From megaphone to mosaic: five principles for narrative communications

Ağustos 3, 2020

from “The TILT, Reframing Human Rights for the 21st Century”

How can civil society groups and charities apply narrative work in practice? Based on our work with migration groups in the UK during the pandemic, we believe a crucial step is more narrative synergy between organisations that share the same values. Scroll right to the end for practical steps and more information about how you can get involved in collective narrative change.

Have you ever looked closely at a detailed painting and then slowly stepped back to see the picture take shape and come alive before your eyes? It’s a magical feeling when the smaller component parts complement each other and align to create a unified whole. This is what happens with an intricate mosaic, where small individual tiles collectively merge to create an image that is striking to behold.

The same synergistic principle applies to narratives. We communicate by sharing our messages and stories, but it is their accumulation over time that form lasting, memorable narratives. When we communicate strategically we need to think not just about how we craft our own message, but also how we are adding to a greater whole and strengthening shared narratives in the process. In short: to be strategic we need to be synergistic.

As the Narrative Initiative writes:

“What tiles are to mosaics, stories are to narratives. The relationship is symbiotic; stories bring narratives to life by making them relatable and accessible, while narratives infuse stories with deeper meaning.”

Elena Blackmore, writing for PIRC, has also used this metaphor to powerful effect where she writes perceptively about #BlackLivesMatter and the response that is required to change harmful narrative mosaics:

“This is the narrative mosaic of white supremacy and it comprises hundreds of years’ worth of tiles of violent history. We can understand a narrative in this way: as a ‘coherent system of stories’.”

If communications work is about crafting the right kinds of words, visuals and feelings to get a message across, then strategic communications is about stepping back and thinking about the big ideas, attitudes and behaviours we want to shift. This means thinking not just about promoting the work of our own organisation, but choosing the right stories to tell about what is happening in the world today. This means communications based more around moments than on campaigns.

These reflections are based on recent work with Unbound Philanthropy and Migration Exchange during the pandemic. We have been working to help activist groups apply narrative messaging around Covid-19 produced by communications experts such as Anat Shenker-Osorio, PIRC, Frameworks Institute and IMIX to their daily work. And we have been having deep conversations about narrative change through our Narrative Working Group (NARWHAL) convenings, curated by Phoebe Tickell.

Thinking of narratives as mosaics leads us to collective communications strategy

If a narrative is a mosaic, our communications must build it up tile by tile.

Every day is a new opportunity to find new tiles to add. These tiles can be planned and created by your organisation. They might also come from an ally or from grass-roots supporters.

Creating new, striking narrative mosaics requires as many people as possible offering up the same sorts of ideas, creating images that bring to life our shared values and exchanging stories that reflect our worldview.

We have designed a messaging house to help guide this process, drawing on the idea of a Larger Us developed by Alex Evans at the Collective Psychology Project as a way of articulating what unites groups working on human rights, environment, poverty, racial justice and others in common cause.

This messaging house contains simple “common sense” ideas that we can all repeat over and over again, and bring to life in stories, videos, drawings and graphics (find out more about the messaging house by scrolling down to the practical steps below).

We use a messaging house applies the mosaic principle because rather than asking every group to use shared branding or slogans, we instead invite everyone to inject a little bit of the spirit of our shared worldview into their work.

Applying mosaics-thinking to our communications strategies is crucial if we want to change narratives.

Getting the wording of our messages right is important, but communications is often about more than words: it is about images, stories and emotions stirred by cultural products.

Five principles for creating narrative mosaics with strategic communications

There are five principles we’ve learnt from mosaic-making that help us to get to the heart and soul of strategic communications. We explore and unpack each of these principles in more detail, below:

Principle 1: We need to unite around shared messages that capture the spirit of our communication. It takes many different tiles to make a mosaic. If all our tiles relay conflicting messages, our tiles will simply form a blur from which no narrative emerges. Only by constantly reinforcing a complimentary, shared worldview with stories and frames on a daily basis can we make our narrative salient enough to stand out.
Principle 2: We need to capitalise on key moments that arise — tapping into the zeitgeist, rather than purely relying on engineering the focus. Mosaic-makers innovate all the time. We need to be open to raising up what works and what resonates in response to key moments.
Principle 3: We need to build up powerful bonds of reciprocity. Building a mosaic is about elevating and building on motifs that work, and generating new, iterative content as a result. Reciprocity builds strong supportive networks, helps to further the message of a Larger Us and demonstrates that we are making progress together.
Principle 4: Apply the rule of thirds. There is sometimes magic to be found in placing the subject off-centre, resisting the urge of pushing problems to the front and centre.
Principle 5: We need to accumulate multiple stories and messages. Mosaics are created by adding together multiple smaller parts, some of which are plain and reinforcing, peppering our communications with bursts of creative inspiration. Sometimes we need to experiment many times over to hit upon a powerful message that truly resonates. Everyone can add their tile to the narrative mosaic, even by retweeting another post or asking your supporters share some positive news.

Principle 1: Uniting around the spirit of shared worldviews

Andamento is the ability to capture the mood and ‘feel’ of the overall piece, described as follows by one mosaic expert:

“Never mind the design — a design is a design — but pay attention to what is going on in the background of a mosaic and it is there that you will find the melody, the choreography, the spirit of a mosaic.”

The same applies in our strategic communications: Messages are important, just as the design helps to create the overall picture; but it is also vital to capture the ‘andamento’ i.e. the spirit or the overall ‘feel’ of the piece. This is about more than just crafting and framing our words and projecting them out to all who will listen. Instead, it’s about working together, collectively, to achieve a bigger, shared objective: It’s about making our communication fizz with energy and sing out in symphony.

The message of ‘a Larger Us’ needs to be at the heart of our strategic communications work. It is more than just a design feature; it is the ‘andamento’ — the spirit that should pulsate through all our communications.

Many campaigns start from a ‘them and us’ frame, and there is power in mobilising people to join a side who share a common enemy or opponent. But we are not as polarised as we might think. The vast majority of us are kind, well-meaning individuals who can unite around shared, transcendental values built on love, kindness and care that need to be at the heart of all our messaging if we want them to be more powerful factors in our politics.

The team at PIRC has done tests showing that thinking the best of human nature helps support for social change. Rutger Bregman, author of HumanKind, reminds us of the goodness of human nature and warns us that pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

If you look at empirical evidence then you find that assuming the best in other people gets you the best results.”

Covid-19 has taught us that we are all in this together. If we want to highlight just how marginal extremists really are, we must proportionately balance stories of extremism with those that show we are part of a Larger Us, rather than a ‘them and us’.

While we have to counter the threat of extremists, calling them ‘the opposition’ or ‘the other side’ gives credence to what is a minority view, worthy neither of these terms, nor of a dominant place in our mosaic.

Elevating the voices of those who share and express the message that we are united, connected and hopeful is kryptonite to extremists who seek to divide us.

Principle 2. Thinking in moments, rather than campaigns

Signature campaigns are one way to change narratives, but small, daily stories that capture people’s attention and create a “word of mouth” buzz are vital tiles that add to narrative mosaic. Rather than international theme days and other planned events, these stories and content are relevant to the spirit of the times. On social media these are known as “moments”.

Moments have the added benefit of authenticity. Moments are not just a condensed part of a news cycle, they are something happening in people’s lives. Campaigns, by contrast, are something we plan inside our organisations. Moments can be an influential figure like the footballer Marcus Rashford taking a stand on a principle like free meals for children from poor families over the summer holidays or K-Pop stars ruining a Trump rally. Or everyday people doing something that gets people talking, like banging plates on their balconies during Covid_19. These moments tend to capture the zeitgeist of a particular time, and reveal something we already know or feel about ourselves and our societies.

The significance of moments is that they act like a spark in a tinderbox. They ignite passion in people and can often be the precursor to political or policy change, and in some cases can go on to create powerful movements, as we saw with #MeToo, #TimesUp and more recently with #BlackLivesMatter. We need to be ready to spot and amplify these moments when they arise. This means finding unusual allies, acknowledging the power and influence of public figures and recognising the significance of popular culture in catalysing social change.

