4 ms·

The carrot and stick ... it's complicated. Some people will respond better to one or the other. Also, the carrot of 'feeling good about yourself' has many nuan

The carrot and stick ... it's complicated. Some people will respond better to one or the other. Also, the carrot of 'feeling good about yourself' has many nuances. An anecdote: We used to live in a village that had a few kilometers of semi-rural 2 lane road leading to it. Even though this road was outside city limits, it had many driveways and side streets on it so the speed limit was 50 km/h. At the time we had 2 cars, one regular family car (VW) and one luxury car (BMW). I always drove at the 50 km/h speed limit. However, when I drove the VW 70% of drivers would overtake me, while when I drove the BMW nearly all drivers would fall in line behind me. This was consistent over years, and extremely obvious once you noticed it. Apparently people are influenced by the behavior of others, but how that influence is achieved can depend on subtle factors. Another example: For decades there where 'informational feel good' campaigns trying to get drivers to stick to the speed limit on the town's ring road. Decades without any result. When finally a plethora of speed cameras were introduced, the speeding problem was solved in a few months.

atoav 6y ago
I think the best approach is usually a combined one. Think about drinking and driving. Just shaming/punishing people for it isn't going to solve it, if there aren't e.g. pull factors like practical solutions to avoid driving when drunk, recognition for people who don't drink when driving needs to be done etc. I think often the worst thing is existing culture. So things like: "It is not manly/cool to wear a seatbelt." Would a Hollywood action hero wear a seatbelt? Certainly not! Things like these are very hard to get rid off and take time and maturity. Endangering yourself and others is neither cool nor manly, it is a mechanism to show others how invincible you feel you are: the modern day equivalent of banging on your chest. Ironically people who are actually strong and secure rarely ever need to do all that chest banging.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  > people who are actually strong and secure rarely ever need to do all that chest banging. Something Orwell observed in Down and Out is that the worst snobs are not to be found among a restaurant's clientele, but among its waitstaff.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  > I think often the worst thing is existing culture. So things like: "It is not manly/cool to wear a seatbelt." Would a Hollywood action hero wear a seatbelt? Certainly not! In one TV show called "Forever" (spoilers, btw.) there's a nice scene where one of the characters is driving a car at gunpoint and gets out of the situation by driving into a wall and releasing the bad guys seatbelt right before impact. There's nothing inherently uncool about seatbelts; it's just a matter of how it's presented. "Heroes don't need seatbelts to drive a car" makes as much sense as "Heroes don't need guns for a gunfight". This proves that the rules of coolness can sometimes be shifted away from valuing recklessness. The same effect might be possible for other areas as well.
montagg 6y ago
Guilt is as much a tool as pride. I think the way Martin Luther King, Jr. frames the goal of direct action in “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”[1] is helpful in understanding the power of internal guilt in changing things: > You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. You can then use both the stick (tension that leads to confronting a crisis) to lead people to the carrot (pride for confronting that crisis). It does depend on the community’s ability to internalize that tension, though. I’m concerned that is much harder than it used to be. I think for many American Republicans in particular that is no longer possible, because they’ve created parallel information streams that scrubs out all of that tension. If that’s true, I don’t actually know what the right tactic is to help them understand the tension that exist in so many issues, or even if there is a plausible tactic. [1]: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

atoav 6y ago

I think the best approach is usually a combined one. Think about drinking and driving. Just shaming/punishing people for it isn't going to solve it, if there aren't e.g. pull factors like practical solutions to avoid driving when drunk, recognition for people who don't drink when driving needs to be done etc. I think often the worst thing is existing culture. So things like: "It is not manly/cool to wear a seatbelt." Would a Hollywood action hero wear a seatbelt? Certainly not! Things like these are very hard to get rid off and take time and maturity. Endangering yourself and others is neither cool nor manly, it is a mechanism to show others how invincible you feel you are: the modern day equivalent of banging on your chest. Ironically people who are actually strong and secure rarely ever need to do all that chest banging.

082349872349872 6y ago
> people who are actually strong and secure rarely ever need to do all that chest banging. Something Orwell observed in Down and Out is that the worst snobs are not to be found among a restaurant's clientele, but among its waitstaff.
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
> I think often the worst thing is existing culture. So things like: "It is not manly/cool to wear a seatbelt." Would a Hollywood action hero wear a seatbelt? Certainly not! In one TV show called "Forever" (spoilers, btw.) there's a nice scene where one of the characters is driving a car at gunpoint and gets out of the situation by driving into a wall and releasing the bad guys seatbelt right before impact. There's nothing inherently uncool about seatbelts; it's just a matter of how it's presented. "Heroes don't need seatbelts to drive a car" makes as much sense as "Heroes don't need guns for a gunfight". This proves that the rules of coolness can sometimes be shifted away from valuing recklessness. The same effect might be possible for other areas as well.

montagg 6y ago

Guilt is as much a tool as pride. I think the way Martin Luther King, Jr. frames the goal of direct action in “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”[1] is helpful in understanding the power of internal guilt in changing things: > You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. You can then use both the stick (tension that leads to confronting a crisis) to lead people to the carrot (pride for confronting that crisis). It does depend on the community’s ability to internalize that tension, though. I’m concerned that is much harder than it used to be. I think for many American Republicans in particular that is no longer possible, because they’ve created parallel information streams that scrubs out all of that tension. If that’s true, I don’t actually know what the right tactic is to help them understand the tension that exist in so many issues, or even if there is a plausible tactic. [1]: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....