When we argue with people, we can be pretty sure their brains are arguing right back at us
The human brain is well equipped to rationalise current behaviours and defend comfort zones from the kind of arguments delivered by well-meaning educators.
Economists call this phenomenon the ‘sunk costs effect’. People make investments in certain courses of action and may defend those investments to the point of absurdity even when the prospective gains outweigh the benefits.
Hence educational campaigns that rely on reasons are likely to force people to voice counter-arguments. And the more they argue for a position, the firmer their position becomes.
As Miller and Rollnick explain in Motivational Interviewing, that’s exactly the opposite of what change makers should be doing:
“It is the client who should be voicing the arguments for change. When you find yourself in the role of arguing for change while your client (patient, student, child) is voicing arguments against it, you’re in precisely the wrong role.”
In sort, reasons tend to be counter-productive. There are plenty of alternative strategies, for example:
On the weekend I saw a sign at Minnamurra Rainforest walk that said “No swimming or diving. Penalties apply.”
Last month the NSW Parliament made the act of compensating the mother of a surrogate baby punishable by two years imprisonment.
Is criminalisation an effective way to control behaviours that are deemed to cause social or environmental harms?
The oft-quoted success story is Mandatory Seat Belt laws. So I thought I’d go back and look at how these laws achieved such a momentous change in behaviour.
I wasn’t prepared for the story that emerged. In short, seat belt laws, combined with continuous enforcement and education, HAVE modified the behaviour of all but a small percentage of the population. Nowadays, practically everyone belts up. But what seat belt laws HAVE NOT DONE is make us a whole lot safer. Amazingly, after 40 years, repeated analyses by credible statisticians show that we are little safer than before the laws were enacted.
Subtle forms of social resistance appear to have almost completely negated the hoped-for impact of these laws on road safety.
I didn’t think that would happen. Neither did the authorities. The story has important implications for anyone attempting to control behaviour through criminalisation.
Here’s the story, and below it are some lessons.
What lessons can be drawn from the history of seat belt laws?
1) If you can avoid using criminalisation as a tactic, do so. Criminalisation causes resistance and unexpected blow-backs can fundamentally undermine your efforts.
2) Ensure you have a believable, science-based, clearly articulated case, supported by respected, independent voices.
3) Don’t consider criminalisation until you have overwhelming support and a high degree of voluntary compliance in the target population. In effect, criminalisation should only be considered when it reinforces exiting social norms. Criminalisation may therefore be useful at the end of a long process of voluntary change to control the behaviour of a very small number of chronic resistors.
4) There will always be a small number of resistors and they are likely to cause a disproportionate amount of harm. Therefore understand that criminalisation requires a significant, endless investment in monitoring and enforcement. Weakness in this area is likely to fundamentally undermine the impact of legislation.
]]>[Google “Cognitive Dissonance” and “Psychological Reactance”] Solution: increase the familiarity of the new practice. 5) Social identity. Where someone’s social identity is wrapped up in a practice, change can threaten their identity and relationships, so naturally they actively maintain that practice (a case of denial, really). Solution: connect the new practice to people’s values.
6) Just plain old inertia. Change takes energy, and people naturally prefer a low-energy state, especially for routine tasks.
Solution: break the routine with an out-of-the-ordinary, fun, social event like a Ride to Work Day, or competition, party, sale etc…
In an experiment with 212 undergraduates, Psychologists Amara Brook and Jennifer Crocker found that for those “not heavily invested in the environment”, negative feedback about their ecological footprint undermined their environmental behaviour.
[Article1]
“Rather than changing their ways to protect the environment, the results of this study suggest that these [people] may give up on their efforts to protect the environment”, they wrote.
However for those “more invested on the environment”, calculating their ecological footprint promoted more sustainable behaviour.
This research was reported in USA Today, but doesn’t seem to have been formally published yet because I can’t find it on Google Scholar.
However if you’re keen you could email Amara directly on atbrook@scu.edu and maybe she’d send you a copy.
It’s easy to guess at the mechanism at work: a straightforward (and, when you think about it, fairly predictable) case of DENIAL (aka Cognitive Dissonance).
Incidentally, while I was tracking down info on Amara Brook I stumbled across a “Conservation Psychology” website with an amazingly detailed collection of resources, including a huge number of scholarly articles on the subject: http://www.conservationpsychology.org/resources/articles/
The USA Today article also reported some interesting research, by Elizabeth Nisbett and John Zelenski at the Carleton University in Ottawa, that found that people tend to systematically underestimate how much happier they’ll feel from spending 15 minutes outside, and overestimate how happy they are being inside.
