Elephants and Asteroids
I’m a month into hearty thesis-ing and my focus has shifted, so I wanted to provide an update.
I came into the beginning of the year ready to take on Rupert Murdoch with my $0 budget. I knew in my bones that something felt off about conservative media, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Why was there no one competing on the same level as Fox News? I still feel that way to a large degree, but at that point I don’t think I appreciated the real nature of the problem.
Soon after I wrote my initial post, I learned about a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind. It’s completely altered my perception of the problem — so much so that I think it sits closer to the foundation of my thinking about the problem space. I want to explain how my thinking changed.
At the beginning of the book, Haidt describes his theory of the rider and the elephant. The elephant is your intuition, instantly reacting to stimuli, whether it be someone’s hairstyle or their stance on gun rights. The rider sits on top of the elephant, and it represents your rational mind. The rider’s main job is to come up with a good set of reasons that the elephant went in whatever direction it decided to go that day. The rider is like a good press secretary — providing rationalizations for every decision that gets made by the president.
His point is that we’re largely driven by our intuition, and we use reason to rationalize where our intuition takes us. He argues the reason why Republicans, conservatives and right-wing media are so effective is because they spend more time talking to our elephants than to our riders. Meanwhile, “smart” and “well-educated” liberals spend most of their time talking to riders — trying to persuade solely with cold, hard, lifeless facts. How many people do you think change their minds when they hear that the ocean levels will rise by two feet over the next 200 years?
It got me thinking about how we use social media — what percentage of our posts are talking to riders? How many are talking to elephants? We have a tendency to post and read articles that “prove our point” with a set of facts and figures that give us ammunition for our arguments. How often do those articles appeal to our moral centers? How often are those stories told in a captivating and compelling way?
Haidt also has an experiment he calls The Asteroid Club. It’s a way for liberals to see through the eyes of a conservative and vice versa. Here’s how Haidt describes it:
An Asteroids Club would never hold debates. People use reasoning to find evidence to bolster their existing beliefs, so debates can often increase polarization. Rather, a local Asteroids Club would hold telescope parties in which members help each other to see approaching asteroids — one from each side — that they hadn’t really noticed before. Telescope parties would harness the awesome power of reciprocity. If we acknowledge your asteroid, will you acknowledge ours?
The Asteroids Club is a way for elephants to talk to elephants.
It’s a way to help the other side understand our moral perspectives, so that we can actually talk to each other and not at each other. Have a conservative try to solve global warming while a liberal tries to solve the debt crisis. What will each side dig up and learn about?
As far as I can tell, this is one of the best ways I’ve seen to promote healthy discourse — it just doesn’t scale very well. How can we take the goodness of The Asteroids Club so that it applies to all of our conversations and disagreements? I think this question will be a big influence on my thesis going forward.
At this point, I haven’t ruled out that a competitor to Fox News is the right idea to pursue, but I’m now approaching it with a better understanding of how we form our moral compass and ideologies, which is to say I’ll be thinking a lot more about elephants and asteroids.
