Nudging Again and the “What if?” Proposition

In his 2007 book Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken notes that there are currently over 1 million organizations, most operating at the grass-roots level, dedicated to making things better for people and the planet on which we live. He notes that these organizations have a very similar core message, whether they are focused on reviving the environment or instituting social justice, and that message is the need to treat each other and our world in a way that is congruent with a set of commonly held ethics. He also notes that, far from the minority of ineffectual and ragtag extremist groups they are often touted to be, these groups are growing in their effectiveness and represent a growing majority of people who hold opinions on these issues. In fact, he suggests that these organizations represent the largest social movement in the history of the world. But most people are unaware of this fact.

On a different note, Sanjay Gupta recently wrote an article for Time pointing out that a dieter may double their weight loss by writing down the food they eat on a daily diary. Why? Because it keeps them from fooling themselves and potentially from fooling others.

So what do these two messages have in common?

First, let’s look at one more item. Wikipedia states, “There are two principles that any definition of democracy include. The first principle is that all members of the society have equal access to power and the second that all members enjoy universally recognized freedoms and liberties.” American’s, of course, live in a republic, which means we elect officials to make the important decisions for us and power is anything but equally shared and our liberties are hardly universally recognized. Be that as it may, we continue to go about our daily lives as if we lived in a democracy.

Now, what do all three of these ideas have in common?

What they have in common is the notion of a false social norm. Remember that one? I won’t fully repeat a previous blog but suffice it to say that a false social norm is an idea that people believe most other people believe, when in fact they do not. So when I say, “Most people prefer the color blue,” when in fact they prefer green, I am stating a false social norm. And if you nod your head and smile in agreement you are accepting a false social norm, at least on the outside.
So why is this important? After all, most people believe some things that aren’t true and most people don’t like to argue. So what? Well this is what – when people think that an opinion is held by the majority they are less likely to speak their own mind if they hold a differing opinion, and more likely to either keep quiet or pretend to agree. And if people’s real opinions about important issues don’t get expressed then people won’t realize that most other people might agree with them and a false reality gets created that doesn’t fix things that need fixing in the real world and most likely will harm everyone in the long run. However, if real social norms are made explicit then people can make good decisions based upon their agreements and deal with the minor number of disagreements they might have at a later time.

Therefore, a food diary creates a true account. (See how I cleverly slipped this in here?) And families that share their diaries get an even greater benefit because they tend to eat less when other people explicitly know what they eat. This is a true social norm versus a false social norm. And there is a social norm for social and environmental change, a really big one, but most people don’t know it yet.

So what if we knew how most other people really felt? Would it change our behavior? Would it cause us to really look at the facts to see what is really going on and to do something about them? Perhaps…. But what if the information were easier to find, like a food diary? What if, say, we could see the federal budget without spin, commentary, or boilerplate? What if it were on a daily ticker in the corner of our computer screens? What if we saw our carbon footprint, our military capability, or our educational standards compared to those of other countries on a daily basis? How about our healthcare costs and the quality of care we receive and how many people receive it and how long it takes, or the treatment of our troops, or our standing in the eyes of the world, or our energy consumption, or our national debt, or our average household debt, or what the real average salary is and how long people really work and how many jobs they hold and how many people have to work in a household to make ends meet? Wouldn’t that make things a bit easier to assess? And what if we had a democracy where we were able to vote on all of these things? What if we could vote on whether or not to go to war? What if we could vote on how the federal budget is spent and how much we are taxed? What if we could vote on all of the really important stuff? What if the “smart crowd” phenomenon could take hold on a national level?

What if our commonly held ethic was a dedication to finding and disseminating the real truth? And what if we really had something to say about what is done about it when the truth is revealed? That, I think, would truly be a democracy. And we might just start to effectively address many of the truly pressing issues of our time with willpower and resources sufficient to produce real and productive change.

So how about this for a start, let’s have a federal daily diary that is easy to read and easy to get. And then let’s start talking to each other about what we really think and then let’s vote on this stuff. It is, after all, the essence of American democracy.

