On reflection, Evan Davis is wonderful
I was delighted this morning to see the extensive coverage for an RSA report by my colleague, Dr Jonathan Rowson, called ‘Reflexive Coppers’. The report described a small scale but fascinating study of the value police offers felt they received from insights into cognitive processes and exploring ways of thinking more effectively.
The positive findings reinforced the RSA’s more subtle and empowering approach to behaviour change. Instead of ‘nudging’, which seeks to change choice architecture (for example, putting healthier food more easily in reach than unhealthy in canteens), the RSA’s ‘steer’ approach aims to give people the understanding and tools they need to change their own behaviour. This was particularly relevant to police officers as they try to find a way to reconcile their public order and public engagement functions.
We try at the RSA to be honest about the disappointments as well as the successes of research. So Jonathan’s report also describes the problems police officers had applying the lessons they had learnt from their training, and the limited take up when they were offered an opportunity to have further discussions about reflexivity.
I suspect this latter finding reinforces a point I was making last week about the need to embed more thoughtful ways of operating in day to day work practices. Unless methods of refining individual cognition and regularising group reflection are made a core part of work, attempts to think better are likely to be undermined by day to day pressures.
The Society’s ‘social brain’ strand of work (of which the police report is a part) is central to our broader historical focus on enhancing human capability. Whether the issue is improving children’s attainment, tackling social problems or fostering innovation, how to think and decide more effectively is an important question. Indeed, the RSA is seeking to achieve greater depth than other research organisations by underpinning our practical and policy related work with a set of cross-cutting insights not just on cognition and behaviour change but also social networks, design and social enterprise.
Given the RSA’s broad remit, it is important that we connect the specific focus of our work to wider themes. Which brings me to Evan Davis, who, as we all know, has a background, and continuing interest, in business and the economy. As you can hear, it is the esteemed broadcaster who spontaneously links Jonathan’s work to economic productivity and manufacturing specifically.
Indeed, in a knowledge economy dominated by the service sector the question of how we might organise work so that people are better motivated and more likely to develop and apply new ideas is as vital to business profitability as to public sector efficiency.
In ‘The Righteous Mind’, Jonathan Haidt reports research showing how the quality of people’s reasoning is improved by being forced to reflect for just two minutes, rather than responding to a question spontaneously. With that in mind, look at this research on how our on-line behaviour indicates a growing intolerance of even the most minor delay in gratification.
It is the ability to reflect which makes humans different and social psychology, behavioural economics and other disciplines are finding more and more ways in which our intuition is unreliable. Imagine a world where everyone every day was given the encouragement and the time for structured reflection (sometimes alone, sometimes with others) it is hard to believe it wouldn’t make the world a better place. As work intensifies and information multiplies it is also hard to see how we can make it happen.
Apples, elephants and roosters
The other day I had coffee with Andy Gibson, founder of Mindapples, an organisation which – among other things – aims to give people the information and advice they need to maintain good mental health. As well as being a very active Fellow of the RSA, Andy is a great guy; energetic, ambitious, thoughtful and totally driven by the desire to help people have better lives. I was impressed by the way he combines a big vision with very practical ideas and interventions.
Having just the previous day chaired Jonathan Haidt we got on to elephants and riders. If it is the elephant of instinct which governs our emotions, how can talking to the rider of conscious thought make an impact? While recognising that every person has their own mind apples (the mental equivalent of five a day) there are some proven methods which are fairly easy to enact and which are shown to have an impact on our underlying sense of well-being. For example, regularly writing a list of the things which are good in our lives really does seem to have an effect on our overall positivity.
But what about the jungle; the paths of social norms, pressures and incentives which drive the elephant to take a particular course? How possible is it, I asked, to improve the mental health of employees if an organisation’s working practices tend to make people more anxious and alienated.
There is an echo here of the central argument of the Richard Sennett’ book The Corrosion of Character. The modern white collar workplace with its emphasis on employee flexibility, team working and mission may seem to provide an environment which is more conducive to well-being than the factory floor, but the loyalty expected of employees is not reciprocated by footloose firms driven by the interests of anonymous investors. Like much of Sennett’s work, aspect of the argument can be opaque and the evidence far from convincing, but many people recognise the description of workplaces where employees are supposed to show the responsibilities of committed corporate citizens but are in fact mere items of dispensable human capital. If I recall correctly, Sennett cites a study of poorly paid air stewards showing higher levels of depression and anxiety after they were told to project more warmth to passengers.
For organisations to adopt an holistic approach to mental health they may have to be willing to examine their business model. If the demands of competition or customer care (either because it is disrespectful or too respectful) are inimical to employee resilience or self-respect it may be better not even to try to improve well-being. And if an organisation’s business model has to change it might have implications for customers. I worry that the signs you see in public buildings and on public transport asking people not to abuse or assault staff reinforce a rather negative set of behavioural expectations, but I guess this is the idea I am getting at.
