studying other weather systems...

If you want to learn more about how weather works on Earth, it is useful to study it on other planets ...

 

With a few others I've been spending a bit of time thinking about how to motivate people to respond to global warming and to "do the right thing" (whatever that is).   I've visited the problem before and can list some bad approaches, so some of time has been spent looking at how people deal with other issues.

 

One of them is obesity.  I'm familiar with some of the issues and have been interested in the energy flow of food and exercise, but the societal problem is significant and most top down public efforts to deal with it have been failures.   Most of the approaches are far too simplistic and seem to rely on trying to scare people.  Diets are difficult and mostly are failures if you look at results a year after the diet began.¹  Combine scare tactics with non-workable approaches and you have a bad recipe for change.  Thanks in large part to several friends who read this - Colleen, Jheri, Juliette and Sukie - I found an approach that works for one person.  It has left me with the sense that more global solutions will be very difficult demanding top down and grass root approaches.

 

It is understandable why people use the sensationalist approach, but there are a class of problems that don't respond.  Our wiring simply isn't well suited to long term efforts where change is subtle.  During this morning's rowing session I was going through some podcasts on the subject and came across a Yale Rudd Center interview of Samantha Thomas of Monash University. (mp3 - about 24 minutes - highly recommended if you are interested in this sort of thing).  She notes approaches need to be more positive in nature and current approaches are not just unworkable, but are often counterproductive. 

 

One of the learnings I've had over the past several years is people don't respond to number and the use of logic.  Such an approach may work with some and it is natural for anyone with a scientific background, but it won't sway most people and can be counterproductive.   It is also open to attack by pseudoscience and the ensuing argument can create a numbing cloud of confusion.  The pseudoscience tactic worked very well for the tobacco industry and it seems to be working well now.

 

A few years ago I gave a series of talks on the subject that mostly failed.  I think I could do a better job now, but probably not a great job.  A very useful book (although I'm not in complete agreement) is Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson.  Randy has a Ph.D. and had a tenured position in marine biology at UNH.  His midlife crises was to quit and become a Hollywood filmmaker.  His approach is to concentrate on messages that might communicate.  A fascinating book and very different from the standard sciencey approach.  A few others practice other interesting approaches - Neil deGrasse Tyson and E.O. Wilson for example.

 

For the time being I'm still looking around. A friend, Belinda Nnoka,  has just written a book on bullying - another interesting problem that certainly occurs with heavy people.  I've seen a draft and found it interesting how she breaks down a very complex problem and looks at grass root approaches to solving the problem - at least locally.  There are some similarities in some approaches used in weight loss and bullying.

 

Some of you have serious marketing chops.  If anyone has any interesting ideas, I'd love to listen ...  let's have a conversation.

 

But all of this is just mechanics - figuring out a way to begin to motivate people to do something about global warming or having a society become less obese.  The point of this note is the importance of studying other systems - those other worlds that happen to have weather systems that might spark a bit of insight.  It turns out you meet some interesting and passionate people and perhaps both of you gain something as a result.  It can be enormous fun.

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¹ Much has been written on this, but a great introduction is Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - the Myths and Realities of Weight Loss by Gina Kolata (one of the better science writers out there).  Most of the studies are too short term to see if approaches fail or not and most are funded by companies who are pushing a product.  This amounts to really bad science - failing for decades and still trying the same approach over and over.

 

Comments

[Jean Russell]

the work I have been tracking on motivation and influence includes:
Cialdini - Influence (he writes on the science of persuasion)
NLP - Neuro-linguistic programming. Find someone who does the desired thing well, model out what they do, and then do it. Also, with the NLP coaching work I did, we worked a lot on belief change. It is like re-programming the brain.
I find all the new behavioral economics and neuroscience work very interesting. Drive, Sway, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, seem to be the biggest titles, but I also have several others. I think a good body of this work will help us understand and then use the actual ways people operate to our collective advantage.
What other sources are you looking at?

I am sure there is a whole area of visual persuasion - such as using teal and orange to trigger emotion and emotional recall. Orange stands out in memory. Etc. Strangely most of the knowledge in this comes from sales/marketing research and not some general curiosity about how people function.

Thanks for the inquiry.