How can we start humanising the world?

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I’ve given quite a few talks and spoken with a lot of people since the publication of my book ‘Humanise: how knowing ourselves can change the world’ late in 2024. It’s been well received, and the audiences I’ve spoken to about it have found its vision of a humanised world very attractive. As result, the question that has most often come up has been ‘How can we take practical steps to move towards a more humanised world?’.

This is a question of particular relevance and urgency in the political and cultural times we live in globally, in which many aspects of the world appear to have quickly lurched in the opposite direction recommended by the book since its publication. These include the rise of populism, conflict, prejudice, environmental destruction and, overall, the dismantling of existing protective structures around human beings (such as the US pulling out of the Paris climate agreement) rather than the building of further structures to promote our flourishing.

I’ve therefore written the paper below to answer the increasingly urgent question of ‘What can each of us do to move from where the world is to a more humanised world?’. It contains 6 practical steps we can all take to start the shift towards a more humanised world – and at the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a more important issue than this.

Click here to read the paper (pdf).

 

Please also share the paper with your friends, colleagues and networks!

‘Humanise’ – new book out 25th October 2024

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I’m very excited to announce that my fourth book ‘Humanise: How knowing ourselves could change the world’ will be out on Friday 25th October 2024.

A summary of the book is here, but the core aim of the book has been to provide an accessible yet reasonably accurate picture of how human beings think and behave, and then apply this to some of our most pressing challenges as creatures. It is based on the idea that there is little chance of us building a better society or addressing our challenges as a species if we don’t understand ourselves as creatures first.

Yet, as the book reveals, this is exactly what we have been trying to do over recent decades. Most people – including policy makers and politicians – have an inaccurate or incomplete conception of how human beings think and behave, based on out-of-date thinking from the Enlightenment, and this has hampered our ability to tackle major human challenges including the obesity crisis, disinformation, prejudice, violence and climate change.

The third part of the book seeks to bring all these themes together and ask why we seem to be struggling as creatures with aspects of the modern world, including the challenges mentioned above. It argues that the modern world we have built around us actually represents a hostile environment for human beings in a number of ways, and argues that the only way to build a world in which humans can flourish is to ‘humanise’ the ideas, institutions and structures that surround us. These radical changes will help support rather than exploit some of our cognitive and behavioural vulnerabilities – from our inbuilt thinking biases to our tendency for tribalism – and help nurture some of our traits that will be more useful in our interdependent modern world, including our ‘superpower’ of co-operation.

It is a hopeful but radical book that will challenge people’s views of what they are, as well as some of our most basic ideas, institutions and assumptions – from freedom to education. I feel it provides some basic foundations that could give us the most realistic chance of building a better and more sustainable future for our species and the planet.

The book has been a huge undertaking as it is essentially 3 books in one, with each requiring a strong review of the evidence base. The first part is a psychology book, the second an analysis of 5 key human challenges and the third part a discussion of political, social and practical possibilities for the world we could build ourselves in the future. Overall, I hope it is a book that will be both interesting and stimulate future research and action on how to build a better future based on understanding the creatures we really are.

Click here to pre-order it!

Talks

I’m doing an online talk to promote the book on the 28th October 2024. It would be lovely to see you there. The link to book (free) tickets is below:

Building a world fit for humans

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Our understanding how human beings think and behave is one of the most important tools we have available to make our world and our lives better. Yet, we are failing to use this knowledge.

A couple of decades ago, psychology was released into the real world in a discipline that has become known as ‘Behavioural Economics’, in which pychological knowledge is used to nudge, prod and cajole people into specifc actions. This is sometimes used to achieve behaviour change on important topics – for example the United Nations produced a report in 2021 showing how behavioural science can be used to help achieve its Sustainable Development Goals. In other cases, it is used for commercial purposes – for example, to help design the layout of supermarkets so that customers will buy more products.

There is a growing industry of consultants and agencies offering their services to help clients harness human behaviour to achieve their aims – whatever they are.

It’s no surprise that psychology is being used for commercial purposes as well as laudable humanitarian ones, as it’s a powerful tool. What is surprising to me however is that we only seem to be using it at a micro level – to gain detailed changes in individual human beings – and only very rarely to explore the bigger picture, of society, politics and our future.

It may simply be because behavioural economics is the most useful tool immediately from a commercial perspective, so this is where the money has gone. But there are significant ways we can rethink and improve the world if we applied our understanding of human beings to the systems, ideas and institutions that govern us.

Our knowledge of how human beings think and behave has dramatically increased in the last 80 years, as advances in knowledge and a desire to understand the horrors of the Second World War accellerated research into how and why we behave as we do.

Despite these advances in understanding, most people, including those who are writing our economic policies, building our instititions and setting our pollitical and social visions, still have an old-fashioned and innacurate view of human beings – one that can be traced back to the Enlightenment, over 200 years ago. It is the picture of human beings as ‘rational calculating machines’ – creatures that make balanced, informed decisions on the information available to them. The reality is far from this however, and a great deal more complex.

We are creatures with a range of mental and behavioural adaptations to help us simplify the world, pass our genes on, live in tribes and function in the environment that our hunter-gather ancestors lived in up to 12,000 years ago. As a result, we are not rational calculating machines – we are much more complex than this. Our particular thinking and behavioural traits have enabled us to build our population to 8 billion people on this planet that live relatively peacefully together.

As creatures evolved for a hunter-gatherer existence and environment however, we can find it difficult to adapt to the challenges and expectations we face in the twenty-first century world we have created – from the need for global co-operation on existential issues such as climate change, through to the need to deal with massive levels of information and lifestyle choices.