Fortunately, just yesterday, I saw a brilliant example of one small business which has taken the brave step of changing the way it does business in order to assert the right of workers to be treated with respect. If the lead of Little Red Rooster in Norwich was to be followed so that it became socially unacceptable to place a face to face order while on a mobile phone, it would not only be good for the mental health of the staff, I suspect it would be a mind apple for the customers too.
Do the right thing
The RSA was delighted today to host a talk by the social psychologist and public intellectual Jonathan Haidt. I loved Jonathan first big book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ and I wasn’t disappointed by his new creation ’The Righteous Mind – Why good people are divided by politics and religion’. I strongly encourage my readers to buy the book or failing that download the video or podcast of the event from the RSA website in a few days’ time.
But in the meantime here are Jonathan’s three core arguments, and for each a specific highlight of the case which stood out for me plus a question I think the argument raises:
Argument: Because the elephant of intuition is more powerful than the rider of deliberation, moral judgements are firstly and mostly intuitive and only subsequently and occasionally reasoned
Highlight: Experiments which test subjects’ reactions to stories involving abnormal but not strictly harmful behaviour find that, instead of reasoning leading to response, the subjects react first and then develop – often rather contrived – rationales for their reactions
Question: As people in general become more reflexive (more inclined to think about their life and their values) and indeed more neurologically reflexive (aware of their own cognitive frailties) will the power of judgement start to shift from elephant to rider?
Argument: We have six moral ‘taste receptors’: these are care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation. The liberal left has a message which stimulates the first three but is much less relevant to the last three. While the conservative right may not be as credible on care/harm, still, it has a message which stimulates all six receptors.
Highlight: (actually two) in most people the fairness/cheating receptor is more about proportionality (rewards for hard work and punishments for misdemeanours) than ideas of social equality. Put another way, we care more about procedural than distributional justice. And, conservatives tend to be more accurate in describing the views of people on the left than people on the liberal left are in describing what conservatives believe.
Question: While the conservative right may appeal to a greater array of moral instincts, doesn’t this also mean conservatives have to contend with more internal contradictions; most obviously between social conservatism and libertarianism?
Argument: Human beings are 90% chimp (self-interested individuals) and 10% bee (group oriented social animals). Sacred beliefs (by which we usually mean religion) have an evolutionary purpose at the level of group selection in relation to promoting solidarity and sacrifice and discouraging free riding
Highlight: Richard Sosis’ study of two hundred communes in 19th century America found that the more sacrifices that were demanded of members (as part of a religious creed) the more likely by far they were to survive.
Question: How can and should the ‘hive’ instinct evolve in the twenty first century? How do we reconcile the benefits in well-being and pro-sociality of powerful group bonds based on common beliefs and characteristics with the benefits to organisations and societies of diversity and the sheer facts of a shrinking world of moving, connected people?
I do hope that whets your appetite for the book and the podcast. And, by the way, if these are the kinds of questions which interest and motivate you maybe you might want to find out more about applying to be a Fellow of the RSA. Given the antics of a certain Trenton Oldfield on Saturday we may soon have a space to fill
PS Much to my discomfort, and by sheer co-incidence, to illustrate teamwork Jonathan’s first slide today featured two rowing boats!
Getting to the point
A change in my behaviour which people have urged on me is to write shorter posts; so – following a fascinating conversation on the topic with a new Fellow – here are ten points about behaviour change in just over 500 words.
Think of the handful of successful – and seemingly irreversible – collective changes in behaviour in the last few years. How about the shift to lead free fuel, the increase in recycling rates (from 8% to nearly 40% in just over a decade) and take-up in London of the Oyster card. As processes, what did they have in common?
I suggest three things:
First, the public understood the reason for the change (respectively, saving children’s brains, protecting the planet and reducing landfill, and getting in and out of stations more efficiently);
Second, undertaking the change was made pretty easy (respectively, cheap engine conversion, lead free cars, lead free petrol in every forecourt; various recycling aids such as colour coded rubbish bags; and a tap-in card system which worked;
Third, the costs of not doing the right thing was gradually increased as the behaviour changed (leaded petrol costs more and becomes more difficult to find, councils start to become more prescriptive about recycling, the premium for buying conventional tickets rises).
So, if it is this simple, why can’t we achieve a whole slew of the other behaviour change outcomes which people broadly support? Here are four reasons:
The changes above were ones which applied to everyone and so there wasn’t a risk that pushing the issue might be criticising or stigmatising people. This is not the case with behaviours such as eating too much, drinking too much or smoking (all of which habits, by the way, seem now to be going in the right direction).
The changes involved most people in roughly the same magnitude of effort (although going lead free was harder for people with lead petrol cars). Other behaviour changes, for example, home insulation or getting fit may be much easier for some people (with modern houses or gym memberships) than others.
The connection between the behaviour change and the sought outcome was uncontroversial. In other areas it may not be so clear. For example, do all parents feel confident that getting engaged in their children’s learning will be helpful (nor might they necessarily see this as their job), for many middle income earners it is far from clear that saving more for their pension is actually a wise move financially.
