One Foot in the Past? Why Engaging Change is Rooted in What We Know
The human mind hates sudden change - but understanding how it structures our world can help us devise incremental strategies for change
PLEASE NOTE! Applied Psychologies is now “Behavioural Science Weekly”. Apologies for the rebrand, just seemed to make more sense. Besides, I figured if Twitter can do it …
I’ve talked before about the importance of processing fluency for engaging audiences, but the idea goes much further and can be a tool to help promote change agendas.
Let’s recap about processing fluency: All other things being equal, people prefer to think about things that are ‘easy on the mind’. Simply put, our brains are hardwired to like stuff that fits together well. This type of bias is useful in everyday life. It helps us see that those bright red earmuffs just ain’t gonna go with your smart business suit. Or that antique dressing table will stick out like a sore thumb in your jazzy, contemporary new apartment. It’s Fish ‘n’ Chips rather than Jelly ‘n’ Beef. Some things just go well together, they ‘fit in’, and when they do, they’re easier for our brains to process. What’s more, being basically adaptive organs our brains like the things that are easier to process, and dislike those that are harder to process.
I, along with Mark Rubin and Stefania Paolini (two other social psychologists at Durham University), devised an experiment to see just how fundamental this tendency to like everything in little ‘cognitive boxes’ is. We asked a group of undergraduate students to split in to two groups: A and B. We then asked a few members of the A group to join the B group; and a few members of the B group to join the A group. When we asked people to say how much they liked each of the people in the groups, on average, they liked people who had not ‘migrated’ more than people who had.
Ok, just think about this for a moment. This is a completely abstract task. The groups were called “A” and “B”. Membership to the groups was totally random. There is no logical reason why anyone should like anyone in these groups more than anyone else. But on average the participants still liked those who had not migrated more than those who had. In other words, there was a basic cognitive bias against migrants. Simply moving from one category to another was enough, in relative terms, to be disliked.
We also asked participants how difficult they found it to think about either migrants or people who had remained in their original A or B groups. Migrants were reported as being harder to think about, supporting the notion that they were liked less than non-migrants simply because they were more difficult to think about.
Now you might have noted that one of the clear analogies of this study is immigration - our abstract ‘migrant’ letters could represent migrants to different countries, and processing fluency an underlying cognitive explanation to accompany the various social and political explanations as to why some people harbour negative attitudes towards immigrants. However, there are also broader implication for how the social brain deals with any change. For a start it helps explain why change is hard. What we already know is safe, secure, and (while it may not be perfect), it’s easy on the mind. We know what to expect from our environment (whether it’s work, college, or personal relationships), so the bar is high for things to be so bad we want to take a leap in to the unknown.
This is a further important point here. Thinking about change may be cognitive difficult, but doing so may be highly beneficial. In fact, this makes a lot of sense given what we know about human adaptability. After all, we’re biologically predisposed to like high-fat, high-calorie foods but that’s hardly a recipe for a healthy life. Similarly, sticking just with what we know - never opening our mind to the experience of other cultures and customs - is a route to rigidity and close-mindedness. We may be cognitively predisposed to like simplicity, structure, and coherence, but there’s a whole load of evidence that it’s people who break the mould that prosper most (but that’s a post for another day).
What does all this mean for engaging your audience with a change agenda? Given the social brain’s overriding need to create a stable, predictable model of the world then any change needs to be rooted in the existing reality. Put another way, leaping off and leaving everything you know behind is always going to be a hard sell. But, change that is presented as incremental and evolutionary, and importantly that retains key (positive) aspects of the environment your audience already knows, will make the transition far more palatable ... and perhaps even appealing.