We expect ourselves to overcome these challenges, and we tend to label people as stupid or evil if they fail to do so. Yet we are living within systems and institutions (political, economic, social and many others) that have been built based on the incorrect ‘rational calculating machine’ view of human beings. And some have been built on other aims than helping human beings to flourish in a finite world. This means, in some cases, we are using tools sucha as behavioural economics to actually exploit our mental vulnerabilities, rather than helping to protect them to enable human beings to flourish. Why would we set up supermarkets to ‘nudge’ people to buy more unhealthy food otherwise?

Our knowledge about human beings could help us redesign the world and our lives in a way that is suitable for the creatures we really are – and with the aim of helping human beings to flourish within the parameters of our planet. From systems that promote greater international co-operation through to mass communication methods that don’t incentivise hate and division. But our challenges are urgent, so we need to get on to this job now – and encourage those who are applying psychology to the ‘real world’ to think big, and use it to challenge the systems and ideas that govern us.

It’s time to unleash the full power of psychology to create a better future for human beings and the planet.

Join me at a special event on 8th Nov 2021!

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Exciting news today as I’d like to invite you to a live online recording of a new episode of my ‘Humans & Hope’ podcast. It’s on Monday 8th November at 3pm GMT, and is about how we can seek social change more effectively – from standing up to discrimination through to building more successful campaigns.

Just reply to this message or email richard@changestar.co.uk to reserve your place – and I’ll send you the Zoom link for the session.

It’s an essential session for anyone seeking a better world – whether in your job or in your everyday life. There’ll be loads of valuable insights from expert psychologists in the main session, and plenty of time for you to ask questions at the end.

In the session I’ll be talking to Dr Maja Kutlaca from Durham University and Dr Helena Radke from the University of Edinburgh about how we can seek social change more effectively – from confronting discrimination through to building more successful campaigns.

We’ll explore some of their fascinating insights, including our attitudes towards people who stand up against injustice, how to build stronger coalitions to tackle social issues and how to develop more effective campaigns.

The session should last around an hour.

So, join me, Maja and Helena – as well as many others – on Monday 8th November at 3pm, and hone your campaigning and social change skills with the help of evidence from psychology!

To take part, simply reply to this email or email me at richard@changestar.co.uk . Please do share this invite with your charity colleagues and contacts – everyone is welcome. But hurry – places fill up fast!

New podcast episode out today (18/10/21) – “Are humans moral?”

I’m also pleased to say that a new episode of ‘Humans & Hope’ is out today – and it’s a belter!

In this episode I talk to Dr Pascal Burgmer, lecturer in Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Kent, about morality, and whether it’s really possible for human beings to meet the moral standards we commonly set ourselves. Is it really possible for us to be the selfless, kind, moral creatures we want to be?

We ask how our moral thinking and behaviour works – and whether the moral standards we set ourselves as human beings are realistic. If they’re not – what’s the best we can hope for and how might we achieve it?

It’s a fascinating conversation – you can listen to it now in the places below or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/humans-hope/id1586341045
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6byt9VJpqqK4y8fx4wXzdk
My website – https://richarddocwra.com/podcasts/humans-hope/

People and possibilities

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We need to understand human beings better. In fact, I believe that understanding how human beings think and behave is the first thing we should do when trying to address any human issue – whether personal or global.

Over the last century, psychologists, neuroscientists and other researchers have made some remarkable discoveries about how we think and behave that have transformed our picture of human beings as creatures. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are not aware of this new picture, and are stuck with old and innacurate views of what we are and what makes us tick.

This potentially has significant consequences, as it is not just members of the public that lack awareness, but many of the people who lead or help to create the society we live in, including politicians, economists, educators and policy makers. As a result it means that we are not only living our individual lives ignorant about what makes us really tick (including our vulnerabilities as well as our powers – and how to use them), but we are also living within societies, institutions and ideas that are built for different creatures than those we actually are. For example, if everyone knew, as scientists do, that people are more inclined to seek coherence rather than truth, surely we’d want a society that makes it easier for people to identify and access reliable sources of information, rather than leaving people open to an information supply that is dictated by the economic market, where information’s financial value (in terms of grabbing people’s attention) is prioritised over accuracy or truth? I imagine we’d also have a society that places more emphasis on teaching people to think critically.

I am currently working on several projects that explore this issue, including those that try to help people understand this new picture of how we think and behave, and those that consider what implications this has for some of the big issues we care about – from the spread of hate and prejudice to our fight against climate change. I also want to explore what our lives, institutions, ideas and societies might look like if we applied our new knowledge of human beings to them, with the aim of helping people to flourish. It could bring a radical re-think of some of our most established ideas – from how we educate our kids through to how we can enable people to think for themselves.

The first of these projects is a new podcast series launching on 4th October, called ‘Humans & Hope‘.

In each episode I’ll be joined by an expert psychologist to explore one of humanity’s biggest hopes or challenges – including seeking global peace, tackling the spread of misinformation, and preventing climate change. We’ll ask whether each aim is realistic, given the creatures we are. And if we can’t achieve them – what’s the best we can hope for?

I’ve had some truly fascinating and enlightening discussions in the episodes I’ve recorded already and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Sign up to my mailing list to keep in touch with news of its launch, new episodes and other projects I’m working on. Also do get in touch if you’d like to discuss the possibilities for collaboration or consultancy work on any of these topics.