We also need to sustain these moments and make sure that changes are woven into the fabric of our systems and structures. In particular, we each have a a duty to ensure that racial justice is woven into our conversations about narrative change.

Principle 3. Building up powerful bonds of reciprocity

Behavioural scientists often remind us of the intense power of reciprocity. It is one of the strongest social norms we have in our society. As Matthew D. Lieberman, author of Social: Why our brains are wired to connect, reminds us:

“If someone does you a favor, you feel obligated to return the favor at some point, and with strangers we actually feel a bit anxious until we have repaid this debt. This is why car salesmen will always offer you a cup of coffee.”

We can use this intuitive need to reciprocate with one another in our communications. If you want others to elevate and share your work, start by doing the same for others.

No one organisation can make a narrative salient by itself.

The Connection Coalition have aligned 450 groups that share common values to tackle loneliness by sharing all the ways people are helping each other during the pandemic.

Even if you can secure coverage in a big news outlet, or the support of a celebrity influencer, it takes sustained repetition of ideas across multiple channels and platforms to achieve salience. We all need to share each other’s stories and content for it to have a chance of impacting how people think, feel and behave.

Organisations, activists, artists and other people who share common causes can together create and source content that contributes to our narrative mosaics. This is about reciprocity: we all need to repeat each other’s ideas for them to become “common sense” narratives that people internalise and share. No organisation can, or should, try to produce this flow of content themselves, nor should they think they can distribute that content wide enough on their own. When we see something that reinforces our shared ‘Larger Us’ worldview from another messenger, we should flex every comms muscle we have to make it seen and talked about.

Fortunately, myriad NGOs, charities and movements do not need to agree to the exact same talking points, slogans and hashtags. But they can articulate a shared vision and basic values they are working towards. All the different stories, reports and other outputs can then reinforce our shared idea of how the world works and should be. In other words, we can agree what we want the mosaic to look like, and then create tiles of our own that contribute to it, in our own different ways.

Principle 4. Give your subject space to breathe

Artists often work to a ‘rule of thirds’ principle, and mosaics are no exception. The act of off-setting the subject paradoxically helps to give it greater prominence. We can learn from this principle in our communications work. By off-setting we give our subject room to breathe.

Mosaic-makers create impact by moving the main focus of the design at least one third of the way towards the edge. Communicators can learn from that by not always pushing political divisions and social problems to the fore, but letting them sit slightly to the side of more personal and multi-faceted stories, in which the people affected by problems are not defined solely by them. This draws the audience in, touches them on a more emotional level and allows them to feel empathy, rather than pity, for the people we want to support. People who have moved to a country generally want to be seen as people, not as migrants or refugees. Make the audience care about the person first, and then invite them to relate to the situation.

In the new series New Neighbours about newcomers to Europe and the people who welcome them, the story is about the emerging relationships. The issues are there but they are not foregrounded, allowing alternative possibilities to become apparent.

Principle 5. Accumulation of stories

As George Lakoff teaches us, if your communication is based on narratives you disagree with, you risk reinforcing these negative narratives. He encourages us to make the moral case for our positions with the same values that we want to activate in all audiences, built on empathy, responsibility and hope. We know that critiquing stereotypical stories only reinforces them, that we need a flow of surprising stories that create a mosaic of tolerance and appreciation for others. In today’s media environment we can elevate myriad voices and empower people to tell their story, their way.

It’s the accumulation of different stories that makes a narrative. We should think of our communications outputs as tiles that need to be true to the spirit of the mosaic that is our narrative and our values, rather than a single canvas that needs to be perfected like a masterpiece. You cannot fit the whole mosaic on one tile, and not every story needs to capture every aspect of an issue.

We can share one story of a successful refugee, one story of a migrant who is helping out, just getting by with help from the community, and another who is grateful, if that is the emotion they themselves want to express. We also need stories of people who are not on the move, but are welcoming to those who are. Just as individual tiles need to be true to the spirit of a mosaic, we can be guided in selecting these stories by our own values, basic ethical guidelines and a desire to let people speak for themselves.

Stories that communicate ‘a Larger Us’ can show people from different backgrounds forming new bonds of connection, like the Britain Connects series.

Practical steps for a mosaic-movement approach to narrative change

Step one: Agree on simple messaging

The first step is a set of shared messages, leading with the same values. The specifics of our messaging may vary for different audiences and contexts, but there are universal ideas and values that we all identify with. Articulating these will help us to respond to what is happening in the world today — to “message this moment” in the words of Anat Shenker-Osorio.

That is why we designed a simple messaging house to describe the ‘Larger Us’ messaging that ties together the values underlying migration work with other causes like climate change, social and racial justice and equality and inclusion.

We find this format of the messaging house helpful because it focuses attention on one, predominant umbrella message (in this case a Larger Us) and then explores three sub-messages that help to strengthen the overall proposition.

A messaging house focuses your communications on the ideas you want to get to get across, rather than reacting to the loudest voices or being derailed by cynical questions. It is built around our values so it can be applied to any issue or situation, keeping you “on-message”, as well as “on-narrative”. The fact that we are all connected to one another as human beings is just as important a principle to climate change as it is to migration and racial justice.

Do take a look at the messaging house and see how you can apply it to your work. There is even a blank version you can use to adapt and apply the ‘Larger Us’ messaging to your own communications. We are happy for it to be an iterative tool and we welcome you to use it and add your comments, adjustments and input.

Step two: Organize content creators

Messaging is the starting point, but we need more than words to reach a mass audience. We need to elevate the actual stories happening in the world today that illustrate our messages without needing to use our jargon.

To that end, we can organise our supporters to be our chief storytellers. You can send them this simple cheat sheet to explain what kind of stories they can tell. That way, when they see a moment, for example, of cooperation between communities, they can take out their phone and tell the story themselves on social media. You can then elevate the best ones.

The 3 Million invited Europeans in the UK to share their own stories of helping out during the pandemic using the hashtag #RightThereWithYou.

Creative artistic content can also bring our messages to life in emotive ways that may resonate with people the way political messages do not. A creative brief for cultural creators can inspire the people who can paint more beautiful tiles for our shared mosaic. For example, you can give artists and designers who want to support our cause this creative brief to articulate what you stand for, but leave them the creativity to bring those values to life in their own authentic way.

During the pandemic, for example, Fine Acts commissioned artists around the world to create small, simple works of art that would inspire hope, inviting people to print them into posters and sharing on social media. They are now curating works in support of Black Lives Matter.

Dancing Fox has a new project called “We were made for these times” combining art and stories that help us imagine a better world. To make people believe in the things we are calling for, we need the help of creative people to help them visualise what society will look like after our solutions are in place.

Step 3: Gather and curate stories

When we see a moment that reinforces our shared narrative, we need to get people talking about it. And we also need to ensure that we have a diverse range of people telling and sharing their stories. Getting news media to cover those stories is a crucial step, reaching new audiences and giving them credibility. But once we secure that coverage, we need people to share that news story. Getting the media hit is only half the work, we have to push it out on social media to drive “word of mouth” buzz around it if it is to become a salient “moment” that grows our narrative mosaic.

It is on all of us to work together to build the mosaic. There are two basic things you can do to play your part:

You can add stories you think will build up the ‘Larger Us’ mosaic in this story bank, whether you see them in the news or hear about them happening at grass-roots level.

For example, the Relationships Project has created the Spirit of Lockdown storybook to gather “the moments when we’ve noticed one another, as we have seldom noticed before.”

You can share stories that are already in the story bank, as well as stories you see from other activists and organisations, through your personal and organisational social media channels. You can use this messaging.

Step 4: Salience via distribution

We want as many people as possible to see the videos produced for the Britain Connects and New Neighbours series because they encapsulate the idea of ‘a Larger Us’. We should be sharing them through organic social media posts, sending it to others to ask them to share as well and even buying ads of our own to make sure more people who are likely to share them further also see them. That is how positive narratives around migration will become salient.

