Podcast Ep 3 – How self affirmation can change our behaviour

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I’m very pleased to launch episode 3 of my podcast series today – and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to sharing with people, as it’s such an interesting topic. My conversation in this podcast is with Professor Peter Harris, who is a professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

His academic research investigates how people can be encouraged to respond less defensively to important information – especially about their lifestyles or behaviour. This can be particularly important when you’re trying to get people to make positive changes to their lives – from stopping smoking through to simply learning things. In other words, it could help to achieve social change on a range of issues.

In this conversation with Peter we explore the idea of ‘self affirmation’ and how it can help to change people’s behaviour. We also discuss where the research has got to and what the challenges are in turning it from an interesting academic idea into a real-world solution.

It’s a great topic and I hope you enjoy the episode! Please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and share it with everyone!

New podcast – Making the world better

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I’m very excited to announce that my new #podcast ‘Making the world better’ is now live!

In the podcast, I talk to people who are making the world better – not just those tackling big issues at a global scale but also those working at a local level or in less obvious areas too. I want to find out more about what these people do, the issues they’re working on and why they matter. In the end, I want to pay tribute to everyone who’s trying to make things better.

Each fortnightly episode has a different guest – and we’ve got some brilliant people lined up in the first few shows including CEOs of leading charities, political advisors, academics, fundraisers – and people who are working to help others in their local communities.

The podcast is available from all the usual providers, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts (coming soon) and Google Podcast (coming soon), as well as hosted here on https://richarddocwra.com/making-the-world-better/.

Please check out the podcast! I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with as many people as you can, and of course follow it on Spotify if you like it. And if you can take one further amazing step, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (when it’s live there) would be extra helpful and much appreciated.

Carbon disarmament – a new solution to climate change?

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Decades on from my first involvement in the fight against climate change, we have still not found a way to get the change we need on this issue, and the urgency of the crisis is becoming greater every day. I was recently at a talk at the Hay literature festival by a leading environmentalist who trotted out the same old facts about climate change – shocking facts that are only denied by the most ignorant or deluded – yet failed to offer any new solutions on how we go about getting the change we need.

This has been a pattern that most well-meaning people have fallen into on climate change – including experts. There is ample analysis of how bad the situation is, but precious little innovation or creativity in proposing solutions that are big and ambitious enough to tackle such an unprecedented global issue.

So, I’d like to offer one!

First, let us note what any solution needs to achieve. It needs to:

  • Be applied on an international, global scale, but also be an idea that can transfer to the micro-scale of our individual lives
  • Be something that can achieve significant change within a short-term window
  • Go beyond the vagaries and short termism of modern democratic politics
  • Be something that reflects the severity of the problem we face
  • And finally, if we are to implement it in the short term (which we must, given the latest projections of the impact of climate change), it must be something that isn’t seen to threaten people’s freedoms or modern lifestyles.

The last point is probably the most controversial of the lot, and, as an environmentalist and proponent of what is termed ‘new economics’, it is something I have struggled to come to terms with.

Ultimately I would like to see a complete recalibration of our economic system into one that doesn’t promote economic growth for the sake of it, regulates consumption within the limits of one planet and promotes lifestyles that recognise that having more material goods is not the route to happiness. However, in the west we currently live in a culture that is so dominated by the idea of freedom and the philosophy of neoliberal economics and consequently so unwilling to make perceived downgrades in lifestyles that it will take decades before we can achieve such a cultural shift in the political class and the broader population.

And the need to address climate change is so urgent that we simply don’t have the time to wait for these shifts in culture to occur before we try to resolve the climate issue. So how can we do it quicker?

Like many things in the modern world, I suggest the answer lies in how we frame the issue – and then how we communicate it to people. Here are some thoughts.

Stopping disaster

First, we should not present the solution to climate change as imposing limits on people or their lifestyles, however much we may think this is the right long-term approach, as they (and the politicians that represent them) simply won’t go for this in the short term. Instead, we should present it as stopping a catastrophic event from happening.