Not many people’s identities were wrapped up in using leaded petrol cares, buying paper tickets or disposing of rubbish irresponsibly, but this isn’t the case in relation to some other potentially harmful activities such as gang membership, binge drinking or maxing out on credit cards.
Where does all this obvious thinking take us? Well three words spring to mind: realism, design and reinforcement:
Realism in that unless behaviour change can be made attractive, easy and sticky it is hard to achieve;
Design in that we need to think about how more complex behaviour changes can be broken down into plans and processes which do have these characteristics;
Reinforcement not only in successful change relying on steady reinforcement but that we do as a society successfully change habits for the general good we should underline its value as a way of building collective confidence in future changes.
Good, wise and happy
Reader, if I say that West Brom’s 5-1 weekend victory over Wolves cheered me up only briefly, you will know the slough of despond through which I am now doggedly crawling. Still, life goes on, blogging is a welcome distraction and the comments posted to the previous posts on human development deserve some kind of response.
I earlier suggested that the biggest challenge for advocates of a human development approach (by which I mean the attempt to help more people attain a ‘higher’ level of thinking) is to demonstrate it is possible to bring about a sustained shift in consciousness through a deliberate intervention. Various bits of evidence have been suggested, ranging from specific educational initiatives to a whole community programme in Curacao (although this was forty years ago). Perhaps the most robust evidence comes from research into organisations where, for example, the correlation between more open-minded, collaborative ‘strategic’ leadership styles and success was identified in an influential HBR piece by Rooke and Torbert.
However, there are a number of difficulties with relying on organisational research, particularly in private sector firms. First, researchers tend to focus on leaders and as ‘Junius’ pointed out in his comments this tends to assume that leaders’ interests are the same as the led and as society’s as a whole. Second, research into organisational success factors is renowned for extolling the virtues of successful firms just before they go over a cliff, and – more tellingly – we have to ask why, in a free market, if this style of leadership works, it hasn’t swept all before it.
But given the massive challenges (and costs) involved in undertaking a major process of adult development and then evaluating its long term impact, I have been thinking of another approach.
After a tip off from Number Ten (they really are interested in this stuff) I got hold of a fascinating paper by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So. Here is the abstract:
Governments around the world are recognising the importance of measuring subjective well-being as an indicator of progress. But how should well-being be measured? A conceptual framework is offered which equates high well-being with positive mental health. Well-being is seen as lying at the opposite end of a spectrum to the common mental disorders…. we identify ten features of positive well-being. These combine feeling and functioning, i.e. hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of well-being: competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality. An operational definition of flourishing is developed, based on psychometric analysis of indicators of these ten features, using data from a representative sample of 43,000 Europeans. Application of this definition to respondents from the 23 countries….reveals a four-fold difference in flourishing rate, from 41% in Denmark to less than 10% in Slovakia, Russia and Portugal. There are also striking differences in country profiles across the 10 features. These profiles offer fresh insight into cultural differences in well-being, and indicate which features may provide the most promising targets for policies to improve well-being. Comparison with a life satisfaction measure shows that valuable information would be lost if well-being was measured by life satisfaction. Taken together, our findings reinforce the need to measure subjective well-being as a multi-dimensional construct in future
surveys.
By including aspects like meaning, self-esteem and vitality, Huppert and So’s definition can be seen to be edging towards criteria of higher order functioning. But while high scoring individuals may have better thoughts and better lives does this mean they are good citizens in the demanding sense I have linked to closing the social aspiration gap (citizens who are engaged, resourceful and pro-social)?
A manageable piece of research might involve an in depth survey which explored the correspondence between measures of well-being/flourishing, higher order thinking/consciousness and good citizenship.
It is as well to embark on research with at least some idea of what might represent powerful results. Assuming there is some pattern, there are three possible outcomes, all of which are interesting:
* The factors are strongly correlated with each other but also with another key characteristic, say, for example level of education. This would call into question the value of an adult development programme as distinct from the existing consensus behind raising educational attainment.
* The factors are unevenly correlated with, say, good and happy citizens not exhibiting higher order thinking or – more intriguingly – higher order thinkers being good citizens but not very satisfied with life. Apart from shedding light on the meaning of life (yes please) such findings would suggest which attributes are most important to target through social and political interventions.
* The factors are strongly correlated with each other but not with another confounding variable. The intriguing question then would be: if people with higher order cognitive capacity are also happier and more virtuous why is this not an unstoppable meme which is leading inexorably to a social tipping point past which we enter a wonderful new world? Removing the barriers could provide the core purpose for an emerging policy programme.
So, two questions: has the research already been done (comprehensively – I know there are bits of evidence, for example, of volunteers having higher well-being)? And if it has not, has anyone out there got about £40k so the RSA can do an initial 1,000 person study? Unquestionably the kind benefactor would immediately be overwhelmed by an immense feeling of well-being.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s the answer for poor old maudlin me. Unfortunately, I’m a bit short right now, will £35 be enough to be going on with?
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