Harnessing Psychology to Create a Better World: Questions & Answers
Harnessing Psychology to Create a Better World: Questions & Answers
Issue 116: Our Q&A with students from a class on "Influence: Harnessing Psychology to Create a Better World."
This week we want to share some questions—and our answers—from Dr. Helen Harton’s class called "Influence: Harnessing Psychology to Create a Better World." As part of the course, Helen has students read and discuss books and articles and come up with a plan to use psychological theory/research to try to improve society in some way. The students come up with a few questions to ask the authors of the books they are reading. We are happy to answer questions about “The Power of Us” from any educators who assigns our book to their class (see the bottom of this newsletter for more information about our free teaching resources).
We answered the following thoughtful questions from Mara, Makenzie, Emma, and Emily:
What do you hope for us, as the readers, to take away from your writing? What do you hope we will use to change the way we act, and how will that impact society as a whole?
When our publisher suggested calling our book “The Power of Us”, we liked it because the word power conveys two things. First, identities have powerful effects. They have the power to shape what people believe, what they like and dislike, even their basic perceptions like taste and smell. They provide a foundation for a great deal of good in the world like trust and cooperation, but also a great deal of bad like discrimination and intergroup violence. Second, understanding social identity provides people with a source of power. Understanding how identity works can help people resist some of its negative aspects – making them more critical of disinformation that is too conveniently favorable to their group or increasing their skepticism of leaders who are clearly trying to suppress dissent or to divide people rather than unite them. Drawing on shared identities can help people be more effective leaders in their own lives.
Throughout your writing process, did you have to change the way you already saw society and how you both personally view social identity? Did the social identities you both personally hold change throughout the process of writing this book?
The COVID-19 pandemic began in the midst of writing our book and had an effect on how we see society. Prior to the pandemic, we had the optimistic assumption that even in highly divided societies like the United States, a common threat involving the need for a strong collective response (like an alien invasion or a global pandemic) would bring people together. In 2020, it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be the case and that the antagonistic political identities in certain countries–and especially the US–were a major obstacle to responding effectively to the pandemic. We are now a bit less optimistic than we were before about the potential for major challenges to bring people together, although we don’t think that what happened in the United States was inevitable. Leaders have the ability to make people think in terms of broader, more inclusive identities. In fact, we saw many other leaders around the world do this during the pandemic and it saved countless lives.
In terms of our own social identities, writing and publishing this book gave us the entirely new identity of “authors.” It turns out there’s a wonderful community of book authors who we are now connected to and derive a great deal of support, belonging, and enjoyment from. This was probably the biggest surprise–and more enjoyable part–of writing a book. In fact, it’s inspired us to write more books!
I assume that you began working on this book before COVID-19 and the events of 2020 or at least had some ideas planned out for the book. How did the 2020 election, and the pandemic alter the direction you chose to take the book?
Both the pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election culminating in the insurrection on January 6, 2021 had a big effect on the final chapter of our book. We decided early on that the last chapter would be a look at “the future of identity” and we left the writing of it until all the other chapters were finished. These events made this a darker chapter than we had originally envisioned. But we felt that the future of identity had to grapple with the very real and major issues raised by the pandemic and the insurrection.
The pandemic revealed starkly and undeniably the deep inequalities that exist in many societies – inequalities that manifest in who could stay home to protect themselves and their families and who had to continue exposing themselves to risk, in who lost their jobs, and in illness and mortality rates. January 6 shocked the world by showing just how close to the brink American democracy had come. Other countries are facing similar threats. So our look at the future of identity ended up addressing these things, with sections on inequality, democratic backsliding, as well as climate change–which will require us to come together in an even more inclusive way than the pandemic since the scope of this problem is even bigger.
You both took a part in authoring the book, so, how did having two different perspectives affect the content of the book? How did you both come together to write a very cohesive book?
At first, it was challenging to write a book with two authors. Most books are written with a single author with a single voice. And many aspects of book promotion are focused on single authors. There is a bit of a culture of the lone genius among book authors–we have this image of the writer sitting in front of a typewriter and churning out book after book. When we won the APA William James Book Award we noticed that 42 or the previous 43 book award winners were solo authors.
