People like a change candidate that doesn’t make them change
In his final interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday night, President Obama called Donald Trump a “change candidate”. Exit-polling confirms this idea: 83% of the population who voted for Donald Trump said his most important quality was that he would “bring the needed change” while a “whopping 93 percent” say the country is on the wrong track. This is something all of us have been hearing since November 8th. What nobody wants to admit is that they don’t want to change. We want the world to change, and our politicians to carry forward that change, without requiring us to change. In short, we want a change candidate that doesn’t make us change.
As someone who ran on a campaign of “Hope and Change”, Obama knows a thing or two about change candidates, and probably knows better than anyone the difficulty of achieving that change. Just before Obama became president he reiterated his claim to change Washington and end partisanship divides, asking Americans in his inaugural address to pull together as a nation and make little sacrifices for the good of society. Immediately, this was met with strong and continued resistance, and today, partisanship in this country is at its highest level in decades.
As another president takes office this weekend, people are asking “What kind of changes should we expect? For many Americans, the anticipated or potential changes are cause for grave concern. I am one of these Americans. But I’d like to ask a different set of questions: Why is change so hard? Why is change political gold, the currency of choice? And most importantly, why do we want our political leaders to bring change but don’t want to change ourselves?
The first question seems easy enough. Change is often scary and difficult. By its very nature, it brings with it uncertainty and instability. The psychology of change is now a robust field of study and new research has shown that human behavior is not as determined by our genes and biology and has more plasticity and change than we previously thought. And yet, the essential takeaway of decades of research on human psychology is clear: people are reluctant to change. And there are both cognitive and behavioral reasons for this.
Cognitively, a change in beliefs causes “cognitive dissonance”, an anxiety that spreads as new beliefs conflict with the previous network of background beliefs. The dissonance, and anxiety it produces, only lessens when there is a perceived consistency in one’s set of beliefs, formed either by reaching actual consistency in one’s beliefs, or more likely by being distracted or through some (often mild) level of self-deception into believing one’s beliefs are consistent. In one of the seminal studies on cognitive dissonance conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith, the authors found that the anxiety and negative affect experienced in cases of cognitive dissonance are so strong that people will give up previously held beliefs if they conflict with experimenter manipulated statements offered over the course of the study.
In other words, people might have well-reasoned beliefs they hold but give up those beliefs when they are subtly maneuvered into vocalizing an opinion that clearly conflicts with this belief. Studies like Festinger and Carlsmith’s show that the negative affect associated with cognitive dissonance is so strong that people will change their cognitive beliefs — but they change their beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance and not to track what they believe is true or justified. Beliefs change, but often the cause and rationale for these changes are not to be more accurate or truth-tracking, but because it is easier. Changing one’s beliefs is hard and changing one’s beliefs to track the truth is very hard.
A similar result occurs with our motivations and behavior because of weakness of will. Suppose people can overcome or work through the anxiety of cognitive dissonance, often this still doesn’t lead to actual changes in motivation and behavior. As anyone who has struggled to quit smoking, or failed to stick with a New Year’s resolution will admit, following through on one’s commitments is hard. As the French social and political theorist Jon Elster has championed and my good friend John Davenport argues in great detail in his book Will as Commitment and Resolve, the human capacity to form pre-commitments, to stick to commitments, and to resolve to follow through those commitments sets us apart from other species and underlies our core intuitions of the both will and rationality. And yet, this capacity often and regularly falls short in practice. Whatever will and willpower are, we regularly don’t stick to our commitments assuming we even make those commitments to change in the first place. One again, change is hard.
If change is so hard, this might help explain why we consider it political gold. If everyone is reluctant to change, then the real change-makers are rare gems. And people like change. Novelty, innovation, and artistic expression are all expressions of change. More importantly, Americans really do not like our government, especially Congress. With an approval rating of 19%, the new Congress’s approval rating shows a lack of faith and trust in our elected officials. This is the approval rating of a new Congress on their first day, which is stunning but perhaps hardly surprising when the outgoing Congress had an approval rating of 11%. Yet, as The Center for Responsive Politics reports, in the last several elections, approximately 95% percent of Congress was re-elected. Why? We could point to better fundraising, familiarity and name recognition, and perhaps even what we might call neighborhood bias, the idea that Congress is terrible, but my congressman might be one of the good ones. Yet, at its most basic, the reason is simple: Change is hard.
So this gets to the last question: Why do we want our political leaders to bring change but not change ourselves? Given the psychology of change, this should not be surprising. What is surprising is how effective politicians who claim to be “change candidates” can capitalize on this. This itself seems a bit of self-deception, or at the very least a bit of mental jujitsu. We vote for change, demand change, become frustrated when there is no change, but we don’t change ourselves.
So as one change candidate leaves office and another change candidate enters, we might want to critically examine the type of change and change candidates we really want. More importantly, we might want to question our blind love of change and seriously look to see how we can evince change ourselves. This might imply some change in ourselves, but just as significantly, look to ourselves to cause change in the (political) world.
