The Science of What Makes People Care – Six Imperatives for Changemakers

The scientific evidence is piling up: people don’t act on information, they act on what they care most about.

We’ve distilled six core principles from behavioral, cognitive and social science that you can apply to help people care more about your work. The framework helps you learn to apply these rules to your own work and apply a science-based framework for approaching new communications challenges.

The Six Imperatives are:

1. Understand who you want to act, and offer them something of value. Your communication shouldn’t be an obligation; customize what you are sharing with and for specific groups or individuals (we call them actors) who can make a profound difference for your issue or who need to do something different.
2. Talk in pictures. Use visual language instead of abstract concepts or terms of art to help people connect with your work.
3. Invoke emotion with strategy and intention. We have a large palette of human emotions to use in our stories, yet we often default to just a few. The emotions we use, when used intentionally, can help us break through.
4. Make your calls to action actionable. Your goals and calls to action are different. We review princples of effective calls to action.
5. Build curiousity. Science tells us we’re more curious about things we’re familiar with than something new. We can connect our concepts to others in ways that break through.
6. Use what science tells us to build more powerful stories. Story is the most powerful tool we have. We introduce the science of story building concept.

Read the Stanford Social Innovation Review piece published in fall 2018 that launched this framework.