As we will see this approach has a number of advantages, and has been successful in achieving large-scale change on other issues, from nuclear disarmament through to smoking.

Global politics – the carbon arms race

One way to achieve this at a national level is to reframe carbon – from its current frame as a vital source of energy and an enabler of lifestyles, and into a new one – as a deadly weapon and an immediate, destructive threat to the entire global community.

In this way of framing the debate, a country’s use of carbon can be likened to its supply of nuclear weapons – a threat to the global community, and something to be reduced as soon as possible.

We are therefore looking for an end to the global carbon arms race – and seeking global de-carbonisation.

Like nuclear weapons, carbon can be seen as a means of gaining competitive advantage on other countries, so the process of global de-carbonisation should take place through a global treaty that enables countries to reach a negotiated reduction without individual actors feeling they are losing out or becoming more vulnerable in relation to others as part of the settlement.

The carbon left in the ground, like the uranium used for nuclear weapons, would be seen as a potentially harmful substance that should remain in the ground.

Individual level – carbon as a health threat

We can carry this analogy of carbon as a toxic threat down to an individual level, where we want to frame high carbon usage as highly antisocial and damaging – a source of shame, with low usage a sign of virtue.

At an individual level this framing therefore has a parallel with the campaign against smoking – an antisocial habit to be shunned. Or, for a more current example, the use of unnecessary plastics in daily life. Something to be ashamed of.

This would make the threat of climate change much more immediate and urgent on a personal level, and enable the campaign to target a range of areas of people’s lives that are contributing to their carbon output and climate change, and directly challenge people to stop them as they are antisocial health threats to other people and the planet.  These areas would need to be prioritised carefully for the impact they have, and could include:

  • Driving petrol cars
  • Flying
  • Eating meat
  • Not saving energy at home
  • Over-consuming material goods and services

The detail of the campaign messaging can be agreed at a later date, but one approach could be ‘Do you really need to take this flight/eat this burger/drive this car?’ and show the potential impact of each flight/burger/journey on the world and other people. Not by using statistics about usage – eg ‘each flight uses 1 ton of CO2’ – as this is like saying ‘smoking a cigarette uses one cigarette’. Instead we need to show the potential impact of this action – and focus this on things people care about – such as their lives, loved ones and other people. We have seen this work with some success in the current campaigning on the use of plastics, and showing pictures where plastics are causing suffering to animals we care about – such as sea turtles. We need to tell stories that resonate with people.

To date, there has been very little campaigning that criticises people for carbon-heavy aspects of their modern lives. A carbon reduction campaign needs to do this, in order to challenge people directly about the impact they are having on the world. This unwillingness to challenge people in their daily lives has been one of the great failures of the climate change movement to date – it has tried to make people feel good about making very minor changes without criticising them for what they’re already doing – for example, flying and eating red meat. We need a much greater sense of urgency.

This will be a significant change of direction, and could be controversial and a jolt to many people. But this is precisely what we need – a sense of urgency and passion.

Conclusions

The above ideas are simply examples of the ways we could reframe the issue of climate change, and there may well be other more effective ideas out there. But we urgently need to consider not the problem (as this is established), but how we will go about solving it – and do so  from the position we’re at now as a global society and culture, and our knowledge of how to influence people.

How British politics is changing – for the better

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Many of us with pro-environmental and liberal values have been feeling battered and under threat over the last three or four years as we’ve watched the rise of right-wing populism in our own country, in the US and around Europe.

The evidence suggests however that this is not the whole picture – and in fact, there are other trends taking place that provide hope to the liberal world view.

For example, as campaigner and values expert Chris Rose notes, “Since July 2017 a majority of the country have swung (increasingly) to be pro-Remain (analysis by the UK’s leading pollster here).”

In fact, there continues to be an underlying increase in the number of ‘Pioneers’ – essentially people with liberal, progressive values – and this is being driven by the emergence of a younger generation with a greater tendency towards these values. So, there is perhaps hope for the future.

