How do we change a culture?

There’s been a significant culture shift in Joburg over the past year or so. Perhaps you’ve noticed it too. For the first time in my experience, Joburgers are taking drunk driving seriously. Suddenly, behaviour is changing and people who used to drive blotto without thinking twice are now signing up for taxi services. Why?

This is the kind of question I spend a lot of time mulling over. As a communication strategist, I’m interested in how culture changes, because persuading people to behave in a certain way — whether it’s buying a client’s product or filing your tax return on time — is central to what we hope to achieve, and the only way to ensure the sustainability of different behaviour is to affect the culture that produces it. But culture is elastic and volatile as well as frustratingly concrete and immovable, and it can be hard to predict how it can be influenced to any degree. Why do some campaigns work and other fail miserably? Why is it possible to instil good habits in some areas of our collective lives, but not others?

I’m surmising that there is a confluence of reasons for the shift in the culture of drunk driving shifted in Joburg (or at least the more affluent parts of the city). All of them have added up to achieve an impact that individually would have been unlikely, and though anti-drunk driving ad campaigns have played a role in this, it’s a relatively small one.

First, people are being caught, and they’re ending up spending the night in jail. The Metro Police are much more visible than they were — people routinely tweet about roadblocks being everywhere — and they’re catching people who are driving over the limit. The people who are getting caught are telling their friends, and their friends are thinking twice. The other evening, for example, I was stopped by a Metro Cop on Main Road in Bryanston. He didn’t breathalyse me but I’d had a glass of wine and I’ll admit I was just a little worried. Ever since then I’ve been paranoid about how much I drink. It’s just not worth it.

Secondly, the fear of being caught and spending time in jail is being reinforced by advertising messages. Two decades of ads featuring blood-spattered surgeons and the mangled survivors of car crashes failed to have the impact that a campaign featuring the kind of friendly people you could expect to find in jail achieved in a season. (Interesting that the campaign in question should be so focused on men, when studies show that drunk driving is up among women.) Both brandhouse and SAB have run campaigns that focus on the risk of being jailed rather than the possibility of being involved in an accident.

Thirdly, the mushrooming of driving services has made it much easier and more affordable to get around without having to get behind the wheel. Visit a club like Movida on a Friday evening and you’ll see the taxis lined up outside. We’re nowhere near Sydney, where it’s unnecessary to drive because taxis are ubiquitous but we’re improving. Not that this kind of service is especially new — Toot ‘n Scoot has been around for at least five years — but now there are several competitors and a new industry has effectively been created. Word of mouth is helping drive take-up of these services — I’ve never seen an ad for one, but friends and colleagues have told me about them; if I were a more dedicated party animal, I’d definitely sign up.

All of these factors have combined to produce a kind of positive feedback loop, where worries about police roadblocks, pertinent reminders by ad campaigns and the ease of organising alternative transport all work together to shift the way we behave.

As to that all-important element of social unacceptability, from what I have observed, people have stopped driving drunk not because there’s any particular moral judgment attached to it, but because it’s too risky. Remember the ad campaign that asked us to pay our TV licences because it’s the right thing to do? How many of us cared? It’s the same with driving under the influence: we don’t do it as much because we’re worried about spending the night in jail, not because we think it’s wrong. So attitudes to morality have probably had little to do with this particular change in behaviour.

There are of course all sorts of other complexities involved in culture change: coordination problems, common knowledge, cues from the media, organised religion and so on. Sometimes cultures reach a critical point and then shift very suddenly to produce a new equilibrium, something described in Philip Ball’s brilliant Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. As with other systems involving the behaviour of individuals, like traffic or the stock market, the point at which that might occur is difficult to predict.

I’d love to see a culture shift in other areas. Road manners is an obvious one, as is sexual behaviour and crime. The targeting of smoking has been a success, by and large: another example of how culture can be changed gradually through a combination of law enforcement, (in)convenience and communication, in this case a lack of advertising. (Research by Martin Lindstrom suggests that anti-smoking campaigns may actually encourage the habit.)

Still, there are far too many smokers dropping their butts everywhere and flicking them out of their cars, and this is related to what would be first prize for me: litter. It’s a habit that seems endemic to South Africa and, sadly, one that seems to be virtually impossible to uproot. The example of the drunk driving suggests that the only way to achieve any progress towards litter-free country would be penalties that get enforced along with an ad campaign to reinforce attitudes as well as easy access to bins. I suspect that litter would require much more of a moral element than drunk driving, if only because the penalties for doing it aren’t that much of a deterrent.

So, could we take the example of drunk driving and extrapolate from it to change more of our bad habits? It’s entirely possible that nothing we do or say will work. But I think it’s worth trying anyway. Given the right strategy, who knows what we could achieve.