Using Social Marketing to stop Poaching Behaviours?

Hi Hélène,

I would not think CBSM would work very well.

There is not a lack of information about how bad poaching is, it is well understood, so information and education is not needed.

And, prompts arent necessary, because nobody is forgetting anything.

Social norms might help, but I still doubt it because:

the fact poaching is illegal is a very strong normative message, and they are already violating that norm.
at least in BC, poaching etc. is strongly frowned upon by the hunting community (pro-hunter conservation groups, magazines etc), so poachers are already violating that norm.
norms are about flocking behaviour, so the density of people is very, very important. If two people hunt together and they are both happy to shoot an animal out of season, there is no way to introduce a norm to them. And, there arent really that many big social events where you could talk about the norms of hunting.

Furthermore, there are politics in the issue. First Nations have the right to harvest for food, and to sell that harvest in many cases. This outrages many hunters, who may poach in "protest.


You could try to boost the visibility of hotlines to report poaching, and increase random spot checks by conservation officers. I dont think CBSM would be very effective.

Best,

Ruben.


Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com

Hi Ruben:

Thanks for your comments. Please note that community-based social marketing is not limited to the use of education, prompts or normative approaches. At its core, community-based social marketing involves understanding what motivates an undesirable behavior, in this case poaching, as well as what are the barriers and benefits to the alternative behavior that we wish to encourage. Once we understand why the undesirable behavior is occurring and what might be done to encourage the alternative, desirable behavior we pilot test strategies to address both the undesirable and desirable behavior's barriers and benefits. These strategies can be incredibly diverse in their nature but are governed by our foundational research.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr
Environmental Psychologist
McKenzie-Mohr & Associates Inc.
http://www.cbsm.com

Thanks for your comment, Doug.

I am fairly familiar with CBSM, and used it as the springboard for my research into behaviour.

IN GENERAL, the biggest challenge CBSM faces is that it is very attention-demanding, and getting attention is a very difficult task.

As you will know, in every campaign there are outliers that are not affected by the strategy. Poachers are the outliers, and it will be very, very difficult to get at them.

So yes, you can figure out the barriers and benefitsif you can find a representative group of poachers to study. Good luck getting them to admit to poaching. But then what? The whole point of poaching is to be unknown.

How will you deliver a program to them? Especially, what are the chances of delivering a successful program within a realistic budget? I don't think the main tools of CBSM will be very useful.

Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com

Hi Rueben:

Thanks for your response. I agree that conducting barrier and benefit research with poachers is a non-starter, but speaking directly to poachers is obviously not the only way that we can learn about what is motivating their behaviour. If we were to learn, for example, through expert interviews that the primary motivation for poaching was the profit gained from the sale of illegally obtained animals or animal parts our attention could turn to what could we do to remove or diminish that market? Programs such as Seafood Watch and Finished with Fins suggest that we can use normative pressure to alter the purchase habits of the public and financial consequences to alter the purchases of suppliers. It would be interesting to see whether normative pressure could be used to alter the purchase of animal parts that derived from poaching. Given that status is often associated with acquiring these animal parts suggests that normative based approaches might be worth considering.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr
Environmental Psychologist
McKenzie-Mohr & Associates Inc.
http://www.cbsm.com

Good points Doug, and you point to what I consider CBSM's greatest strengtha methodology that is built on the analysis of data.

So, poaching is a big a word. We are familiar with the markets in rhino horn, for example. But poaching gorillas for bush meat is done to feed the family, as, I suspect, is poaching deer in here in BC.

Poaching salmon seems like a much bigger financial opportunity, though as I mentioned there are politics and still-developing laws on First Nations rights.

So the benefits of the specific poaching we are talking about matters.

I don't consider programs like Ocean Wise to be a success, and they perfectly illustrate the conclusions of my own work in behaviour:

Dr. Roy Baumeister finds that attention is a physically limited resource. This is supported by Daniel Kahneman's recent book, as well as his work stretching back to the 70s.

So, attention is physically limited, therefore it is finite. Attention is a zero-sum equation, there is only so much of it, and when it is used, it is gone until you sleep, or eat.

Since it is limited, our brains are reluctant to spend it, which makes attention-hungry campaigns like Ocean Wise unlikely to succeed.

Furthermore, Ocean Wise ends up in competition with every other issuerefugees, domestic violence, carcinogens, conservation, economics, etc etc etc.

This makes it harder for truly important issues to succeedthey must compete with every teeny little issue sucking away at our attention.

So, changing the system that shapes our behaviour will always be the most effective thing to do. Only when that works should we look at social and attention-demanding campaigns.

Obviously changing the system is hard, and so we typically immediately give up, and go back to making brochures and collecting pledges. For the reasons above, that is often doomed to fail.

I think it would often be better if we did nothing at all, and spared the attention for truly jugular issues.

And, when you can change the system, it is impressive. My team increased the recycling rate at a very large pilot site by 250%.

Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com

Thanks for your response, Ruben. Interested in hearing others thoughts on this.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr
Environmental Psychologist
McKenzie-Mohr & Associates Inc.
http://www.cbsm.com