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When the world feels grim, and the future uncertain, a glimmer of humour can immeasurably brighten the day. Walking through St Paul’s Churchyard this week, I came across an intriguing sign made of reflective glass. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” it reads. “Litter left here reflects badly on us all”. There was not a single cigarette butt or discarded cup on the surrounding lawn. And the clever behavioural nudge left me feeling positive, rather than lectured.
If only this approach could apply to other public messaging. We seem to live in a deluge of gloom. While the chancellor talks down the economy, the public realm is full of warnings that add to a sense that things may be even worse than our own experience suggests. “Take care after drinking alcohol,” read posters at bus stops — unlikely to be heeded by anyone who has overindulged. Meanwhile, the “zero tolerance for abuse of staff” message has become ubiquitous. But behavioural science suggests it may do more harm than good.
Abuse is real. Frontline staff in retail, health and hospitality are especially vulnerable to bullying, even violence, from customers. But organisations that use these messages as a cheap way to reassure staff are likely to have little effect on the delinquent minority, while making the rest of us feel less safe and contributing to a sense that the public sphere is debased.
As the psychologist Robert Cialdini observes in his book Influence, humans are deeply influenced by what those around us do. Hotels have saved gallons of water by telling guests that others hang their towel up in the bathroom rather than adding to the laundry. Conversely, being told about bad behaviour can normalise it. Rangers in Arizona, trying to stop tourists filching bits of petrified wood as souvenirs, erected signs to warn: “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the petrified forest”. Research showed that these made stealing sound normal, so more people did it. The injunction had essentially become permission.
Decades of research suggest that empathetic messages are more effective than blunt, threatening ones. It’s one thing to hear “your call is important to us” on replay, despite it clearly not being so. It’s another to be told that “aggressive behaviour will not be tolerated”, while you wait on the line. Such messages can have a boomerang effect, documented by psychologists like Jack Brehm, in which humans mulishly do the opposite of what we’re told. E Scott Geller’s famous study of cinemagoers, for example, found that people who felt they had already paid a lot for a seat were angered by signs telling them where to discard their popcorn buckets.
Protecting frontline staff requires much more than performative messaging. Some hospitals have had an impact by training staff in de-escalation techniques, and giving patients clearer information about triage protocols and waiting times. In Australia, a promotional campaign built awareness about the terrible abuse experienced by workers in fast food and retail. But customer behaviour didn’t change. When asked why, workers thought the biggest reasons were inadequate staffing and customer waiting times. These are both things management could change, if it wanted to.
Supermarkets that make customers do all the work, reducing their low-paid staff to troubleshooters when the automated till’s red light is flashing, might stop to wonder if this is in anyone’s interest except for the bottom line. At my local store, one of the older cashiers is refusing to give up her post at the checkout: she enjoys the customer interaction and so do we. Customer abuse is far less of an issue in shops like Timpson, whose staff are given wide discretion about everything from stock to how they deal with complaints.
It’s not all bad. An upside to our common national language of inane announcements is the occasional off-the-cuff riff by bus, Tube or train staff, expressing solidarity over the tannoy about a failing service. A classic of the genre was produced by a now legendary train driver who apparently said: “Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.”
Meanwhile, the widely loathed “See it. Say it. Sorted” security message, which some travellers still don’t understand, spawned its own musical at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Perhaps most irksome is when rules invented to suit the authorities are presented as being in our interest. When the former BBC presenter Mark Mardell was barred from his flight in October, then left stranded and alone for seven hours without his bags in Istanbul airport, he was told it was for his “own good” because he has Parkinson’s. The hypocrisy was monstrous, as was a member of the airline’s staff subsequently wishing him a “speedy recovery”.
Something similar happened to Austria’s three rebel nuns, an Instagram sensation in their eighties after escaping from a care home and breaking back into the convent from which they’d been ousted. No one who watches the video of Sister Rita learning to box will believe that the church authorities were interested in anything other than their own convenience.
Both these stories demonstrate that human kindness is still alive and well. In Mardell’s case, another passenger and a member of staff noticed him struggling and came to his aid. The nuns are being supported by their former students and neighbours. Negative public messaging is more than just ineffective: it obscures the crucial fact that we can still count on each other.