A friend of mine, a self-employed engineer who freely admits to being more than a million dollars in debt, recently told me that the start of Global Financial Crisis thrust him into a period of gloom. Doom-laden headline after headline ground down his optimism and zest. Then, after a few months of depression, he made a terrific decision. He chose to ignore the news. To be specific, he stopped watching TV news. He just blanked it out.
The effect was dramatic. His spirits lifted. He got on with his life. He found that new business kept coming in. His work got done. His mortgage got paid. He discovered that the GFC was something he could safely ignore.
It seems that a lot of Australians may have made similar choices, for the Australian economy has weathered the GFC far better than any economy in the world. According to the Reserve Bank, consumer confidence dropped less than in the other major economies; businesses retrenched fewer workers; and business investment remained surprisingly high.
Instead of slashing their wrists, Australians may have just stopped paying attention to the news and got on their lives.
Denial is a well studied psychological phenomenon (just Google “cognitive dissonance”). As psychologists understand it, denial is all about protecting the self or identity. When someone is presented with information that challenges their identity they experience mental discomfort or dissonance. There are two ways to reduce that discomfort. They can either change their behaviour or they can avoid that information in future. Since avoidance is almost always easier and less risky than change, most people choose avoidance. Or, as J.K. Galbraith put it, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Denial gets a bad rap. Being “in denial” is supposed to be an example of mental feebleness. But there is a potent connection between denial and economic prosperity.
Behavioural economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, in their book Animal Spirits, How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, make a valuable point about confidence. Confidence, they wrote, is the key “animal spirit” in an economy: “When people have confidence they go out and buy; when they are unconfident they withdraw, and they sell.”
Confidence, they pointed out, is not just a certainty that good times will keep rolling. The word comes from the Latin fido, meaning “I trust”. But trust is not a positive form of mental activity. It’s actually a form of mental inactivity. It consists of not thinking about consequences, of hoping for the best, and assuming that someone else has done the job of risk management. Trust is a low energy mental state and it’s easy to see why this is so. If we worried about everything in life, we’d go crazy. We’d be paralysed with doubt because of all the agonisingly complicated uncertainties surrounding every decision. Lack of trust, that is, the active mental state of mulling over consequences and worrying about details, is something that inhibits economic activity. Trust, that is, not thinking much about the consequences, is therefore much more than bliss, it’s one of the root causes of national prosperity.
Denial is nothing less that the choice to return to a state of trustful ignorance. Being in denial, far from evidence of feebleness, is therefore a fantastic strength. Think about it. Without denial would there ever have been a successful rebellion or revolution in history? No. It would all be too confronting. Worrying about the ranks of muskets and cannon lined up against them would have terrified all those potential revolutionaries into helplessness. And there would never have been a paradigm-challenging idea: no renaissance, no heliocentric theory, no electricity, no penicillin, no stapler. Without denial of the near certainty of failure, all the revolutionaries who made our world would have stayed at home. True, denial can sometimes be a weakness. But very often it’s a great strength.
Now you have to wonder, since Australians have retained their economic confidence far better than Europeans and Americans, what makes us such superior denialists? Americans in particular seem to have gone into a blind panic. I’m just speculating now, but one explanation might have to do with our native self-doubt. Without swollen egos, there’s less far to fall. Stick a pin in Americans’ party balloon and the result is mass hysteria. Deflate our party balloon, and, deep down, we’re not all that surprised.
Another explanation may have to do with how sensible we are. Denial, you see, is always easier when it’s backed by some evidence. Australians, like practically everyone else in the world, would have been startled into alertness by the sudden collapse of the US economy. Most of us aren’t idiots, so before slipping back into the sweet balm of semi-consciousness we would have looked around our neighbourhood for some evidence that it was safe to do so. We saw: a government confidently and aggressively responding, local institutions not collapsing and NO ONE ELSE PANICKING. There’s a well-established principle in the social sciences called ‘social proof’ which can be expressed as ‘if those around me think there’s no problem, there’s no problem’. Thanks to a few comforting real life observations, Australian’s seem to have decided that it was safe to lapse back into trust and get on with their lives. What became a contagion of panic in the US and Europe became a contagion of denial here, and we’re all the better for it.
Yes, denial: our saving grace; our life boat in a storm; our national treasure. Let’s give it the respect it deserves.
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This piece is not just frivolous. Denial is something change agents struggle with every day. Denial
has it’s own logic: it’s driven by the fear of not being able to manage the unfamiliar. Trying to “drag people out of their comfort zones” is a recipe for failure because the human capacity for denial is infinite. A solution is to focus on increasing people’s confidence or self-efficacy (in other words, EXANDING their comfort zones), an approach which minimises the fear that causes denial!
* Malcolm Edey, Assistant Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia, The Economic Landscape in 2009, www.rba.gov.au/Speeches/2009/sp_ag_040309.pdf
