Resilience: often necessary, occasionally evil
Yesterday, straight from an energising discussion with our Projects team about future RSA approaches to public services issues, I rushed to deal with something more current and tangible. My twelve year daughter has a long term health condition, which means regular appointments and occasional bouts of hospitalisation. After twelve years navigating a Victorian monolith, we now have the airy complexity of a brand new PFI building. We’ve gone straight from Dickens to Huxley.
My daughter has always been intense and feisty – most people who spend a few hours with her need to come up for air at some point – but in her regular interactions with medical people and places, this is amplified. And adolescence is now adding to the mix. Yesterday, she refused to answer questions that weren’t using the correct medical terms on the piece of paper in front of the physiotherapist. She asked irritating questions, gave cryptic answers, and her body language was moody, sullen and horizontally sprawled – she looked like she was on our sofa watching something excruciatingly boring on TV.
Like any parent would, I often plead for her to be more polite to a group of people that definitely want her to be as well as possible. At the same time, I know that her assertive games are a form of resilience – a way of coping with loss, setbacks and change, and steeling herself for future battles and disappointments. She is an expert patient now, and her attitude in some ways ensures that the system treats her as such.
I remember Maria Balshaw, now Director of Manchester City Galleries, arguing that ‘arsiness’ was a key attribute of creativity, so should possibly be taught in schools. I doubt if this idea will catch on, but we do need to accept the need to develop qualities in our young people that aren’t always pleasant. Whether it’s the liberal perspective on social and emotional learning, or the more traditional approach through character education, both emphasise qualities and attitudes that, in essence, make children easier for us adults to deal with. Just be nice. Even our Opening Minds framework, which includes ‘coping with change’ as a key aspect of the ‘managing situations’ competency, might not be quite ready to develop and assess approaches which elicit and celebrate the nasty.
This links to an emerging idea for a broader RSA project: can we harness new insights into the teenage brain and other research to ask how can schools and society relish rather than fear the teenage years? What kinds of behaviour change do we need to promote, in both teenagers and the adults and institutions which deal with them, to ensure a happy, productive adolescence?
In pursuit of happiness
‘Happiness’ is a concept that I seem to be increasingly encountering. It is the subject of a piece of work that my colleagues in Arts and Society are involved with in collaboration with the Happy Museum Project, an initiative that is encouraging UK museums to support transition to well-being and sustainability in our society.
The Happy Museum Project was born from psychological research suggesting that happiness and well-being are not related to material wealth. On the contrary, an emphasis on material wealth has led to a focus on the short term, causing the majority to feel pressure to “keep up” and leading to more unhappiness. Key to a sustainable notion of well-being, according to the Happy Museum Project, is what they call ‘support learning for resilience’, which encourages learning that is curiosity driven, engaging, informal and fun and can build resilience, creativity and resourcefulness.
Of course this is not a wholly new concept. We’re becoming increasingly familiar with research that shows that over a certain comfort threshold, increased wealth doesn’t correlate with general satisfaction, take Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, for example, which was developed in the 1970s. Now the UK government has started to focus on the notion of happiness, with the announcement of the National Wellbeing Project in 2010, which will see them attempt to measure how happy Britons are and use the results to shape government policy.
One area where happiness does not seem to have been a central consideration however is in education. Take the new Ofsted framework, which requires inspectors to place emphasis on behaviour, safety and teaching but makes no mention of emotional wellbeing, sociability and support. The aim here may have been to concentrate on the essentials and perhaps the more quantifiable elements, but this only reinforces the lack of regard with which these qualities are held.
Plans for performance related pay for teachers could be taken as another example of overlooking the importance of happiness. Not only is this measure likely to increase pressure on teachers, making them less happy, but their performance is likely to be measured solely on academic results, as it must be, and not well-being. This is not to say that the two will always be unrelated. For example it seems obvious that if a child is taught in a way that is exciting, fun, collaborative and supportive then they will not only be happier but will be more engaged and therefore attain better results. But this policy risks increasing pressure on students to achieve academically, leading to more teaching to the test and so risking children’s well-being.
Additionally some proponents of performance related pay for teachers base their arguments on economics; a good teacher = a good education (good grades) = a good job = more money. Not only in the current climate is this not necessarily the case, as there are not enough good jobs for high achieving students, but if money doesn’t make us happy then we shouldn’t be thinking only about education in these terms.