There is also a change emerging in the historically binary nature of UK politics, as a new ‘values’ dimension is arising in our system, acting as a new ‘top-down’ axis cutting down the middle of the current horizontal ‘left-right’ axis. At the top of this new axis are values like gender equality and environmental sustainability (essentially ‘Pioneer’ traits) and at the bottom are values like stopping immigration (common ‘Settler’ traits).

This change is causing fractures in the main two political parties, built as they were many years ago on the basis of social class politics. In the last week we have seen departures from both the Conservative and Labour parties of politicians who found their parties weren’t able to adequately represent their progressive values. We have seen the same thing at the other end of the values spectrum, with the ERG wing of the Conservatives straining at the edges of the party and just managing to remain within its outer lining rather than tearing out of it. Sadly for progressives, these pro-Brexit traditional values still seem to be holding sway over the leadership of the two main political parties, even if they do not represent the majority of their MPs, or indeed the population as a whole now.

As Chris Rose argues, “the slow but powerful current of values change will sooner or later prove an irresistible force. The most dynamic expression of this in the UK right now is support for the school and student strikes over climate change, led almost entirely by young women, most too young to vote.”

But we need to make the most of this underlying trend towards progressivism – and do so now. Rather than feeling ashamed that young people have proved more dynamic than anyone else in taking action on these issues, the rest of us need to take immediate action too, and show the establishment parties that we want policies and country that reflects our values.  This applies to a range of issues, including climate change, but in the next few days and weeks it should start with progressive political action to seek a second referendum or a more measured approach to Brexit. There is an opportunity – and we need to take it.

It’s important for anyone seeking progressive change to understand how these forces are working to shape the political landscape, and to consider how they can be harnessed more effectively for campaigns and social change.

To read more about this fascinating issue, read Chris Rose’s blog.

 

Influence – a problem that goes beyond obesity

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An article has appeared today in The Guardian which talks about the many ways in which our everyday environments have been built to encourage us to consume fatty, sugary, junk food, and that we need to see some policy interventions from the government to change aspects of our daily environment in order to address the current obesity epidemic. Possible steps suggested in the article include “tighter controls on the advertising and promotion of junk food, and the closing of loopholes that allow social media to bypass regulations imposed on other media.”

Unfortunately, the issue of obesity is only one small part of a much bigger problem, which commentators and policy makers still don’t seem to have woken up to. The problem is this – the latest psychological research shows that human beings are not as rational as we think we are. We can be strongly influenced by the environment and other people around us, and we live in a complex world with more influences acting upon us than ever before – including politics, the media, advertising and many others.

As a result, many of us end up being moulded by these influences, leading to us getting trapped within restricted worldviews, lives and behaviours that simply follow the dominant ideas of the people and society that surround us – often for the worse. This includes the example of obesity but could equally apply to consumerism, greed, the rise of the far right or religious fanaticism.

This can not only be harmful to our own lives, but can also have serious implications for society, as it leaves us vulnerable to manipulation by others – including materialism, the press and the influence of political demagogues. At a time of political upheaval and rising populism, this is clearly an urgent issue.

Given this picture of non-rational human beings and the complex, pressurised world we live in, we need to be given the skills to live our own well-informed lives and not simply be moulded by other people – including the wealthy and powerful. We also need a society that helps to protect our mental freedom and provides the conditions for us to think for ourselves.

Sadly, the society we currently live in and the institutions that surround us – including our children’s education system – don’t recognise the importance of these skills and don’t equip us with them to anywhere near the level we need. In fact, we live at a time where the external conditions in society actually militate against us developing them.

We need to do two key things to deal with this:

a) We need to build a society and environment around people to help them flourish, and this has to include providing the conditions in which people can think for themselves without undue influence from other people, companies or anyone else with the power to manipulate them. A good example of this is when the food and retail industry spends millions of pounds trying to influence us to make unhealthy food choices, which damage our health and ruin our lives, but increase their profits. But it extends to many other areas of life – from advertisers trying to manipulate people, through to politicians trying to influence people into particular political decisions. Essentially, we need to help people build and protect their ‘mental freedom’.

b) We need to equip people with the information and mental tools to understand how they can be manipulated like this, and be able to resist it and truly think for themselves about what they want from every aspect of their lives (as far as it is possible to do this).

