Week 5 - This is an Outrage! The Use of Emotion to Create Content that Sticks
The scene often plays out as follows. I am in front of a class, talking about a topic that I feel deeply passionate about, which is why I am teaching it in the first place. I have spent a sizeable portion of my life to be in this position, to transmit what I consider important information to a class of young adults who I hope will take the baton and carry the information in their lives. And when that time to present comes, when I am in front of the class, and the students are showing zero interest whatsoever in the content, you really start to question your life decisions. The other question is, how to fix it?
Many, if not most, sociology courses deal with some element of social problems or societal issues that we hope will spark outrage in students. It is not that we are looking to be ‘downers’ all the time. But, you spend enough time studying society, you are going to find plenty examples of things being messed up. Most of us ended up in sociology because it connected with a sense of injustice in the world. In turn, we would like our students to share that sense of outrage around those topics.
Anyone? Anyone?
Furthermore, professors want to be inspirational figures, providing knowledge about the world in which students become enthralled. So when students are just tuning out as you are talking about these topics, it can drive you a little batty. Of course, such a reaction is very self-centered. Why should they feel my outrage, or why should that outrage be so self-evident to them? Since a lot our content gets ‘sticky’ because of our emotional connection to it, the absence of any emotional connection means that this content fails to stick.
Chip and Dan Heath wrote a book called “Made to Stick” in which they explore why some ideas catch on and why others don’t. One of the key challenges for any person trying to transmit information is what is called the ‘curse of knowledge,’ in which we assume the knowledge that we possess is equally shared by our audience, and thus they have the same capacity to understand what we are saying. Thus, we can’t understand why others are not connecting to the information we are sharing in the same ways that we are. To combat this, they find that sticky ideas are: interesting, memorable, and actionable. And few things are more interesting, memorable, and actionable as emotions.
Emotions are motivating, drive people to action, and create the foundation for memorable experiences. As Jonah Berger in the book “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” notes, “rather than quoting statistics or providing information, we need to focus on feelings.” Such a realization is fundamental to many marketing campaigns. It would then seem that sociology course should be an easy sell given we are marketing in outrage. The problem lies in assuming the things we care about as professors are the things that students care about. Additionally, we believe that the outrage should be self-evident, and when it is not we cannot understand way (thanks to the curse of knowledge).
Highly motivating
So there I was, trying to make my PowerPoints on criminal injustice interesting through the force of will and snazzy images, to no effect. The students were not interested (or only kind of interested), and I was getting frustrated. No matter how I tried to ‘sell’ the content through my examples, the students were just passively sitting there. Time for Plan B and get them to own their learning.
To achieve this, I created an assignment called “This is an Outrage!” The task was fairly simple: select any example of criminal injustice that you could find, apply the course materials to showing why it was an injustice (whether a lenient sentence due to wealth and power, or someone without power being discriminated against and mistreated in the system). Then they had to construct a convincing case as to why this was an outrage. I didn’t ask them to write ‘papers.’ Rather, it was an exercise in identifying, examining, and communicating outrage. Also, I was trying to get students emotionally invested in topics of their choosing, through which they can connect the contents of the course in a personal and meaningful way. Furthermore, I was trying to get them to care about the course through things they themselves care about, or at least have become emotionally invested in.
Beyond just writing the papers, I created a second phase of light competition. Since students said they learn best through sharing, I needed to get them to share. However, when you ask students in class to raise their hands to talk about their papers, there typically is no excitement in it. Their stated goal of sharing is offset by their lack of willingness around sharing. How to get students to share with one another, as well as to care about sharing it for some ultimate end or outcome?
To deal with this, I came up with the following ‘competition’ to find the biggest outrage in the class, or what I called “Share the Outrage.” The steps were as follows:
Share the Outrage in groups – the students were divided into groups and asked to share with one another what they wrote about, and why it was an outrage.
Decide which case is the most outrageous – each group then had to decide which one was the greatest outrage in their group.
Share the Outrage to the class – A spokesperson from each group then presented their biggest outrage in an attempt to convince the rest of the class that their group had the biggest outrage. Rather than just describe it, they had to try to sell it.
Vote on the most outrageous case – the class then discussed the finalists, voting in which case was the biggest outrage and why.
There were a lot of cases of outrage. It was interesting to see that the Tamir Rice police shooting in Cleveland was the biggest outrage. Also interesting was that cases of corporate malfeasance, while having a larger numerical impact on the lives affected, didn’t produce the same levels of outrage. This helped students to see why white-collar crime can be seen as less outrageous, even though its impacts can be socially substantial.
The students were generally happy with the exercise, and the papers on the whole were pretty good. It was much better than asking the students to write a report on a book or chapter, at least from a class learning and student engagement perspectives. Overall, the outcomes of what we learned from the process of “This is an Outrage!”:
Getting students to think about how to create compelling arguments based on facts as well as emotions
Evaluating across different examples and cases to make determinations of ranking and outrage
Understanding the complexities of making these determinations, especially in terms of how to discuss and compare ‘harms’
Being able to explore these topics from multiple perspectives, in that each case has multiple outrages
Identifying our own individual and social biases in making these determinations. Why was it that Purdue Pharma was not seen as the most outrageous given their role in the opioid crises and the sheer volume of people that were harmed? How does that relate it to how society views white-collar crime?
Connecting course content to real life situations
Having fun in a creative assignment that they felt was unusual for the school. One student said a friend at another university was surprised that this exercise was being assigned at Bentley (which is another blog for another time).
Do you have ideas regarding how to use emotion in assignments to make content stick? Feel free to share your thoughts!