So I come back to the Happy Museum Project’s central tenet – our culture must focus on the long-term and sustainable benefits of its actions. Whilst achieving good academic results may lead to happiness in the short term, it can no longer guarantee a child’s future well-being in the face of unemployment, recessions and climate change, although perhaps it can help. My point is not to belittle academic achievement, but to emphasise that like so many things, we just cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that having confidence, emotional stability and resilience, will help this generation of students to survive this uncertainty and to cope better, if not always be happy.
Reflecting on Reflexive Coppers
Being reflective means never having to say ‘sorry if these comments come a bit late’. So, after my recommended twenty minutes of reflection, here are some thoughts inspired by Monday’s excellent Reflexive Coppers report. The Social Brain team said reflexive, I’ll say reflective, even though I am sure that the difference matters to someone out there.
The report demonstrated a real appetite from the police to engage in new kinds of thinking and conversations, and also outlined the barriers, both cultural and institutional, that prevent reflectivity. These barriers are far from unique to the police force. Even the teaching profession, which by its nature you might expect to embrace reflection as a key pedagogy for pupil and adult learning, finds this difficult. It’s often a case of ’Teach first, ask questions later, if at all’.
In my previous job with Creative Partnerships, although the excitement came during the classroom projects themselves, most teachers and practitioners recognised that the most important, sustainable learning came through the reflective processes we built into the programme’s design and values – ‘question, connect, imagine, reflect’. This was often tough stuff , but ultimately it was the reflection that changed teachers’ practices when our circus left town.
My own experience of Action Learning as a powerful tool for solution-focused reflection was that it worked best with people who weren’t only outside your own workplace, but from different professions. Common Purpose‘s model is partly built on this cross-professional approach, but their operation can appear too evangelical and assertive to encourage genuine reflection. It is also expensive. Are there cheaper, more self-facilitated ways for professionals across different public services to reflect collaboratively, possibly based on the TeachMeet DIY approach, and possibly on particular themes (for instance, children and young people)?
When my sister was training to be a nurse, during one of her first lectures her class of sixty students was told that “half of you will end up marrying policemen”. She neither became a nurse or married a policeman; but if her lecturer was right then reflective, cross-professional pillow talk may already be happening, off -duty, in various rooms of various homes.
Old habits die hard. What about new ones?
One of the core thematic strands of the Social Brain project is habits. Some great research from Phillipa Lally’s team at UCL demonstrated that it takes 66 days to form a habit.
Today is my 99th day of working at the RSA and I have just realised that a new habit seems to have formed in this time. Until now, I hadn’t thought of my lunchtime behaviour as either habitual or particularly routine. In my head, there’s all manner of lunching possibilities on my doorstep, and really I’m only temporarily buying lunch every day, as what I usually do is bring lunch from home. I tell myself I just haven’t got into the habit of it since I started this job and relocated to London but I’ll get back into the rhythm of it soon.
But, today, I have to admit that my old habit of bringing lunch from home may have had its day, having been usurped by a new one. When I went to get my lunch today, the woman behind the counter said two things which took me by surprise: “You’re a bit late today,” and “See you tomorrow”.
Ok, I’d already recognised that I tend to opt for that particular establishment, and the woman in question is a lovely, smiley person who at some point not long ago started recognising me and greeting me as a familiar customer. So, her talking to me was no surprise. What I had not realised that is that, from her perspective at least, I have a ‘normal time’ for going for lunch, which is sufficiently predictable for her notice and comment that I was ‘late’. And, although, like I say, I recognise that I go to the same place more often than not, I wouldn’t have thought it was regular enough for a member of staff to expect to see me every day.
Habits are behaviours which we perform automatically because they have been performed many times in the past. The repetition of a particular behaviour creates an association between a situation and an action. The situation acts as a cue which prompts a behaviour to be performed automatically. Doing something automatically means doing it without thinking.
Phillipa Lally and her colleagues at UCL found that breaking habits is very difficult. The easiest way of breaking a habit is to control your environment so that you don’t encounter the cue which triggers your habit. They also know that being highly motivated to change a habit doesn’t help much, although it is even harder if you are ambivalent.
What does this mean for my lunchtime behaviour? Well, I can’t really remove the cue from my environment, however you conceive of the cue – which could be my need to eat at lunchtime, my being at the office at lunchtime, or the specific food outlet that I habitually go to. I need to control the environment in a different way. Maybe if I consider the cue as the combined situation of my needing to eat, being at the office and not having brought anything with me, there is scope to change. Essentially what I need to do differently is to bring my lunch in from home.
