On the hard problem of separating "normal" from "ok"
you design messages that tell people, and often this is what happens, there's a lot of corruption, the corruption is a big problem, the corruption being a problem is hurting our development, it's hurting the economy, it's hurting jobs. We need to fight corruption. It's time for you to stand up.
What we found, which is consistent with previous studies that have been done in other parts of the world, is that the people who received the anti-corruption messages either had no effect, or they became more likely to pay the bribe in the game.
This is actually a pretty typical example of a trap you can fall into with this kind of public awareness campaign, one that's been known in psychology for quite a while. The first place I actually ran into this was in a study at the Petrified Forest National Park concerning people stealing bits of petrified wood after being exposed to different sorts of messages. They found that saying "The vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, preserving the natural state of the Petrified Forest" was far more effective at preventing people from taking trophies than "Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest." This seems to be a general pattern where public awareness campaigns run the risk of normalizing the behavior they're trying to prevent.
And it's not just bribery and taking souvenirs, either. Public awareness campaigns have a long history of failure. DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), increased drug use. Scared Straight, where kids got to meet criminals who had done time and told them about the experience tended to make the kids more likely to get in trouble. Diversity training tends to decrease the number of women in management.
Different fields have different explanations for why this tends to happen. The normal social psychology explanation, as I understand it, is that norms are very powerful and that if you say that a given behavior, like bribe taking, is normal but wrong then that will tends influence people towards doing it. One economist explanation is that people can see how many people are punished for a behavior but not how many people commit it, so if you way that lots of people are taking bribes but they know not many publicly published then that means that most bribe takers are getting away with it.
I tend to be sympathetic to the whole predictive processing paradigm where our brains don't neatly separate "What should I do here" from "what would a normal person like me do here." Humans are also particularly culturally influenced so that also contributes. But I wouldn't rule out the economist explanation entirely.
Now, there's an elephant here in the room that's been giving me significant look that goes by the name of The Replication Crisis. Recent times have not been kind to counter intuitive psychology findings when people go back to see if they really happen or not. Still, I don't think that elephant is going to quash this finding under its footpads. There's research from psychology and economics and public policy all pointing in this direction and I'd trust that a lot more than any of them in isolation. And different groups coming to this conclusion don't seem to necessarily be familiar with each other's work. So I'm actually thinking that at least most of this research will stand up.
So what do we do about this?
Well, having some message discipline and emphasizing how little people bribe or use drugs or whatever in your messaging might help. The problem is that you want to emphasize severity to get funders and volunteers for your organization. Now, you can always tell your funders that people taking petrified wood from the park will eventually destroy it and also make posters talking about how most people don't steal anything and be 100% correct in both statements. But that's a difficult sort of tightrope to walk.
Another important thing for leaders do is to be sensitive to signs that their messaging is making things worse off. Lets say you try to run an anti-bribery campaign in your country but then people get angry because they think you're stereotyping them as a bunch of extorters. Then chances are that a whole bunch of people who aren't talking to you are taking home the message that bribery is perfectly normal.
I've phrased all this advice in terms of what the leader of an organization should do, but I worry that leaders will seldom be in a position to take it. It seems like the people who are most likely to join an anti-bribery organization are the ones most likely to believe that bribery is a huge problem. And people who emphasize how many people don't take bribes when talking outside the group are going to have to seem a little suspicious. How do you as a group member know if that's clever marketing or just an absence of commitment? And more to the point, exaggerating the problem is exactly how you get more media attention, social or otherwise, which can later turn into influence and get you into a position of leadership.
So I think that this is actually a really hard problem and I don't see any way to help except by doing what I'm doing here. That is, getting more people to be aware of the dangers of normalizing the same behaviors your'e trying to fight.
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