If you have the resources, you can also run social media adverts to make sure people see and share the stories, running ads to these audiences we feel are most likely to share positive migration stories. Erica Chenoweth has written that successful non-violent civil disobedience requires activating only 3.5% of the population. We can use that same principle in trying to target the stories we want shared to those most likely to spread the word.

Ask your supporters, friends and allies to add tiles of their own. You can use mail-outs and whatsapp groups to ask them to share on-message stories with their friends. We can have a greater impact encouraging a wide community of people to share the same sorts of stories. The smallest, simplest small stories from their daily lives are all small stones that make up the mosaic.

An implication of this approach is that we also focus audience research on our closest supporters, not just persuadables or extremists. Our base, after all, are the people most likely to articulate our narrative to other people and bring it to life through their actions.

In summary, civil society and charities need to be better at working together to make the most of the resources we have at our disposal to get the message out. In the words of The Narrative Initiative we need to “connect a narrative “nervous system” of collaborators.”

Are the press releases, tweets and videos we put out every day contributing to a shared mosaic, or are we simply all tiling our own bathrooms? If we want to change narratives, we can start by working together, particularly at the level of communications team. For example, the network of the people who actually run the social media accounts of the world’s biggest international NGOs set up earlier this year by Valeriia Voshchevska and Dante Licona is a perfect space to achieve reciprocity in our communications.

What happens next?

We can all work together to share values of empathy, kindness, equality, inclusion and solidarity. We can do this through a list of ‘Larger Us’ social media influencers who all agree to regularly share stories that are on-message. We can funnel stories to this list by getting grass roots organisations and cultural groups to see this as a resource when they want to elevate their work.

As a first step for building narrative reciprocity, we have created a common global space for anyone who wants to build ‘Larger Us’ narratives. If you are interested in our ideas, please share your thoughts below or get in touch here. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Crazy World of Biases

Temmuz 21, 2020

This article was written by Buster Benson and includes links to connect to his profile, website and publications

We definitely encourage you to follow his very smart insights into human psychology

A few key take aways :

There is too much information out there. When presented with new information, we absorb the one that fits what we already know and discard the rest
We trust ourselves and mistrust others: everything that comes from our side is seen as right, and what comes from others sides as wrong. This makes changing very difficult and makes “inside manipulation” very easy.
Relatedly, we think we know what others are thinking. But this is often based on comparison to what we think ourselves: this leads us to think that people from other groups disagree with us, when maybe they actually don’t.

Human biases control our attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. It’s impossible to campaign without being a master in understanding biases.

Happy reading !

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet : Because thinking is difficult

I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can’t recall the name or details. It’s been an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking. Nothing else I’ve come across seems to be both as comprehensive and as succinct.

However, honestly, the Wikipedia page is a bit of a tangled mess. Despite trying to absorb the information of this page many times over the years, very little of it seems to stick. I often scan it and feel like I’m not able to find the bias I’m looking for, and then quickly forget what I’ve learned. I think this has to do with how the page has organically evolved over the years. Today, it groups 175 biases into vague categories (decision-making biases, social biases, memory errors, etc) that don’t really feel mutually exclusive to me, and then lists them alphabetically within categories. There are duplicates a-plenty, and many similar biases with different names, scattered willy-nilly.

I’ve taken some time over the last four weeks (I’m on paternity leave) to try to more deeply absorb and understand this list, and to try to come up with a simpler, clearer organizing structure to hang these biases off of. Reading deeply about various biases has given my brain something to chew on while I bounce little Louie to sleep.

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

Four problems that biases help us address:

Information overload, lack of meaning, the need to act fast, and how to know what needs to be remembered for later.

Problem 1: Too much information.

There is just too much information in the world, we have no choice but to filter almost all of it out. Our brain uses a few simple tricks to pick out the bits of information that are most likely going to be useful in some way.

We notice things that are already primed in memory or repeated often. This is the simple rule that our brains are more likely to notice things that are related to stuff that’s recently been loaded in memory.
See: Availability heuristic, Attentional bias, Illusory truth effect, Mere exposure effect, Context effect, Cue-dependent forgetting, Mood-congruent memory bias, Frequency illusion, Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, Empathy gap
Bizarre/funny/visually-striking/anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things. Our brains tend to boost the importance of things that are unusual or surprising. Alternatively, we tend to skip over information that we think is ordinary or expected.
See: Bizarreness effect, Humor effect, Von Restorff effect, Negativity bias, Publication bias, Omission bias
We notice when something has changed. And we’ll generally tend to weigh the significance of the new value by the direction the change happened (positive or negative) more than re-evaluating the new value as if it had been presented alone. Also applies to when we compare two similar things.
See: Anchoring, Contrast effect, Focusing effect, Framing effect, Weber–Fechner law, Distinction bias
We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs. This is a big one. As is the corollary: we tend to ignore details that contradicts our own beliefs.
See: Confirmation bias, Congruence bias, Post-purchase rationalization, Choice-supportive bias, Selective perception, Observer-expectancy effect, Experimenter’s bias, Observer effect, Expectation bias, Ostrich effect, Subjective validation, Continued influence effect, Semmelweis reflex, Bucket error, Law of narrative gravity
We notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in ourselves. Yes, before you see this entire article as a list of quirks that compromise how other people think, realize that you are also subject to these biases.
See: Bias blind spot, Naïve cynicism, Naïve realism

Problem 2: Not enough meaning.

The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world.

We find stories and patterns even in sparse data. Since we only get a tiny sliver of the world’s information, and also filter out almost everything else, we never have the luxury of having the full story. This is how our brain reconstructs the world to feel complete inside our heads.
See: Confabulation, Clustering illusion, Insensitivity to sample size, Neglect of probability, Anecdotal fallacy, Illusion of validity, Masked man fallacy, Recency illusion, Gambler’s fallacy, Hot-hand fallacy, Illusory correlation, Pareidolia, Anthropomorphism
We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories whenever there are new specific instances or gaps in information. When we have partial information about a specific thing that belongs to a group of things we are pretty familiar with, our brain has no problem filling in the gaps with best guesses or what other trusted sources provide. Conveniently, we then forget which parts were real and which were filled in.
See: Group attribution error, Ultimate attribution error, Stereotyping, Essentialism, Functional fixedness, Moral credential effect, Just-world hypothesis, Argument from fallacy, Authority bias, Automation bias, Bandwagon effect, Placebo effect
We imagine things and people we’re familiar with or fond of as better than things and people we aren’t familiar with or fond of. Similar to the above but the filled-in bits generally also include built in assumptions about the quality and value of the thing we’re looking at.
See: Halo effect, In-group bias, Out-group homogeneity bias, Cross-race effect, Cheerleader effect, Well-traveled road effect, Not invented here, Reactive devaluation, Positivity effect
We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about. Our subconscious mind is terrible at math and generally gets all kinds of things wrong about the likelihood of something happening if any data is missing.
See: Mental accounting, Normalcy bias, Appeal to probability fallacy, , Base rate fallacy, Murphy’s law, Hofstadter’s law, Subadditivity effect, Survivorship bias, Zero sum bias, Denomination effect, Magic number 7+-2, Swimmer’s body illusion, Money illusion, Conservatism
We think we know what others are thinking. In some cases this means that we assume that they know what we know, in other cases we assume they’re thinking about us as much as we are thinking about ourselves. It’s basically just a case of us modeling their own mind after our own (or in some cases after a much less complicated mind than our own).
See: Curse of knowledge, Illusion of transparency, Spotlight effect, Streetlight effect, Illusion of external agency, Illusion of asymmetric insight, Extrinsic incentive error
We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future. Magnified also by the fact that we’re not very good at imagining how quickly or slowly things will happen or change over time.
See: Hindsight bias, Outcome bias, Moral luck, Declinism, Telescoping effect, Rosy retrospection, Impact bias, Pessimism bias, Planning fallacy, Time-saving bias, Pro-innovation bias, Projection bias, Restraint bias, Self-consistency bias

Problem 3: Need to act fast.

