The winning entry for the environment category in this year’s Media that Matters Film Festival was a short animated film about the dangers of electronic waste. And what consumers can do to help the problem. I’m not sure if I find it effective or annoying. You decide.
Tag Archives: health
Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp
Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp – Interview
ArtForum, April, 2003
DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here to his memory. When did Mark die?
TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996.
DC: Okay, let’s begin with a work that seems appropriately sad. Ten years ago a few of you in Gran Fury made a poster with four questions, the last of which was, “When was the last time you cried?” Was that the final work done under the auspices of the group?
LORING McALP1N: Well, after that we did the flyer Good Luck… Miss You for “Temporarily Possessed” at the New Museum. That was meant as our farewell.
DC: That was 1995. You did the four questions in 93. Do you remember the other three questions?
AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: “Do you resent people with AIDS? Do you trust HIV-negatives? Have you given up hope for a cure?” The conversation leading to that work was largely driven by Mark Simpson. We were grappling with a problem we had at that later stage– trying to put very complex things into a very concise text. This work was a response to our frustration at being unable to articulate the complexity of the issues. We decided to just go bare bones and say how we felt, which had never been our primary focus.
TK: I remember that Mark always had a yellow legal pad in his house on which he wrote all sorts of things. And those questions were among the things he wrote. They were about feeling alienated as someone living with AIDS and about feeling less well physically. That, and the fact that the visibility of the crisis and the AIDS activist demonstrations had faded away.
Continue reading
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activism, activist example, art, art example, health, perceptions, politics, research
Leave a comment
Loss Aversion, Greenpeace, and Health
Here’s a pattern of tactics I realized have something in common. They all work by presenting a threat. Loss aversion, as it can be called, can be more motivating – using the stick instead of the carrot.
## Example 1 From Greenpeace:##
The ranking criteria reflect the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies. Our two demands are that companies should:
1) clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances;
2) takeback and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
I talked to someone at Greenpeace about this (we could get in touch with him again for an interview) and he said the strategy here was to always be targeting the company in last place. All the companies will improve because they fear being outed as “the worst” by Greenpeace.
##Example 2: Loss Aversion for Weight Loss from NPR (excerpt):
Would you stick to your diet if your savings were at stake? Two professors are betting the answer is yes. The winning formula may include signing a contract to enforce the bet.
Yale professors Ian Ayres, an expert in contract law, and Dean Karlan, a behavioral economist, both entered weight loss bets. And both won. They took off the weight they pledged.
Karlan describes a recent effort in the Philippines to help smokers quit. Through a local bank, the smokers signed agreements to put their cigarette money into savings accounts and agreed to urine tests. At the end of six months, if the tests showed they had nicotine in their system, their savings were lost — given to charity.
“It was wildly successful,” says Karlan. People who took up the account were 30 percent more likely to stop smoking, at least temporarily, than the smokers who didn’t participate in a savings agreement.
The results exemplify what behavioral economists call “prospect theory,” or loss aversion.
“What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.”
They have a theory and they know it works because they have stats.
##Example 3: Smoking Habit Auction##
On Monday 31 March, 2008, the highest bidder will receive a contract written by my lawyer, Chris Hoquard at Dominion Law, in which I hand over my right to smoke to them, and agree to pay them a forfeit of NZ$1000.00 per cigarette that I smoke at any time following the auction’s closure. I will donate the proceeds from the auction to the Cancer Society of New Zealand.
Again, success and failure here are clearly defined.
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activist example, corporate, evaluation, health, smoking, threat
Leave a comment