The new book I have written for Life Squared, called ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it‘, explores this issue in more depth and argues for it to be taken much more seriously as a policy priority. We are actively allowing ourselves to be manipulated, trapped and damaged by other people – especially those with the wealth and power to influence us – and we need to stop this, and build a society where the welfare of people comes before profit or any other priority.

The Life Trap – and how to escape it will be published as a free book and audiobook on 24th May 2018 at www.lifesquared.org.uk. To get an exclusive advance copy a week before its launch date, sign up to Life Squared’s newsletter here.

Moral impotence and the tragedy of Aleppo

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Like many people, I’ve been watching the reports of the destruction and terror in Aleppo with a sense of utter horror. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the situation is a feeling that I’m unable to do anything useful about it. And as someone who helps charities show people how to take action and make the world better, this is quite distressing.

I could sign a petition, but this won’t get to people in power in time to prevent the current suffering. I could donate to a charity in Syria that’s in Aleppo and helping people – which I have done. I could tweet about it to express my opinion, but there is so much misinformation and opinion already out there about the political situation that it will get lost in the noise and hot air.

All I can really do to express is my sense of guttural horror at what the people caught up in the violence are experiencing, my feeling of deepest sympathy for their suffering and my grating sense of profound guilt, impotence and inadequacy that I can’t find a way to make it better.

This may seem like an immature, naïve reaction – to want to change the world when one hears emotive stories of people suffering – and maybe it is. Perhaps it’s not the voice of someone who should be objectively considering the big picture and helping to come up with hard-headed strategies to improve things in the long term.

But I just hope the factions that are committing the violence – from all sides – will adopt some of this naïve, simple human compassion and find a way to help the remaining people of Aleppo escape from their nightmare – now.

On the CUSP of a better future?

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Yesterday I was at the launch of a new initiative, called the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). The event was chaired (and the centre is run) by Professor Tim Jackson, one of the country’s leading thinkers on sustainable economics, and the author of one of the best (and most accessible) books on the subject – Prosperity Without Growth.

It was really pleasing to see that a centre has now been set up to push forward work on the idea of sustainable prosperity – or creating a world “in which people everywhere have the capability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological and resource constraints of a finite planet.”

This is not just about climate change, economic inequality or well-being – it incorporates most modern progressive issues and touches every area of our individual lives and society. In short, it is probably the most important challenge that human beings are presented with right now.

So, the launch of this centre is welcome (to say the least), and another useful aspect of the centre is its focus on both research and practice – not only putting together rigorous academic thinking on how to achieve a more sustainable future, but also testing this thinking out and putting it into action, as the latter is what is most urgently needed. I hope the work of CUSP will be complementary to that of existing organisations like nef, who have done great work in getting individuals, politicians, businesses and other institutions to take this range of issues seriously and start gaining traction in tackling the challenges they present.

One question that was asked at the launch event yesterday was how we can get politicians to take action on a radically sustainable agenda. Caroline Lucas gave a good answer, in that we need more courageous politicians who are prepared to do more radical things, and that the only way they’ll develop the confidence to do this is to know that they won’t be punished at the ballot box for doing so. The way to give them this confidence is for people to show them that we want these policies.

So, ultimately, we – the public – have an important role to play in making this change happen – by being vocal in our support for sustainable economic policies, opposing the status quo, supporting companies and institutions that are trying a new way of working and generally by showing politicians this is how we want the future to be.

In conclusion, this will only happen by us leading the politicians. So let’s join the movement, support these organisations and start showing politicians that we want more fun, and less stuff!

#CUSPlaunch #MakeProsperityMatter

Change is hard

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Change can be difficult to achieve.  Change on a global scale can be very difficult to achieve – perhaps even impossible.  And, despite what we may want to think as campaigners, we may not be in control of all the levers that need to be pulled to achieve the change we want – in fact, we may have no influence over some of them at all.

I think these are important realities for campaigners to face up to – particularly those battling certain global issues, like climate change – as they could help them to set more realistic expectations, communicate better and prioritise their activities better.