We’re constrained by time and information, and yet we can’t let that paralyze us. Without the ability to act fast in the face of uncertainty, we surely would have perished as a species long ago. With every piece of new information, we need to do our best to assess our ability to affect the situation, apply it to decisions, simulate the future to predict what might happen next, and otherwise act on our new insight.

In order to act, we need to be confident in our ability to make an impact and to feel like what we do is important. In reality, most of this confidence can be classified as overconfidence, but without it we might not act at all.
See: Overconfidence effect, Egocentric bias, Optimism bias, Social desirability bias, Third-person effect, Forer effect, Barnum effect, Illusion of control, False consensus effect, Dunning-Kruger effect, Hard-easy effect, Illusory superiority, Lake Wobegone effect, Self-serving bias, Actor-observer bias, Fundamental attribution error, Defensive attribution hypothesis, Trait ascription bias, Effort justification, Risk compensation, Peltzman effect, Armchair fallacy
In order to stay focused, we favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of us over the delayed and distant. We value stuff more in the present than in the future, and relate more to stories of specific individuals than anonymous individuals or groups. I’m surprised there aren’t more biases found under this one, considering how much it impacts how we think about the world.
See: Hyperbolic discounting, Appeal to novelty, Identifiable victim effect
In order to get anything done, we’re motivated to complete things that we’ve already invested time and energy in. The behavioral economist’s version of Newton’s first law of motion: an object in motion stays in motion. This helps us finish things, even if we come across more and more reasons to give up.
See: Sunk cost fallacy, Irrational escalation, Escalation of commitment, Loss aversion, IKEA effect, Processing difficulty effect, Generation effect, Zero-risk bias, Disposition effect, Unit bias, Pseudocertainty effect, Endowment effect, Backfire effect
In order to avoid mistakes, we’re motivated to preserve our autonomy and status in a group, and to avoid irreversible decisions. If we must choose, we tend to choose the option that is perceived as the least risky or that preserves the status quo. Better the devil you know than the devil you do not.
See: System justification, Reactance, Reverse psychology, Decoy effect, Social comparison bias, Status quo bias, Abilene paradox, Law of the instrument, Law of the hammer, Maslow’s hammer, Golden hammer, Chesterton’s fence, Hippo problem
We favor options that appear simple or that have more complete information over more complex, ambiguous options. We’d rather do the quick, simple thing than the important complicated thing, even if the important complicated thing is ultimately a better use of time and energy.
See: Ambiguity bias, Information bias, Belief bias, Rhyme as reason effect, Bike-shedding effect, Law of Triviality, Delmore effect, Conjunction fallacy, Occam’s razor, Less-is-better effect, Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski hypothesis

Problem 4: What should we remember?

There’s too much information in the universe. We can only afford to keep around the bits that are most likely to prove useful in the future. We need to make constant bets and trade-offs around what we try to remember and what we forget. For example, we prefer generalizations over specifics because they take up less space. When there are lots of irreducible details, we pick out a few standout items to save and discard the rest. What we save here is what is most likely to inform our filters related to problem 1’s information overload, as well as inform what comes to mind during the processes mentioned in problem 2 around filling in incomplete information. It’s all self-reinforcing.

We edit and reinforce some memories after the fact. During that process, memories can become stronger, however various details can also get accidentally swapped. We sometimes accidentally inject a detail into the memory that wasn’t there before.
See: Misattribution of memory, Source confusion, Cryptomnesia, False memory, Suggestibility, Spacing effect
We discard specifics to form generalities. We do this out of necessity, but the impact of implicit associations, stereotypes, and prejudice results in some of the most glaringly bad consequences from our full set of cognitive biases.
See: Implicit associations, Implicit stereotypes, Stereotypical bias, Prejudice, Fading affect bias
We reduce events and lists to their key elements. It’s difficult to reduce events and lists to generalities, so instead we pick out a few items to represent the whole.
See: Peak–end rule, Leveling and sharpening, Misinformation effect, Duration neglect, Serial recall effect, List-length effect, Modality effect, Memory inhibition, Part-list cueing effect, Primacy effect, Recency effect, Serial position effect, Suffix effect
We store memories differently based on how they were experienced. Our brains will only encode information that it deems important at the time, but this decision can be affected by other circumstances (what else is happening, how is the information presenting itself, can we easily find the information again if we need to, etc) that have little to do with the information’s value.
See: Picture superiority effect, Levels of processing effect, Testing effect, Absent-mindedness, Next-in-line effect, Tip of the tongue phenomenon, Google effect, Self-relevance effect

Great, how am I supposed to remember all of this?

You don’t have to. But you can start by remembering these four giant problems our brains have evolved to deal with over the last few million years (and maybe bookmark this page if you want to occasionally reference it for the exact bias you’re looking for):

Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.
Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.
Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.
This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.

In order to avoid drowning in information overload, our brains need to skim and filter insane amounts of information and quickly, almost effortlessly, decide which few things in that firehose are actually important and call those out.

In order to construct meaning out of the bits and pieces of information that come to our attention, we need to fill in the gaps, and map it all to our existing mental models. In the meantime we also need to make sure that it all stays relatively stable and as accurate as possible.

In order to act fast, our brains need to make split-second decisions that could impact our chances for survival, security, or success, and feel confident that we can make things happen.

And in order to keep doing all of this as efficiently as possible, our brains need to remember the most important and useful bits of new information and inform the other systems so they can adapt and improve over time, but no more than that.

Sounds pretty useful! So what’s the downside?

In addition to the four problems, it would be useful to remember these four truths about how our solutions to these problems have problems of their own:

We don’t see everything. Some of the information we filter out is actually useful and important.
Our search for meaning can conjure illusions. We sometimes imagine details that were filled in by our assumptions, and construct meaning and stories that aren’t really there.
Quick decisions can be seriously flawed. Some of the quick reactions and decisions we jump to are unfair, self-serving, and counter-productive.
Our memory reinforces errors. Some of the stuff we remember for later just makes all of the above systems more biased, and more damaging to our thought processes.

By keeping the four problems with the world and the four consequences of our brain’s strategy to solve them, the availability heuristic (and, specifically, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon) will ensure that we notice our own biases more often. If you visit this page to refresh your mind every once in a while, the spacing effect will help underline some of these thought patterns so that our bias blind spot and naïve realism is kept in check.

Nothing we do can make the 4 problems go away (until we have a way to expand our minds’ computational power and memory storage to match that of the universe) but if we accept that we are permanently biased, but that there’s room for improvement, confirmation bias will continue to help us find evidence that supports this, which will ultimately lead us to better understanding ourselves.

“Since learning about confirmation bias, I keep seeing it everywhere!”

Cognitive biases are just tools, useful in the right contexts, harmful in others. They’re the only tools we’ve got, and they’re even pretty good at what they’re meant to do. We might as well get familiar with them and even appreciate that we at least have some ability to process the universe with our mysterious brains.

A couple days after posting this, John Manoogian III asked if it would be okay to do a “diagrammatic poster remix” of it, to which I of course said YES to. Here’s what he came up with:

If you feel so inclined, you can buy a poster-version of the above image here. If you want to play around with the data in JSON format, you can do that here.

To get notifications about progress on the book that is evolving out of this post, and future bias-related news, sign up here.

TikTok – leading LGBTQ youth platform!

Temmuz 20, 2020

TikTok, the app famous for launching newly out rapper Lil Nas X, is a space where many LGBTQ teens feel safe to come out and connect. The best part? Their parents aren’t on it

This Peter may not be Peter Parker, but he is St. Louis, Missouri’s very own Amazing Spider-Man. The 17-year-old recent high school graduate is a member of the Spider-Gang, a cohort of devotees to the comic book character. He’s amassed nearly 21,000 followers on TikTok, the popular new social app whose young users have built massive followings by creating and remixing funny short-form videos.