But we saw the book process as a collaboration, from the moment we came up with the idea to write a book together to promoting after it was published. We developed a collective voice that goes through the book and we tried to live by the principles of our book about collaborating together to achieve something that neither of us could have achieved alone. We drafted the vision for the book, edited each chapter–and often had heated debates about how to write certain parts of the book. We both had an influence on just about every sentence–and in the process must have exchanged 10,000 text messages! In the end, we were both extremely proud of the book and really happy we got to experience the entire thing together. It sure made it a hell of a lot more fun.
The studies in the book focus on adults. In what ways can we use the knowledge from the studies to shape the younger generations? (Elementary Age)
Although we didn’t talk about it much in the book, there have been a bunch of wonderful studies using younger kids. For example, the original minimal group studies were conducted with 14-15 year olds. And the most famous study in intergroup relations (The Robbers Cave Experiment) was conducted with 11-12 year olds. We have also teamed up with developmental psychologists to study even younger kids (ages 3-6). All these studies show that kids develop social identities and allocate rewards and punishments differently to ingroup and outgroup members just like adults.
We think these studies have important lessons for parents and teachers. For instance, we have given talks about our book to conferences for teachers about how they can create healthier and more effective classroom environments. We hope that more teachers embrace these ideas and find ways to use them to reduce discrimination, create feelings of inclusion, and inspire students to work together. If you know any teachers, please encourage them to pick up our book!
The book discusses that our evolutionary need for hierarchy may be a psychological reason for racism today. With this being an evolutionary tendency, is it too ingrained in us as humans to change these habits on a larger scale, or do you think if given enough time and effort this natural inclination could be altered?
Evolutionary tendencies can be hard to overcome. This is why it’s easy to gorge on sweet and fatty food–it tastes delicious because we are wired to enjoy high calorie foods, even when we know it’s not good for us. That said, we always have the capacity to create norms and institutions that channel our tendencies in healthier directions. Just like we can stock our fridge with healthy foods to avoid succumbing to our munchies, we can create norms where racism is wrong.
In fact, that’s what we have been trying to do as a society. It wasn’t that long ago when slavery and Jim Crow laws were used to oppress people. With time, we have created laws and norms that reject those traditions. In our own lifetimes, we have seen same sex marriage go from an extremely unpopular belief to the law of the land. Of course, there will always be people who try to suppress and oppress others–but by standing against those voices we can continue to create new habits at a large scale. We hope our book helps empower people to be part of that change.
If you want to learn more, here is Helen’s class syllabus on “Influence: Harnessing Psychology to Create a Better World”. She assigns the following books:
Grant, A. (2021). Think again: The power of knowing what you don’t know.
Van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote cooperation.
Sanderson, C. (2020). Why we act: Turning bystanders into moral rebels.
Cohen, G. (2022). Belonging: The science of creating connection and bridging divides.
This summer, we created teaching materials for educators who wanted include ideas and themes from THE POWER OF US in the classroom. We made a syllabus sharing free articles and activities. The course is ideal for college students, but can easily be adapted for book clubs (e.g., by focusing on on the book and excluding any assignments), organizations (e.g., by making the original research articles optional and including case studies or practical activities) or academic seminars (e.g., by focusing on the original research articles and requiring an original research project). Visit this link to request our teaching materials.
We have now visited numerous classes who have assigned our book and are happy to share our teaching materials and answer questions from any other classes. Please let us know if you would like to assign our book and have us visit your class.
News and Updates
This week Jay did a panel on misinformation and disinformation for PEN America and The National Press Club Journalism Institute. More than 90% of journalists said disinformation affected their work and our panel discussed
Jay’s advice for journalists, or really anyone, is to create a system of checks and balances by “embedding yourself in a community who will fact check you…We are smarter by creating norms of accuracy and reinforcing them, and then also [joining] institutions that reinforce, support, and incentivize accuracy.”
You can watch the full panel here:
Catch up on the last one…
Keeping phones out of schools and limiting social media use among youth have been hot topics on social media recently. Jay weighs in on why we should keep phones out of schools in last week’s newsletter:
