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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
A friend of mine, Jason, just forwarded this editorial comment today from the NYT's, "Voting Without the Facts" by Bob Herbert (November 8, 2004)
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.
I would offer this explanation, which may shine some light on how we may work on this communication problem, without calling people ignorant. While ignorance may be a factor, it's a polarizing, fightin' words term that can only create barriers to understanding. No one likes to be called ignorant! I would point out that information and facts (in fact) lie on a continuum that connects with our perceptions, instincts, emotions, values and worldview. As cognitive scientists tell us, we filter information first through the lens of our emotions, values and worldview. Our mind is not disembodied; our cognition is not separate from our biology, as Cartesians and Judeo-Christian theology would have us believe. This is often why we are selective in what information or facts we chose to believe, hear or see. This is why the human brain, as neurobiologist William Calvin would put, is still in Beta. This "transmission problem" applies especially to new information and information that conflicts with our biases and beliefs.
Having facilitated many sessions which try to widen people's range of perception and enhance their capability to see and act on new ideas, I can now almost recognize that beginning phase where new information can't be absorbed and just bounces off the person's perceptual windshield, rather than making inroads into their understanding. Perhaps were in a similar place in America? The pedagogical trick in my work is to design a process that expands the zone of proximal development in a person or group. This heavy term refers to a robust theory of learning developed by Lev Vygotsk over a century ago. Among other things, this theory argues that people can't change their thinking -- especially when it's deeply held beliefs and assumptions -- very quickly. To build a new understanding requires creating a scaffolding, an intermediate structure, so that they can productively bridge what they knew to be "true" (old edifice) to the emerging truth(s) (new building). Or if there is no agreement there, at least a recognition that the reality is not what they thought it was. To do this well requires a careful mix of process and content tools: the process tools, in iterative turns, help people "see" the new content in a more constructive and integrative way. It also helps if this new awareness can be done with a minimum amount of emotional trauma and loss of dignity. Again, no one likes to admit they were wrong or be reminded that they held an outdated idea about the world.
Dialogue techniques work well here. So does scenario planning and learning journeys. Many things can be used to create that "bridge". Finding the analogue processes writ large for the US, however, seems like a stretch. The media, for one, makes this very hard. It propagates an either/or, us-or-them, mind versus matter dualist way of seeing the world, based on a simplistic and outdated communication paradigm that still pretends that information, perceptions and worldviews are not linked.
( For more along similar themes, see my New Frames and Adversarial Politics posting.)