Peter, who posts under the handle @crashlovesyou, has found his niche slinging webs in a Spidey suit at conventions around the country. He could be a stand-in for Spider-Man: Far From Home actor Tom Holland: He looks, talks and even shares the same name as the fictional webbed warrior. But at the end of Pride Month, Peter cautiously announced one major difference to his TikTok followers.

“TikTok allows us teens to express ourselves more openly, because the majority of our parents don’t know about it,” says Karol, a 17-year-old from Connecticut.

Karol is an up-and-coming TikTok creator with 33,000 followers. But offline, her friends and family don’t know she’s posting satirical videos about being the “disappointing” lesbian daughter of straight Catholic parents. “Parents are on Instagram a lot now,” Karol says. “So in a way, TikTok is definitely ‘gayer’ than Instagram.”

For some LGBTQ teens, the appeal of TikTok is how easy it is to go viral on it. The app functions around a default, algorithmic feed, known as the For You page, which features trending videos curated for each user based on who they follow and what videos they’ve previously liked. Unlike Instagram, TikTok’s default feed is centered on discovery; it’s not filled solely by accounts you follow. As a result, hot new content tends to bubble up quickly. Most teens I spoke with said they had a video go viral within months of creating their account.

While for some users, the intention isn’t always to create “gay” content, TikTok communities form naturally when liking videos with LGBT-inspired hashtags or TikTok’s curated video playlists around themes like “Show Your Pride.” Engaging with LGBT content prompts more LGBT content to surface on your For You page. TikTok is, at its core, a feedback loop. It’s easy to find your people.

That’s why many users create queer content more intentionally. “I wanted to post videos of me being a lesbian so others can relate to my content and push themselves to feel confident with their own sexuality,” says Serenity, 15, a California high schooler with over 107,000 followers.

TikTok’s top queer posts are largely positive. Many are sincere coming-out videos scored to “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross; others involve witty commentary on all the various “types of gay guys.” But sometimes the flood of support can turn punitive.

TikTok may be working out its moderation issues, but it remains a leading platform for LGBTQ youth to connect. “Trans men are getting some representation,” Damien says of one of the communities most often left out of LGBT spaces. As for the haters in his comments, Damien couldn’t care less about what they think of his content. “If they can post their progress with bodybuilding, I can [do the same] with my voice. It’s just a screen.”

Whom to follow on TikTok? This list might be helpful

Source: MEL Magazine

Is It Time to Retire the Word ‘Privileged?’

Temmuz 10, 2020

This article by Lewis Oakley first appeared in The Advocate

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As an equality activist, it’s my job to keep track of the tools that effectively change hearts and minds — hitting the delete button on tactics that worked five years ago and keeping my eye on new and inventive ways to get others to empathize and understand.

If understanding is indeed the goal, the word “privilege” is no longer having the desired impact. And that’s giving it the benefit of the doubt that it ever did. It may be a good word for people to let out their frustrations, but if we’re serious about change it’s time to leave the word in the past.

As someone who studied linguistics at university, I understand how loaded this word has become. Whether intentionally or not, it implies the person you are talking about is somehow responsible for their difference. It’s calling them guilty.

The word immediately puts a person’s shields up. So much so that they actually won’t hear your point, they are too busy thinking of defenses.

As a bisexual activist, I rarely call someone biphobic. I may say that a certain thing they said was biphobic, but I know writing an entire person off as phobic isn’t going to help. No one has ever agreed to change their behavior because someone called them a name.

When I encounter negative perceptions of bisexuality, the first thing I do is ask questions. If you’re going to change someone’s perception, you need to know how their brain works. “So why do you think bisexuals will never be satisfied in a relationship?” “Okay, but surely you’ve been attracted to other women that aren’t your wife?” “Are you not satisfied?” “Then why wouldn’t I be?” The skill of an activist is to use someone’s own logic to prove the point.

Some may argue that a lot of people have accepted that they have privilege, and are fine recognizing it. This is true, and part of the battle is won with these people. However, the truth is, for many people, while they have privilege in certain ways, they don’t see themselves that way. They see themselves as a whole person; it’s labeling someone in a way they don’t recognize. It makes you wrong in their eyes before you’ve got to the point you’re trying to make. Some may also feel that you lack empathy; you might see them as privileged because they are straight or white, while they see themselves as severely damaged from their father’s suicide, for example.

Just a slight change in the wording can dramatically change responses and perceptions and encourage people to empathize; think of words like “lucky” or “blessed.”

Rather than exclaiming, “As a straight person you’re privileged,” try explaining “You’re lucky that you can walk down the street holding your partner’s hand and not worry about being attacked.”

For some reason, we’ve reached a point in history where we think shouting and name-calling will produce equality. When in truth, it’s just going to raise the temperature.

The next time you go to use the word “privileged,” ask yourself, Will this make someone understand the plight of the marginalized? Will this word have the desired outcome of changing hearts and minds?

Lewis Oakley is a U.K.-based bisexual activist. Find out more about his work at lewisoakley.com.

Wrestling with pigs ?

Temmuz 5, 2020

In the world of campaigning, there is a harsh debate on whether you should engage in fighting your opponents.

Supporters of this tactic argue that conservatives and progressives are waging a real war, and that there is no way to stay clean. Others oppose that progressives have to stay on higher moral ground and that if you wrestle with pigs, the focus will be on the mud, not on the issue.

Are you conflicted on this?

The article below that appeared in Politics.co.uk will be food for thought

———-

By Laura Shields and Dirk Singer

We’ve always known that conservatives have the campaigning instincts of sharks. But it’s rare for progressives to see their techniques being used against a common enemy, rather than ourselves.

As dual UK-US nationals who work in communication, we have become obsessed with the Never Trumpers who are going all in to get Donald Trump out in November. They include The Lincoln Project, a super PAC which includes former strategists for John McCain and George W Bush as well as George Conway, the husband of one of Trump’s closest advisers, and Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), a campaign that has run some ads, but mainly uses video testimonials from Republicans who will not be voting for Trump.

To give you an idea of what this might look like in the UK, just imagine if Lynton Crosby all of a sudden announced that Boris Johnson is a danger to democracy and they will now be campaigning for Keir Starmer.

So, what can we learn from swimming with our new temporary friends?

Be ruthless

The Never Trumpers might as well have written the phrase ‘go big or go home’. For them there is no Plan B, so there is an intensity and relentlessness about their approach.
They act quickly and opportunistically through their attack ads, frames and messages and react to and lead conversations in real time.

For example, on the day that John Bolton came out with his revelations about Donald Trump begging President Xi of China for help in getting re-elected, the Lincoln Project released their Chyna ad.

There is no magic formula – they just keep it simple by using Trump’s own words against himself. The attacks are often witty. Crucially they always go straight for the jugular. And part of the strategy is to wind Trump up so that he attacks them rather than Joe Biden. This means nothing is off limits, which a lot of the left (‘we’re better than this’) finds distasteful. We do too. But you don’t take a bar of soap when wrestling with pigs in mud.

Zeroing in on Trump’s bizarre ramp walk at West Point and the way he was drinking water made a lot of people with liberal sensibilities uncomfortable. Yet it arguably succeeded in making his unfitness for office an issue and also robbed the Trump campaign of one its most potent attack lines against Joe Biden – ie the ‘Sleepy Joe’ insult.

That in itself is a lesson. Republican operatives have in the past attacked an opponent’s perceived strengths, not weaknesses. If you demolish their key talking points one by one, they have nothing left.

Target your efforts

Never Trumpers target their time and money at the 15 or so battleground states where the election will be won or lost and ignore the national polls.

Within these states, they don’t talk to the Democrats, they talk to the people they need to convert: swing voters, conservatives who also hate Trump or those who voted for him in 2016 but are feeling uneasy about him now.

As Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson said in a recent podcast, the people the Democrats need to win over in these states “are not people who care about gender pronouns”. Unlike a lot of progressives, the Never Trumpers understand what makes their target audiences tick. The left is good at talking to itself but not empathising with the views of people who think differently.

Empathy is not endorsement. It simply means getting inside people’s heads and understanding what messages and arguments work best to persuade them.

Values matter more than policy or facts

Republicans Voters Against Trump is a master class in low budget values campaigning. The videos are shot on smart phones or computers. And they are effective because they are unpolished peer to peer testimonials that speak to core conservative morals, values and identity frames.

Words that come up a lot are responsibility, character, authority, respect, decency, faith, honour and integrity. Unsurprisingly, for all these ex-GOP voters, Trump has none of these qualities. For many, Biden does. They will vote for him because he’s a man of character not because they agree with his policies.

A timely example of all these approaches coming together is the one minute testimonial of Carter and Nancy, Republicans who live near Tulsa, Oklahoma who will be voting for Biden this year. Their story was broadcast on Fox News ahead of Trump’s rally in Tulsa on Saturday.

The closest the UK has come to using voter testimonials in the same way was through the highly underrated and underused Remainer Now campaign, who were not given anything like the prominence or support they needed by the stop Brexit campaigns.

Be consistent, employ message discipline

Message discipline seems to have gone out of the window for the left in recent years in the UK, probably because they associate it with Tony Blair. But the idea that you can shift public opinion or change conversations is fanciful if you don’t hammer your points consistently.

The Never Trumpers pick a theme and keep hammering away at it so that it sticks.

Some key examples are #AmericaOrTrump, where they tried to pin the Confederate flag on him, and more recently #Trumpisnotwell and #PlagueRally to describe Trump’s Tulsa rally.
The Lincoln Project and their founders have significant online reach. Both George Conway and Rick Wilson have over a million followers. The media of course tunes into Twitter, and these messages then get currency, are amplified, and stick.

At the moment the Never Trumpers are on our side because they believe in the fundamentals of democracy and the rule of law. But the reason why they want the Republican party to be demolished at the polls in 2020, is so that they can rebuild it from the ground up to once again look more like the Reagan GOP of the 1980s. That means eventually they’ll be targeting – and beating – progressives again.

Had we adopted some of their tactics, a whole series of disasters from Brexit in 2016 to Johnson’s 2019 election victory could have been avoided.

As a result, we’d do well to watch what they are doing between now and November and internalise some of the lessons they are teaching us, so that we don’t become shark bait next time we meet.

Laura Shields and Dirk Singer are communications consultants and members of Democrats Abroad.

The opinions in Politics.co.uk’s Comment and Analysis section are those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the website or its owners.

“Coronarratives” – Messaging in the time of COVID-19

Mayıs 30, 2020

Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary actions. Global pandemic caused by COVID-19 virus has created repercussions worldwide beyond a shadow of a doubt, but how to properly convey our messages, our mission and our on-going activities in the given state of affairs? There is a room for discussion and debate.

Whether you are a non-partisan activist, part of a local LGBTQ + movement, or simply a socially engaged individual working for a particular cause, your message inevitably needs to be adjusted and tailored to these conditions.

But, we keep circling around the question – how?

We will try compiling several tactics and strategies!

Anthony Torres stipulates several important things – only by working together we can overcome the crisis. But, a very important notion – this situation is terrible, but it is not the first time that we find ourselves in a crisis like this.

LGBTQ activists also fought like this during the HIV epidemic.

It is important to say that it will be better for everyone if ALL of us are treated with equal respect and dignity. Because, at the end of the day, our destinies are tied, and we have to manage our actions so that we are intertwined with each other, and that by putting ourselves at the expense of others, we can very easily put ourselves at risk!

The way we direct our actions now will be good for us in the long run, and we will create a model of cooperation for the challenges and problems that await us after we finish the corona. Such as climate change.

You may continue reading some of Anthony’s messaging guidance HERE.

Although certain age categories are at higher risk of infection, we can all become infected with the virus, and numerous cases show that deaths may occur without previously acquired health problems.

The fact that we can all get sick means that only, after all, we are all people and we are all in the same problem. Thus there is a room to create a message that points out now is the time to overcome the differences between us.

Overcoming this unprecedented crisis also means that we all have to rely on each other. Whether you are white, Latino, LGBTQ, Native Americans … United and together in the fight against the virus, but also against those who send us misinformation, try to profit from the crisis and strive to maintain the status quo by bringing unrest, fueling deeply-rooted stereotypes and prejudices… These are some of useful advices from Anat Shenker-Osorio, communication expert and political pundit. Check out more HERE.

The Opportunity Agenda, an inspiring social justice communication lab, has issued recently messaging resources on COVID-19.

This contribution is of particular importance to our cause, as it focuses on race-class disparities in infection.

That is, although the virus inevitably affects everyone, reducing the risk means isolating and reducing social contacts, that is, having one’s own space, access to the healthcare, a job that can become remote… So, clearly some categories are more exposed to the virus than the others.

This crisis is actually a paramount opportunity to increase advocacy activities for the most vulnerable – for the poor, for the homeless, for the LGBTQ + community.

COVID-19 related messaging resources from OA might be found HERE.

“A rational conversation without lecturing” – How Irish feminist activists repealed constitutional ban on abortion?

Mayıs 3, 2020

With the global strengthening of the far right and policies advocating patriarchal patterns, for the last ten years we have witnessed a time in which women’s rights have been first on the strike.
This is especially the case in the US, where states are practically or literally banning the abortion procedures.
But there are other positive examples testifying to the trend going in the opposite direction. A trend that ranged from outright ban to majority acceptance of abortion as a women’s right.
It’s Ireland. How has the public managed to make this shift in three decades?
Irish activists Alibha Smyth and Tara Flynn recently spoke about the experience at Brave New Words.

Let’s take a look at what it looked like thirty years ago. The Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution has banned abortion since 1983. The women married learning that the embryo was a human being and that protected sex is virtually a sin. This situation led women to secretly go to the UK to have abortions, and have been acquiring contraceptives illegally, via Internet.

In 2016, Irish government summoned the so-called civic assembly, consisting of 99 members from different social groups, for the purpose of reviewing existing abortion measures.
And brave activists advocating women and reproductive rights gathered around the slogan Together for yes!
The result of the referendum is known – in 2018, over two-thirds of voters repealed the amendment.

How is this success explained?
Interviewees began the answer with one simple sentence that actually drives the essence – We listened to the target group.
Activists went out among the people, asked them what they thought, if they had any knowledge of it. They communicated, debated, talked.
And, based on the dialogue conveyed, they realised that they did not want harsh messages. That in the thirty years that the amendment existed, there was no room to articulate nor debate such issues.
This is why activists have decided to frame the issue of abortion so that it is seen in the light of the everyday life and the regular problems that the average Irish woman faces.
It was rational conversation, no lecturing, no imposition.

Activists also estimated that the abortion campaign would be striking and rounded if there was a personal stamp.
And there was the courageous Tara Flynn who spoke publicly about her experience of illegal abortion in Britain. Because she is already a popular face and a prominent TV and radio presenter, she talked about her experience in a humorous and personal manner, without condemnation, presenting that reproductive rights do not exist because of the whim but that they are an urgent need of all women.

An interesting lesson, but also an important incentive for all the activists around the worlds thinking that attitudes seemingly remain carved in stone and things are hard to change
On the contrary, Ireland shows that attitudes can change upside-down!
In a community dominated by deeply-entrenched religious doctrines, change came with a message entailing dialogue and discussion, in a non-intrusive fashion.
It seems simple, but experience shows that openly confronting an opinion with a contrary opinion is a very demanding job!
But, after all, in the case of Ireland, we can conclude that it has produced remarkable results.

