Michael Field - Sustainability Professional, the psychology of positive behavioural change

Between 2% and 6% of society are actively engaged people - movers and shakers are change agents that have huge energy - they have very strongly held beliefs - they are very hard to influence, because of their own strong belief systems... very engaging and being ethics based. You also have the fast followers another 10% or so.At the other end of the scale you have the actively disengaged again between 2 and 6% of society, though you would think that they were very dissimilar from the former, however, in many ways they are two sides of the same coin. These people, basically oppose things, because that is who they are ... they are also quite noisy and we focus a lot of energy endeavouring to change them, when in many ways there is no point. You also have the disengaged group, not quite as bad as the actively disengaged, which make up around another 10%.HOWEVER, the best is to focus on the other 68% of society, they are the neutral group.They don't necessarily have strongly held belief systems and they are the ideal audience because they are by far the easiest people to influence because of a lack of strongly held belief systems. Thus influencing them is a lot more easier, they can can swing either left and right and there are a lot more of them.The choice of language when communicating with the 68% is critical...