Ill communication
Relaying vital information more intuitively to sway influence and drive action
🎼 Shambala by Beastie Boys
Jay Forrester, a pioneering systems thinker, said: “The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. [We have] only selected concepts [which we use] to represent the real system.”
Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher and scholar of semantics, framed a similar thought more concisely:
Irrespective of their contrasting communication styles, the work of both Forrester and Korzybski leads us to conclude that we cannot help but create our own mental models of the world to simplify and make sense of a more complex reality. This being the case, we must accept that not only are all forms of perception imperfect abstractions of the ‘truth’, but all forms of communication also: How we interact with, make sense of, respond to and share information in the world is messy.
We see this challenge writ large in our planetary condition of climate crisis and biodiversity collapse:
- Do most people sufficiently comprehend the reality?
- Of those who feel they do, do they sufficiently communicate the reality to others?
Anyone who has done their homework to get as close as they possibly can to this subject would no doubt respond: Absolutely not.
But why? And how do we change that?
Data vs stories
We all think in a space somewhere between logic and emotion. One end of the spectrum consists of rational, logical, objective facts and the other of intuitive, emotive, subjective feelings.
The language of the climate crisis has been predominantly told in facts, through data and mathematics. Our dominant discourse is that of the science of the IPCC: 1.5℃, 418ppm CO₂ and the like. And as useful as that is in helping us both understand the magnitude of the issue and measure our lines in the sand to escape it, it will not help us mobilise society to all go on this journey together.
Jonathan Haidt’s work talks at length about how most of us typically make our judgements on issues from intuition or peer persuasion rather than reason. The problem we have when we talk about the climate crisis is what Haidt is referring to when he says:
“You can’t convince people on moral and political issues by giving them facts, because human reasoning takes place in an emotional world based on stories.”
If true, no amount of climate facts will resolve the matter to anyone’s benefit. Not only is the data overwhelming and therefore subject to necessary oversimplification — divorcing it of a degree of contextual meaning in the process — it simply doesn’t communicate in a language of storytelling that resonates with who we’re trying to engage: human beings.
So how do we better move our planetary debate from a world of facts told through data towards a world of stories experienced through feelings?
Cognitive shortcuts
We already often find ourselves communicating naturally between these extremities of data and stories through what we could call cognitive shortcuts. For instance, one kind of shortcut is a ‘rule of thumb’. This is an approximate principle or heuristic to make sense of something more complex, helping us avoid getting lost in the details while remaining generally true in practice.
You may be familiar with the ‘80/20 rule’ or Pareto Principle as an example of such a rule of thumb: 80% of the outcomes result from 20% of the causes. This is sometimes also known as the rule of the “vital few and trivial many”.
For instance, you could make a statement along the lines of: “G20 countries account for 80% of emissions”, or “reducing the top 20% of emitters will reduce 80% of emissions”. Neither are 100% accurate, but accurate enough to be intuitively accepted and therefore less complex to recall as information.
Another kind of shortcut is the metaphor or proverb. “An eye for an eye and soon the world will be blind” tells us something about revenge, or mutual destruction, more evocatively than just saying the meaning of those words alone.
The 80/20 rule is a good example of a more data-driven shortcut. “An eye for an eye…” is a good example of a more story-driven shortcut. Neither are pure data or pure story, but it’s interesting to reflect on the depth of meaning the second one seems to convey compared to the first.
As you can imagine, shortcuts are simplifications that complement nicely with our necessity to form mental models and can be extremely powerful means of communication.
However there are many ways to communicate with shortcuts and we perhaps tend to bias more towards verbal and written forms, such as the proverbs and ‘rules of thumb’ discussed already. Unfortunately this means we’re often missing out on even more effective methods, since approaches which tap more directly into our senses have been demonstrated to be more intuitive to our innate physiology.
Aesthetics
If I were to say the word danger, which one of the two shapes on the left below would you associate more with that word?
The vast majority of people would pick the star shape on the right, irrespective of geography or culture. The field of neuroaesthetics is doing its best to explain why, but research has shown that objects with sharp elements activate the amygdala, where the brain processes fear, suggesting we already have interpretive meaning of ‘natural’ shapes hardwired into our consciousness as human beings, in ways we are yet to fully comprehend.
By contrast, many ‘unnatural’ (man-made) symbols are not universal. As we imbue ‘artificial’ shapes with meaning, they become loaded to communicate along purely cultural or geographical lines. All of the symbols shown to the right also convey danger, just contextually. Depending on whether you speak Urdu, Hindi, lived in Europe in the mid-20th century or Palestine in the year 1099, you’re likely to interpret this danger in unique ways. In other contexts some of these very same words and symbols may instead convey spiritual wellbeing, making them problematic as a means of communication.
Reframing
Imagine someone was to conduct a memory test on you. They give you a collection of faces of people to memorise. If you’re asked to try and memorise them by their name (“This man is called Baker”) you would remember much fewer than if you were asked to remember them by their occupation (“This man is a baker”). The same task, framed differently, produces different outcomes. Weird?
This is called the Baker–Baker paradox. It’s believed that the association of an occupation, as opposed to just a name, carries a huge amount of associated meaning and sensory experience, such as the smell and taste of bread, a bakery, flour, a hot oven, a kid riding a bike downhill in Yorkshire, etc. This optimises your ability to memorise.
This interesting phenomenon in how our brain works is also complemented by the fact that spacial memory is superior in comparison to more abstracted or mathematical non-sensory memory. It explains why most people can find their way back to their parked car much easier than remembering an 11-digit phone number, despite it typically being a much more complex set of information. Spacial memory is so powerful there’s a seemingly counter-intuitive technique (‘Mind Palace’), used as far back as Ancient Greece, which enhances the effectiveness of remembering anything (even numbers) by associating them with a location in space, rather than just trying to memorise the information alone, devoid of context.
These examples demonstrate that when we enrich information with sensory content and context we can utilise cognitive shortcuts, or ‘brain hacks’, to navigate our way to clearer communication with others. We also avoid the painful grind of using purely scientific data to expose what should be received as irrefutable objective facts. These rarely land as intended simply because of how we’re wired as human beings: Intuitive story trumps rational data.