Haziran 20, 2019

This article first appeared on Freakonomics radio

The interesting take-aways for LGBTI campaigners:

Information is used by people depending on their existing views: The same piece of information, or explainer video, or real-life story, etc. will be used to REINFORCE attitudes, including negative ones, rather than challenge them. It was pretty clear so far that information alone doesn’t change people. This article suggests it might even be counter-productive!
People live in closed social circles with people who are like them, so influencing others is increasingly difficult. OK, we all know this. But while it will be near impossible to get homo/transphobic people into an LGBTI-supportive group, it is much easier to get them into an unrelated group (say on fashion or make up or cooking or traditional handicraft) that will be LGBTI supportive when the time comes. It’s much more beneficial to invest into finding these groups than trying to get your target group to come to your “obvious” platform.
“The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. In late adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for novelty … And then by the time you’re a middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for the rest of your life.” Don’t waste your time. Concentrate on the period in life when we’re genetically engineered to explore new territories (physical or mental).
One of the key barriers to change is overconfidence in their own opinions. Rather than avoid the conversation or “bust the myths” by providing the “correct information” yourself, ask people to explain their own attitude and they will start loosing confidence because chances are that they won’t be able to come up with something totally convincing. And when they are off-balance, change can happen.

Full article:

Here’s an interesting fact: legislators in several Republican-controlled states are pushing to eliminate the death penalty. Why is that interesting? Because most Republicans have typically been in favor of the death penalty. They’ve said it’s a deterrent against the most horrific crimes and a fitting penalty when such crimes do occur.

But a lot of Republicans have come to believe the death penalty does not deter crime — which happens to be an argument we offered evidence for in Freakonomics. They also say the lengthy legal appeals on death-penalty cases are too costly for taxpayers. Some Republicans also cite moral concerns with the death penalty. So, a lot of them have changed their minds.

We’ve all changed our minds at some point, about something. Maybe you were a cat person and became a dog person. Maybe you decided the place you lived, or the person you loved, or the religion you followed just wasn’t working for you anymore. But changing your mind is rarely easy. Although if you’re like most people, you would very much like other people to change their minds, to think more like you. Because, as you see it, it’s impossible for the world to progress, to improve unless some people are willing to change their minds.

On this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio: how to change minds, or at least try to.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. He describes himself as half-neurobiologist and half-primatologist; he studies both neurons in petri dishes and wild baboons in East Africa. Sapolsky has a lot of experience with changing his mind. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew before he decided, at age 14, that “[t]here’s no God, there’s no free will, there is no purpose.” He used to be a classical music snob; then he married a musical-theater fanatic and director. Today, he often serves as rehearsal pianist for his wife’s productions.

Sapolsky has noticed something about mind-changing: it’s easier to do when you’re younger. In a survey he put together to look at people’s preferences in food, music, and so on, Sapolsky found that people do indeed become less open to novelty as they get older. Someone who hasn’t eaten sushi by age 35, for example, likely never will. He also found that humans are not the only animals that exhibit this behavioral pattern.

“[Y]ou take a lab rat and you look at when in its life it’s willing to try a novel type of food — and it’s the exact same curve!” Sapolsky says. “The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. In late adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for novelty … And then by the time you’re a middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for the rest of your life.”

There are a lot of reasons why it may be easier to change your mind when you’re younger. It could be the fact that your brain is simply more plastic then — something scientists assumed for a long time but now are starting to question. Or it could be that your positions are less entrenched, so it’s less costly to change them.

Or it could be that the stakes are lower: the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on whether you are pro-broccoli or anti-broccoli. But as life goes on, as the stakes rise, changing your mind can get more costly.

Several years before the United States invaded Iraq, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, signed onto a letter in support of such a move. At the time, Fukuyama was well-established as a prominent political thinker. In addition to writing a landmark book, he’s done two stints in the State Department. So his views on the Iraq War were taken seriously.

But as the invasion drew near, Fukuyama started to have second thoughts.

“My main concern was whether the United States was ready to actually stay in Iraq and convert it into a kind of stable, decent country,” Fukuyama says. “But even I was astonished at how bad the planning had been, and how faulty the assumptions were, that we were going to be greeted as liberators and that there would be a rapid transition just like in Eastern Europe to something that looked like democracy.”

In February of 2004, Fukuyama attended a dinner at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. The featured speaker was Dick Cheney. The crowd greeted the then-vice president with a big round of applause.

“And I just looked around at the people at my table and I said, ‘Why are these people clapping?’” Fukuyama says. “Because clearly this thing is turning into a huge fiasco. And that’s the moment that I decided, you know, these people are really nuts. I mean, they’re so invested in seeing this as a success that they can’t see this reality that’s just growing right in front of their eyes.”

Fukuyama paid a heavy price for his change of heart on the Iraq War. He was seen as having abandoned the neoconservative movement and lost close friends in the process. But to this day, he is surprised that so few of the supporters of the war remain unwilling to admit it was a mistake.

There’s another factor that may contribute to our reluctance to change our minds: overconfidence — our own belief that we are right, even in the absence of evidence. Just how much unearned confidence is floating around out there?

Consider a recent study by Julia Shvets, an economist at Christ’s College, Cambridge who studies decision-making. She and some colleagues surveyed over 200 managers at a British restaurant chain. The managers averaged more than two years on the job and their compensation was strongly tied to a quarterly performance bonus. The managers were asked to recall their past performance and to predict their future performance.

Shvets found that only about 35% of the managers were able to correctly say whether they fell in the top 20% of all managers, or the bottom 20%, or another 20%block somewhere in the middle. Forty-seven percent of managers were overconfident about their standing.

And these were people who had detailed feedback about their performance every quarter, which is a lot more than most employees get. How could this be? This is where memory comes into play, or maybe you’d call it optimism — or delusion.

“People who did worse in the previous competition tended to remember slightly better outcomes. People seem to be exaggerating their own past performance in their head when this performance is bad,” Shvets explains. “So what we conclude from this is that people, when given information about their past performance, use memory selectively. They remember good outcomes and they tend to forget bad ones.”

So maybe it’s not so much that people refuse to change their minds — or refuse to “update their priors,” as economists like to say. Maybe they just have self-enhancing selective memories.

Sothere are a lot of reasons why a given person might be reluctant to change their mind about a given thing. Selective memory, overconfidence, or the cost of losing family or friends. But let’s say you remain committed to changing minds — your own or someone else’s. How do you get that done? The secret may lie not in a grand theoretical framework, but in small, mundane objects like toilets, zippers, and ballpoint pens.

Steven Sloman, a psychology professor at Brown, conducted an experiment asking people to explain — not reason, but to actually explain, at the nuts-and-bolts level — how something works.

Chances are, you probably can’t explain very well how a toilet or a zipper or a ballpoint pen work. But, before you were asked the question, you would have thought you could. This gap between what you know and what you think you know is called the “illusion of explanatory depth.” It was first demonstrated by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil.

“[P]eople fail to distinguish what they know from what others know,” Sloman says. “We’re constantly depending on other people, and the actual processing that goes on is distributed among people in our community.”

In other words, someone knows how a toilet works: the plumber. And you know the plumber; or, even if you don’t know the plumber, you know how to find a plumber.

You can see how the illusion of explanatory depth could be helpful in some scenarios: you don’t need to know everything for yourself, as long as you know someone who knows someone who knows something. But you could also imagine scenarios in which the illusion could be problematic, such as in the political domain.

Sloman and his collaborator Philip Fernbach basically repeated the Rozenblit and Keil experiment, but instead of toilets and zippers, they asked people about climate change and gun control. Unsurprisingly, most people weren’t able to explain climate change policies in much detail. But here’s what’s interesting: people’s level of confidence in their understanding of issues — which participants were asked to report at the start of the experiment — was drastically reduced after they tried, and failed, to demonstrate their understanding.

“It reduced the extremity of their confidence that they were right,” Sloman says. “In other words, asking people to explain depolarized the group.”

Matthew Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social and economic networks, used to believe that different people, given the same kind of information, would make decisions the same way, regardless of past experiences and influences.

That, however, is not what Jackson’s research suggests. In one experiment, Jackson had a bunch of research subjects read the same batch of abstracts from scientific articles about climate change. He found that people reading the same articles could interpret the articles very differently, depending on their initial positions.

