By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
How can we solve age-old problems like poverty, disease and alienation? In Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg presents a solution that is simple yet profound, and rooted in human nature.
Tina Rosenberg's Join The Club explores fascinating, counterintuitive methods of mass persuasion.
Tina Rosenberg's Join The Club explores fascinating, counterintuitive methods of mass persuasion.
Peer pressure.
Yes, the same force that parents warn against, since it has lured millions to their doom via drugs, gangs and unsafe sex. Rosenberg illustrates how peer pressure also can serve as "the social cure" by harnessing our eternal desire to connect, to feel cool, to belong to a group.
Like Malcolm Gladwell's best sellers The Tipping Point and Outliers, Join the Club explains how little changes can make big differences, and that contrarian impulses are hardwired into humans. Tell teenagers that cigarettes will kill them and they buy more, Rosenberg points out. But when they realize adults are trying to manipulate them through marketing, sales drop.
Join the Club presents a range of other examples from First World suburbs to Third World slums: They include how an Illinois megachurch dealt with affluent members' alienation by focusing not on spirituality but on bonds between neighbors, and how South Africa lowered its AIDS rates among teens not by emphasizing the lethal dangers of unsafe sex, but by creating "an aspirational life-style brand" called "loveLife." Modeled on a Sprite ad campaign, it emphasized music, celebrity gossip and fashion, along with safe sex.
Among her most powerful examples: the role the Serbian student group Otpor (Serbian for "resistance") played in bringing down the dictator Milosevic in 2000. In a bleak society, Otpor stood out by making political action fun. It was no coincidence that the group's leaders all loved Monty Python.
Title: Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World
Author:Tina Rosenberg
Publisher/price: Norton, 402 pp., $25.95
The most moving example is from India, where a program trains illiterate, poor, often abused rural women as health workers. This new role gives them supportive colleagues, hope and status.
In the USA, colleges have improved students' math scores by recognizing cultural differences. Top Asian students study in groups, while black and Latino students traditionally study alone. The answer: calculus clubs.
Despite her stellar career ? a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for The Haunted Land, her book about Eastern Europe ? Rosenberg practices what she preaches. The voice she uses in Join the Club is peer-to-peer. Rather than intimidating the reader, she inspires.
Dania Ramirez Elisha Cuthbert Sarah Polley Jamie Gunns Jennifer Gimenez
