt appeals are unreliable as motivators of socially or environmentally benign responses.”[87] Witte and Allen found that for fear appeals to produce behavior change, they must be combined with high efficacy messages.[88] The perceived susceptibility to a risk is also a poor predictor of behavior, and the severity of the risk has the least effect on audience behavior.[89]
Here’s a particularly evocative paragraph from Witte and Allen on fear messaging, which I suggest reading with the understanding that some of our Nice White Ladies are frightened by the messaging about changes to the RITA and How Things Have Always Been Done. I’ve bolded certain bits for emphasis.
…when a threat is portrayed as and believed to be serious and relevant (e.g.,“I’m susceptible to contracting a terrible disease”), individuals become scared. Their fear motivates them to take some sort of action—any action—that will reduce their fear. Perceived efficacy (composed of self-efficacy and response efficacy) determines whether people will become motivated to control the danger of the threat or control their fear about the threat. When people believe they are able to perform an effective recommended response against the threat (i.e., high perceived self-efficacy and response efficacy), they are motivated to control the danger and consciously think about ways to remove or lessen the threat. Typically, they think carefully about the recommended responses advocated in the persuasive message and adopt those as a means to control the danger. Alternatively, when people doubt whether the recommended response works (i.e., low perceived response efficacy) and/or whether they are able to do the recommended response (i.e.,low perceived self-efficacy), they are motivated to control their fear (because they believe it’s futile to control the danger) and focus on eliminating their fear through denial (e.g.,“I’m not at risk for getting skin cancer, it won’t happen to me”), defensive avoidance (e.g.,“This is just too scary, I’m simply not going to think about it”), or reactance (e.g.,“They’re just trying to manipulate me, I’m going to ignore them”).
I read this as saying there are two probable responses when you are afraid of something.
- If you think you can affect the thing frightening you, then you will focus on behavior to address the Scary Thing.
- If you think you can’t do anything about the Scary Thing, then you will focus on controlling your fear response instead of changing other behaviors.
I think it seems obvious that some of my fellow Nice White Ladies have gotten stuck in a loop on response #2. Being called out for racism creates a fear response, and instead of working on changing their behavior to address racism we’re seeing a number of examples that fall under “denial” and “defensive avoidance.” But as other Nice White Ladies are pointing out, we have the power to change this!
But enough about what doesn’t change behavior. What tactics are effective?
1. Make a pledge
Simply stating the intention to act is highly correlated with future behavior.[90] This is why we see campaigns for pledges all the time. I addressed this in my post last year in the bit about self-stereotyping. I’m seeing lots of messages from Nice White Ladies pledging to read and promote more books by AoC. Great. Keep it up. Talk about what other actions you’re going to take.
2. Surroundings and personal context affect our behaviors
Maibach et al. use a model of people- and place-related factors to make sense of how an individual’s personal surroundings and context influence their behaviors.
In this model, the people-related factors affecting an individual’s behavior are categorized into individual (skills, beliefs, intentions, demographics, and knowledge), social network (behavior modeling or support by those within family or peer group), population/community (social norms and culture). Place-related factors are grouped into local level (availability of goods and services, legal and political structures, and media messages at home, school, work, and city) and distal level (availability of goods and services, legal and political structures, and media messages in state, regional, national and international area).[92]
When Romancelandia appeals to readers to pick up more books by authors of color, that is an individual level action.
When The Ripped Bodice publishes their report calling out publishers for the dismally low numbers of books by Authors of Color, we are looking at a place-related factor: availability of goods and services. No one can buy books by Authors of Color if they’re not for sale.
When the PAN loop and Romance Twitter starts talking about the issues of racism and homophobia in publishing in general and the RWA in particular, we’re looking at the Social Network level. I think we’re seeing a lot of clash between people whose individual level beliefs are out of sync with the behavior of the peer group. I support everyone who has said that they would like to make RWA and its forums an uncomfortable place for racists, but in the lens of this post I’d like to modify the wording slightly: let’s make RWA and Romancelandia an uncomfortable place for racist and homophobic behaviors. I don’t think we can escape the fact that all of Nice White Ladies are racist by virtue of our existence in a racist society, but we can continually work to address and reduce our own biases.