In fact, information, far from being a solution, can actually be weaponized.

“There was a group of about a quarter to a third of the subjects who actually became more polarized, who interpreted the information heavily in the direction of their priors, and actually ended up with more extreme positions after the experiment than before,” Jackson says.

In other words, a person’s priors — which are shaped by previous experiences, influences, and social networks — play a big role in shaping current beliefs and decision-making processes. Steven Sloman, the Brown professor, thinks that the third factor is particularly important.

“[W]e believe what we do because the people around us believe what they do,” Sloman says. “This is the way humanity evolved. We depend on other people.”

So if our beliefs are shaped by the people around us, one antidote to inflexible thinking is simply, balance. Unfortunately, a great many of us are quite bad at creating diverse, well-balanced networks. People are prone to surrounding themselves with people just like them.

“We end up talking to people most of the time who have very similar past experiences and similar views of the world, and we tend to underestimate that,” Matthew Jackson says. “People don’t realize how isolated their world is. You know, people wake up after an election and are quite surprised that anybody could have elected a candidate that has a different view than them.”

You can find the full Freakonomics Radio episode, “How to Change Your Mind” at Freakonomics.com. You can also listen on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform.

WRITTEN BY

Stephen J. Dubner/ Freakonomics Radio

Stephen J. Dubner is co-author of the Freakonomics books and host of Freakonomics Radio.

Don’t parrot… A short guide to avoiding common communication pitfalls

Haziran 6, 2019

This article by Ralph Underhill, PIRC Associate and Director of Framing Matters was published by the Public Interest Research Center:

President Nixon famously said, “I am not a crook”.

With those 5 words, he managed to reinforce the idea, in the minds of millions of Americans, that he was, in fact, a crook. What he should have said is “I am an honest man”. When he used the word ‘crook’, he was parroting the language of his opponents, and simply reinforcing that negative association in people’s minds.

This is the first communications trap, which I call the…

Parrot, or the refutation trap.

So instead of environmental groups saying “wind turbines are not noisy eye sores”, they should be saying “the majority of people support renewables”. As George Lakoff has long argued, getting involved in denying things just gets you caught up in language that ends up associating your cause with unhelpful ideas. Here is a classic example of the parrot:

David Davis: “Brexit Britain will not be a ‘Mad Max’ dystopian world.”

Fig 1: The UK in 2020.

The point is, when we use words together – like ‘Brexit’ and ‘Mad Max’ – we are making associations in people’s minds and these can be unhelpful.

The second communications trap is the:

Chameleon, or the sanitising trap.

The chameleon (they are so awesome) is when we use jargon or euphemisms that make something we see as bad seem less terrible.

For example, why would a group campaigning on international issues ever use a term like ‘collateral damage’? It is a term created by the US military in order to make killing civilians sound more acceptable. ‘Collateral damage’ is a classic sanitising frame. Let’s call it ‘killing civilians’, because that is what it is. Likewise, ‘outsourcing’ or ‘down-sizing’ are other examples: they usually just mean ‘firing people’.

Fig 2: The original title ‘Killing Civilians’ didn’t play well with audiences.

The third communications trap is the…

Shark, or contaminated language trap.

While people didn’t go around hugging great white sharks before the 1970s, their image was certainly not as tainted by violence as it is now. The film ‘Jaws’ created huge negative associations with these majestic creatures, forever painting them in the public mind as man-eaters.

Fig 3: Woman saved from shark attack by giant lettering.

All words conjure up beliefs and associations in people and when we use terms with too many negative associations we can damage our cause. The shark trap comes in two forms, the contested term and the contaminated term.

A contested term might be something like ‘refugee’ which the right wing press have spent a long time trying to create negative associations with, but still resonates with many as people fleeing persecution. With a contested frame, we can still use it, and we might even be able to reclaim it, but we must tread carefully in order not to reinforce associations that are unhelpful. A contaminated term is one that we should avoid using at all costs, as we can no longer win it back. This might be something like “Make America Great Again”, where the negative associations are so strongly negative that the term cannot be repurposed for a different use.

The final communications trap is the…

Robin, or rose-tinted trap.

Robins are famous for looking cute, you will see them on Christmas cards looking like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. But this is a lie, they are the Begbies of the animal world! If you have ever had two of them near you when picnicking you will know what I mean.

Fig 4: Begbie, exactly as he appeared in the original Trainspotting.

In communications terms, sometimes we seek to criticise something but the term used to describe it has overwhelming positive associations – like a robin. This means that when we use the term people see it as something positive that we are criticising. Let me explain. ‘Jobs’ are nearly always seen as a good thing: “you are lucky to have a job”, “this development will create jobs”. Talking about good and bad jobs just brings in the positive associations of having a job, because people don’t readily think of jobs as being bad. Instead, we must look at bringing up the issue another way, in terms of workers rights or working conditions, and sometimes that might mean avoiding the term ‘jobs’ itself.

A summary of the animal traps in poster form can also be found here.

Story or Narrative: what’s the difference?

Haziran 6, 2019

We know that the world views of everyone are shaped by what “narratives” are out there. But what does this mean? and how does STORY-telling come into the picture.

This easy set of definitions developed by the Narrative Initiative brings a useful clarification:

Narrative Concepts

These core concepts articulate the different levels at which we engage with narrative specifically in the context of social change. Each category has discrete functions, expressions, and modes of transmission.

Story

Simply put: “In a story, something happens to someone or something. Typically, a story has a beginning, middle and end.”

Narrative

Narratives permeate collections or systems of related stories. They have no standard structure, but instead are articulated and refined repeatedly as they are instantiated in a variety of stories and messages. (Toward New Gravity)

Deep Narrative

Deep narratives are characterized by pervasiveness and intractability. They provide a foundational framework for understanding both history and current events, and inform our basic concepts of identity, community and belonging. Just as narratives permeate collections of related stories, so too do deep narratives permeate collections of related narratives. In Toward New Gravity, we used the term meta-narrative. Over two years of dialogue with peers in the field, we’ve evolved to a preference for the term deep narrative. We see that deep narrative lends itself to more illustrative uses.

These foundational terms are interconnected and reinforce each other over time. We find the concepts much easier to hold onto through an example:

The movie Jaws is a story about an insatiable man-eating shark
All the stories about insatiable, man-eating sharks add up to a broader narrative of sharks being dangerous and predatory creatures
The narrative and stories about sharks rest on powerful deep narratives about the human relationship to nature and a fear of the unknown

So when we are telling our stories of LGBQI+ struggles and/or liberation, how much attention do we pay to broader narratives and, most importantly, to deep narratives?

Sometimes our stories reinforce deep narratives which are broadly unhelpful, like the idea that there are two genders only.

The “screening” for deep narratives should be an essential part of message development.

12 3 4

Category: messaging

Thinking of narratives as mosaics leads us to collective communications strategy

Five principles for creating narrative mosaics with strategic communications

Principle 1: Uniting around the spirit of shared worldviews

The message of ‘a Larger Us’ needs to be at the heart of our strategic communications work. It is more than just a design feature; it is the ‘andamento’ — the spirit that should pulsate through all our communications.

Principle 2. Thinking in moments, rather than campaigns

Principle 3. Building up powerful bonds of reciprocity

Principle 4. Give your subject space to breathe

Principle 5. Accumulation of stories

Practical steps for a mosaic-movement approach to narrative change

Step one: Agree on simple messaging

Step two: Organize content creators

Step 3: Gather and curate stories

Step 4: Salience via distribution

What happens next?

Be ruthless

Target your efforts

Values matter more than policy or facts

Be consistent, employ message discipline

The interesting take-aways for LGBTI campaigners:

Stephen J. Dubner/ Freakonomics Radio

President Nixon famously said, “I am not a crook”.

Parrot, or the refutation trap.

Chameleon, or the sanitising trap.

Shark, or contaminated language trap.

Robin, or rose-tinted trap.

Narrative Concepts

Story

Narrative

Deep Narrative