Posted by Paul on August 10, 2008

How the U.S. Presidential Campaign Looks from the Sweaty Perspective of a Texas Heat Wave

Humans and the human condition being what they are, I suppose there are no "unstrange" times. Not in your and my lifetimes. Not in any lifetimes.

But these current times are certainly times that give pause.

At the moment here in Texas, we are in one of our summer heat waves. It is not (at least thus far) as severe as the worst in my memory. That was in 1980 when our air conditioner seemed to never quit running. When the entire family went to the community swimming pool every afternoon about 2 o’clock because the thought of facing the rest of the afternoon without a period of extreme, ongoing-for-a-time wetness was simply unbearable. We went something like almost 60 days, as I recall, with a daily high exceeding 100 degrees, accompanied of course by Texas’ non-desert-like humidity. But this summer's retched temperature excess, while not yet recording-setting in its longevity, is already feeling both excessive and retched.

And it certainly created a vivid tableau for reading economist Paul Krugman's column last week in which he quoted a global warming researcher who has estimated that there is a 5 percent chance that global temperatures will end up rising about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. If that happens, then that will pretty much put a wrap on civilization as we know it.

All of which makes the current campaigns for President of the United States seem like travesties when they aren’t coming across as imbecilities.

The Democrats are wimps. Cowardly donkeys braying about change while fearing hourly that they may actually be perceived by the electorate as a party that might bring needed changes about.

The Republicans are simply not trustworthy on any topic, issue or need. They have been so successful at telling lies that they are incapable of recognizing even the simplest truths.

The third party candidates are all clowns of one degree or another, one stripe or another, one sacred cow or another, one silly bias or another.

The thing is, the quality of our politicians and the vapidness of our political discourse and the inconsequential nature of our proposed solutions compared to the rising tide of probable Life-threatening calamities that surround us are what we deserve. That is, what is to be expected given each of our own personal inabilities to act very much differently than we have been acting.

I truly fear for our future.

And I would truly be without hope were it not for a seemingly built-in quality to our neck of the Universe that I tend to think of as the self-righting instinct—or SRI.

Systems do, crowds of people do, individuals do at times institute the most remarkable of turnarounds for reasons that are beyond the kin of anyone involved or anyone looking on, currently or in the future.

One observation about the SRI is that it is really never “happenstancial.” It is always fueled and fed by circumstances. So it is certainly suicidal as a species, facing what we are facing, to fold our hands this time and sit awaiting and expecting the SRI’s arrival.

All around us, there are points needing to be tipped. There are butterfly wings needing to be flapped. There are jeremiads needing to be shouted forth, and there are changes sorely needing to be made or started toward.

There’s the prospect of a planet-wide train wreck looming. As my colleague Paul Kordis confirmed for Americans with his monumental Ph.D. dissertation last year at Colorado State University (more than fifteen hundred final pages containing an unrelenting drumbeat of evidence that America as it is now practiced is unsustainable), there’s a bifurcation coming.

Travel one road and we’re sure to be going the route of unprecedented pain, ruin and dissolution.

Our one, remaining hope is to take the other road. A terribly difficult task when most everyone, including America’s presidential hopefuls, are speeding along the turnpike leading to tomorrow with their eyes so often blithely closed and their sensibilities so often calibrated to their own narrow self-interests.

Yet I’m not one to espouse the view that people should sit out elections—and in particular this election—because “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference" between any of the candidates or parties. My reason, though, for supporting the Democratic candidate is probably not a very widespread one.

I sense something in the Obama phenomenon. I sense the lurking presence of the SRI. I sense that even Mr. Obama can perceive it, even if he most likely doesn’t understand exactly what it is. That would explain some of his alleged “arrogance” and his ability to view much of the daily abuse of the campaign trail with seeming amusement and/or detachment.

Sitting here mulling on all this in this summer’s Texas heat, I suspect that even the more perceptive of the Republicans can sense it. That’s why they have derisively labeled Mr. Obama “The One.”

If he isn’t, then America probably isn’t going to have much of a say in what happens to the planet’s travails—or how it happens. The SRI has a lot more choices and places to choose from this time. And we all best hope that it will soon be getting about the choosing.

Posted by Dudley on August 03, 2008