Challenge the normal

Most people (outside of groups like XR!) follow what they think is "normal" behavior. These "social norms" are therefore powerful obstacles to change.

Dynamic normative messages emphasise changing trends - to encourage people to become part of the new normal.

This means we can get stuck in our campaign to only motivate a few people, while the majority do not change. Even if we try to tell them that the new behavior is ‘normal’, their everyday experiences will probably indicate that this is untrue.

Dynamic normative messages in our communication may help. The idea is to create a ‘new’ normal that can coexist with the ‘old’ normal, which encourages people to change their behavior while still letting them feel ‘normal’.

An example of a this would be; "in the past few years, an increasing number of countries have started to use citizens' assemblies and even more are experimenting".

This may be much better than a static message like “Ireland uses citizens' assemblies".

A dynamic message emphasises a new, changing trend. A static message states that the new trend has already occured, and it is this statement that can conflict with people’s experiences - and thus cause them to doubt that there is actually a new normal!

As Brett Henning says in his TED talk what if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people there's too many citizens' assemblies to count!