If you are paying attention to any number of the social issues plaguing society and feeling frozen without any idea how to make a meaningful difference, you are not alone – but philosophy professors Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly have collaborated on “Somebody Should Do Something,” a book that uses history and social science to describe how small individual changes lead to collective changes and how each person can make a difference in their day-to-day life.
We talked with Brownstein and Madva ahead of their event at Porter Square Books on Oct 15 about how we can learn new habits to make social change. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where do you think wrong lessons about social change come from?
AM: Confusion about these problems come from a lot of different places. Notoriously, a giant source is giant corporations. Going back more than a hundred years, whenever there was a movement to create laws that would help solve these problems at a collective level, the corporations have organized to reframe the debate so we were all brainwashed into thinking that the solution was what we could do as individuals. One of the most famous examples of the last 50 or so years has been corporations that produce lots of goods that can’t be recycled or reused, and oil companies, which reframe the debate about climate. Instead of putting the focus on themselves as the people producing all of this stuff, they put the focus on us and convinced us that the way to solve the climate crisis is by each of us reducing our individual personal carbon footprint.
I would add, though, that the sources for this individualistic framework are broader. Some of them are probably psychological. There’s a deep psychological tendency that a lot of people have, that when something goes wrong, they think “Okay, who is the individual that we have to blame?” They want to explain behaviors in terms of who is the villain of this story and who is the hero that’s going to come along and save us. But there’s also a collective social psychology to talk about here, which is that the United States is probably the most individualistic country in the history of the world – so all these messages that these corporate campaigns are selling about how it’s a matter of individual responsibility, the reason they resonated was because they were being told to an audience that wanted to hear that message. We collectively, in American and some European cultures, have been brainwashed into thinking of everything in terms of individual responsibility. If you look at a wider range of cultural traditions, like certain traditions of Confucianism and feminism and certain indigenous ways of knowing, you’re much more likely to see a more collectivist way of thinking about these problems. It’s possible these kinds of corporate PR campaigns would have resonated less in a more collectivist culture.
How do we unlearn this thinking?
MB: There’s a lot of avenues for change. One way of thinking about it is by reference to ways that we break habits of any kind. We talk to some researchers who treat racism as a habit, for instance, and ask how can we break the patterns in our minds that lead to the use of stereotypes? And the answer, to some extent, is going to be the same way that you quit smoking or get yourself to go to the gym every day.
One way of thinking about the habit approach is that it has three components. One is knowledge, that you need to know what the problem is; a second is motivation, that you have to care and see why it matters; and third are tools, knowing which ways of getting yourself to change a habit or develop a new one, see which ones work and which ones don’t.
Learning to think not just in terms of my own personal responsibility for climate change but rather my own personal responsibility for doing something to change the politics, the economy and so on that give rise to climate change can similarly come about from knowing the sources of those habits, caring about them, caring about why the problem is such a big deal, and then having the right tool.
A whole different avenue is about social influence, the ways in which we affect one another in really surprising ways. If you think about something like smoking – one of the best ways to predict if someone is going to quit smoking is by looking at whether their spouse quits smoking, or their sibling quits. The same is true in lots of other domains. College roommates have a huge effect on whether the other votes, and that effect lasts for the rest of their life. Whether people put solar panels on their roof is best predicted by whether their neighbors put solar panels on their roof. There’s all these ways in which we are susceptible to the influence of the people around us.
That means we have the opportunity to influence each other in lots of ways that we don’t even realize. We are all already agents of social change. Each of us helps to create the social situation that other people are living in, and that they make their decisions in and what is expected or normal or incentivized or exciting.
We spend a lot of time in the book talking about collective action, working to create social movements, to create communities, to create coalitions with other people who are like-minded in various ways, and there’s a whole lot of interesting literature on what helps to create successful collective action and what can sometimes stymy it.
AM: One of the biggest psychological obstacles to unlearning these habits is a tendency toward what we call either-or thinking, where the problem is either “I have to take responsibility as an individual” or “we have to change the system.” We are trying to encourage people to adopt a both-and perspective about how to encourage individuals to change the system and how to change the system to empower individuals.
What’s the first thing someone should do after reading the book?
MB: It is very hard to predict what will make change in the world. There are a lot of us right now that feel a little frozen by how overwhelming the problems are that we see all around us. One of the lessons of the book is that there are a million different routes to taking action, because all of us are different and have different strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and roles and relationships. There are lot of things readers can try, and if they can do it with other people, they’ll probably feel empowered to do more.
The short, peppy way of saying that is: Doing anything is better than doing nothing. And the rejoinder is: Doing anything with other people in community is even better than doing anything yourself.
AM: We spend a lot of time talking in the book about different social roles that people can occupy, and one thing we would like people to do is reflect on their own social roles. This is another area where we can tend to get locked in to thinking like “my role as a student is to just learn” or “my role as a teacher is just to share the information.” Instead, think about each of these social roles as opportunities to make a social difference. One very low-key example is that one of my students was talking about our reading group with his co-workers, and some of his co-workers came to the reading group too. He’s not just thinking about his job as just taking care of those day-to-day things, but as also being engaged with the people around him.
For anyone in a leadership position, they have incredible power. They might just think that if they’re in a business that their job is to maximize profit, but their job is also to be a role model for the people they work with, and what are they role modeling? They could role model how to be a change maker.
That segues to the broader thing, which is just talking to other people. One of the biggest problems is pluralistic ignorance: We don’t know what other people think about these issues. One of the most notorious examples is climate change. If you poll people in the United States, they think only one-third of Americans want to fight the climate crisis. They have it exactly backward: Two thirds of Americans think we should be doing more to combat the climate crisis. That’s a problem we overcome by talking to each other.
We need to shift our defaults from if you see something bad in the world, you think “someone else will take care of it” to “something bad happened and this is an opportunity for me to step in and try to do something to make that change.” Maybe when you try to engage someone the conversation is clumsy and awkward, maybe they get defensive, and you might think in the moment, “I’m not making any difference” or “I’m just making things worse”; the research is really clear that even when people react negatively in the moment, they’re much more likely to change their behavior in the future.
Michael Brownstein and Alex Madva read from “Somebody Should Do Something” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Porter Square Books, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free.
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