3. Influencers and Mavens
When I was working on this thesis in 2009, I wrote “Little research has been done on influencing social network factors, but the idea of “mavens” is gaining traction and being recognized as useful for influencing environmental action.” [93] Now that we’re in the age of Instagram influencers, I think we are all more familiar with the idea. The maven model identifies individuals who are central nodes within a social network – the people who know everyone, and are influential in spreading knowledge and behaviors to their peers-and seeks to use their influence to further communication campaign goals. Getting mavens on board is likely part of most communication campaigns in 2019, and seeing authors like Courtney Milan talking about racism in Romance on social media is obviously doing a lot to advance the conversation in the wider community. Let’s keep this conversation going in as many public spaces as possible.
4. Removing Barriers
The reasons why people do not take actions are just as important as the reasons why they do; Corbett recognizes that “any intervention … is doomed to failed if it does little to address or remove barriers to change.”[95] In the 1990s, McKenzie-Mohr reviewed similar findings indicating that informational campaigns had little effect on behavior, even information campaigns advertising the economic benefits of taking environmental actions. The answer he proposes, under the name of ‘community based social marketing’, lies in identifying and addressing barriers to behaviors.[96]
Barriers to change seems to be where the RWA has gotten stuck. I would appreciate hearing from those with a longer history in the organization to brainstorm on this topic, as I am a newer member and have been appallingly lax about following organization news until this last week, even if I have read 700 posts since then.
The last bit I have to share from my thesis is research conducted for the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on how environmental behaviors diffuse through a population. The firm Brook Lyndhurst conducted a comprehensive literature review on environmental behaviors. The technical report produced by Fell et al. builds on Cain and Mittman’s ten ‘critical dynamics’ of innovation diffusion and other sources to suggest a checklist of sixteen criteria to consider when evaluating the potential of an environmental innovation to spread within a population.[97] As RWA discusses the changes we’re going to make to the organization, this list may help in vetting ideas and identifying places where behavior changes can be pursued.
- Relative advantage
- Trialability
- Visibility, invisibility, and observability
- Public/private
- Ease of adaptation
- Current norms
- Compatibility with existing behaviors
- Luxury/necessity
- Existing infrastructure
- Ease of development of commitment strategy
- Clustering of other new behaviors
- Habit or one-off
- Purchase or other
- Addition, substitution and modification
- Word of Mouth potential
- State of diffusion
That’s my piece and I’m going back to listening now.
References
84 P. 489. Maibach, Edward W, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. 2008. “Communication and Marketing As Climate Change-Intervention Assets”. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 35 (5):488. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18929975
85 P.67 Corbett, Julia B. 2006. Communicating nature: how we create and understand environmental messages. Washington, DC: Island Press. Google Books preview.
86 P. 120-122.Kotler & Lee, 2008. Social marketing: influencing behaviors for good. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
87P. 39. Moser, S., and L. Dilling, 2004. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating The Urgency And Challenge Of Global Climate Change”. Environment, Volume 26, Number 10, pp. 32-46. https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1734-2005.22.pdf
88 Witte, Kim, and Mike Allen. 2000. “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns”. Health Education & Behavior. 27 (5): 591-615. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12314742_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Fear_Appeals_Implications_for_Effective_Public_Health_Campaigns
89 Bostrom, A. “Future Risk Communication”, Futures ,Volume 35, Issue 6, August 2003, Pages 553-573.
90 P. 39. Moser, S., and L. Dilling, 2004. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating The Urgency And Challenge Of Global Climate Change”. Environment, Volume 26, Number 10, pp. 32-46. https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1734-2005.22.pdf
92 Maibach, Edward W, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. 2008. “Communication and Marketing As Climate Change-Intervention Assets”.
93 Fell D., Austin A., Kivinen E., Wilkins C. 2009. “The diffusion of environmental behaviours; the role of influential individuals in social networks. Report 1: Key findings A report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.” Brook Lyndhurst. Defra, London. Accessed online at http://www.brooklyndhurst.co.uk/the-diffusion-of-environmental-behaviours-the-role-of-influential-individuals-in-social-networks-_110/ 27 Dec 2009.
95 P. 83. Corbett, Julia B. 2006. Communicating nature: how we create and understand environmental messages. Washington, DC: Island Press.
96 David McKenzie-Mohr. “Introduction” http://www.cbsm.com/pages/guide/introduction Accessed online 8 January 2010.
97 P. 86-96. Fell D., Austin A., Kivinen E., Wilkins C. 2009. “The diffusion of environmental behaviours; the role of influential individuals in social networks. Report 1: Key findings A report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.”