Click on this link to see how this applies to the prospects for change on the issue of climate change and energy consumption – as developed in ‘The Story of Energy’ for Life Squared.

Consuming experiences, not stuff, is still consumerism

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I went to an interesting talk at the RSA today by James Wallman who has just published a book called ‘Stuffocation’. His basic argument was that in the society of scarcity of around a generation ago, what mattered in life was having more stuff – i.e. in a society of scarcity, materialism is not a dirty word.

But as we have moved into a society of plenty, materialism and ‘more stuff’ are no longer the answer to the question of ‘What will make us happy?’. So far, so good.

He goes on to suggest that, in our society of plenty, what we do is now more important than what we havein terms of its contribution to our happiness. He therefore advocates the idea of ‘experientialism’ – of seeking experiences rather than new stuff.

He made some interesting arguments but the trouble is he didn’t go far enough. He was careful to state that he didn’t want his ideas to be seen as anti-consumerist – but why not? The only way they would have any real value is if they wereanti-consumerist. Otherwise, he is simply shifting the problem of consumption from stuff to experiences. We’ll be on a treadmill seeking the next new experience and trying to find the money and lifestyles to enable these experiences to happen, and rather than enjoying our experiences our lives will become a list of experiences to try and tick off. It’ll be no different to our attitudes towards stuff today. And in fact we already have this attitude towards experiences! See the forthcoming Life Squared booklet ‘How to achieve less’ – out at the end of the year – for more details on this issue.

The problem we have in the modern world is about much more than having too much stuff and the fact that this doesn’t make us happy. The broader problem is the fact that our lives are focussed on acquiring this stuff and of chasing a particular vision of ‘the good life’ that seeks us to acquire more. The point is that we’re making too many sacrifices in terms of our personal identities, autonomy, stress levels and fulfilment in order to chase this pointless acquisition.

We live in a bubble in the modern world. We need to help people burst this bubble and live truly autonomous lives. That is the only way we’ll lead the fulfilled lives we really want – and sadly just changing our consumption from stuff to experiences won’t do this.

Listen, don’t change

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I was at the Compass Change:How? conference today and was struck by a few things in a discussion we had about ‘why it’s so hard getting people to change’.  By this it meant getting members of the public to take action for a more progressive, sustainable (etc.) world.

The first thing that struck me was the way that many people seeking change on progressive issues seem to believe there are two sets of people – first, us – the people seeking a better world, who are ethical, intelligent, well-informed and see the world for how it really is, and them – the general public that we are trying to influence – who aren’t so enlightened and don’t care so much.  This assumption is deeply condescending to other people and completely untrue.  And is perhaps at the root of our problem of why we find it so hard to gain social change.

The second thing that interested me directly follows from this point – it was the assumption we have as ‘change seekers’ that other people need to be ‘changed’ in some way – in other words, the idea that we need to shift them from their current position to another one, because we don’t approve of their current position.  When we articulate it like this, it’s not hard to see why we’re having problems gaining social change on key issues – because we’re trying to herd people into opinions and actions that they’re not currently prepared to take, and we’re doing so in a way that pays little attention or respect to what they think.

These observations gained greater credibility in my mind as one member of the conference suggested that the best way he had found to gain change was to actually ask people what matters to them and then to listen to their views properly and respectfully – and then try to find a course of action that takes account of these.  It’s really no surprise that this should be one of the most successful ways of gaining change as it doesn’t try to change people – it tries to change issues by focussing on the things that people care about.

But this idea of ‘listening to people’ has its risks for the progressive change makers.  I hear many progressive voices saying that we must become more democratic and let people have a voice – but at the same time they want people to hold particular views and behave in particular ways.  These two aims are conflicting – it’s one or the other.

As people seeking change, we’ve got to work out what we want from people.  If democracy matters to us and we want to let people have a voice we have to do this whilst understanding that people may choose some things we don’t like as progressives.

These are just thoughts I’m chewing over at the moment, and I’ve not formed a definitive opinion on them but they do provide food for thought….