However, Lally’s team point out that new habits don’t stop old habits from existing. Although new habits can trump old habits once they become stronger influences on behaviour, the old habit is still in place. So, for fear of getting lost in a habits hall of mirrors, my old habit of bringing lunch from home must be lurking somewhere, and although it has latterly been replaced by this new habit of buying lunch, it’s still the older habit, and therefore might stand a good chance of displacing the new one and getting back into pole position.
The season for making resolutions is almost upon us, so after Christmas I’ll have a go at reinstating my old lunchtime habit. We’re back in the office on 3rd January; 66 days after that takes us to 9th March by which time I’ll be able to say whether, in the case of what I have for lunch, new habits die as easily as old ones.
Meat, deceit and saving the world
Meat production puts more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than transport. Estimates suggest that the production of meat accounts for 18% of carbon emissions, compared with 14% from transport. In their hot-off-the-press report about taxi drivers’ fuel efficiency, my colleagues Jamie Young and Jonathan Rowson argue that there is a lack of salience when it comes to climate change. This comes across pretty clearly in the British Social Attitudes Survey which came out this week.
The results from the environment section of the survey are alarming. Despite the increasing urgency of the climate change problem, public concern about the environmental threat has declined over the past decade. Less than half (43%) of British citizens consider climate change to be dangerous for the environment; only 28% of us regard air pollution from cars as very or extremely dangerous, a figure which is down from 54% in 2000. These beliefs are reflected in our behaviour. Although recycling is now common, other forms of environmentally-friendly behaviour, such as cutting back on driving and reducing energy use in the home are much less so.
Given that we are pretty certain that there is a gap between knowing what we should do and actually doing it, throwing figures at people about how much carbon is emitted as a result of meat production probably isn’t terribly constructive. However, real life narrative about changes people manage to make might put something more meaningful in the mix.
So, I was vegetarian for eleven years. I gave up being a vegetarian almost as many years ago, and despite being quite an enthusiastic eater of meat, I generally make more meat-free meals than meaty ones. During my committed vegetarian phase, I became quite used to people complaining about the inconvenience of having to accommodate my dietary needs. Julie, an extremely close friend of mine, always gracious and polite, used to try very hard to feed me well when I was visiting her, but on one occasion she said to me “I just don’t know what you actually eat”.
Of the people I know, Julie is the least likely I would imagine to go meat-free. She has three menfolk in her house – two sons and a husband, all of whom have massive appetites and expect a daily dose of flesh-based protein on their plates. As a result of a gradual realisation of the impact of meat production on the climate, and partly swayed by the charismatic influence of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Julie has sneakily withdrawn a great deal of meat from her family’s diet. As I understand it, this has involved a certain degree of deceit.
Basically, she hasn’t mentioned that she’s doing it. She serves up spaghetti bolognaise made with lentils instead of beef, and just doesn’t say anything. She feeds them ‘pie’ (which is actually quiche) – a double deceit here, given that the chaps in her house all claim not to like quiche, as well as assuming that ‘pie’ involves meat. I slightly get the impression that she’s getting as much satisfaction from the subterfuge as she is from doing her bit for the environment. Whatever’s going on in the background, she’s managed to more than halve the amount of meat they eat, and I really think that if Julie can do it, anyone can.
In praise of swearing
Swearing has been all over the headlines in the last few days, what with someone saying the word ‘sod’ on Strictly Come Dancing, a judge overturning the conviction of a bloke who told police to ‘F off’ while being searched, and Rihanna wearing shocking shoes on prime time TV at the weekend.
In his excellent comment piece in the Guardian, Mark Lawson examines the shifting cultural role of swearing, and draws attention the importance of intent and the power to cause offence. The point of swearing is to deliberately employ a taboo term in order to add dramatic, emphatic or insulting heft to whatever is being said. If swearing is a regular component of one’s vernacular, and therefore not truly taboo, then surely it loses its force and isn’t really swearing any more. Lawson notes that there is now a “class of cursers who literally don’t know they’re doing it”.
There’s something about his turn of phrase which gives the impression of this “class of cursers” being unsavoury and probably generally objectionable. That’ll be me then…
When I was at school, I got myself into trouble a number of times through not really understanding the rules of swearing. At the age of eleven, after managing to complete a cross country run without having an asthma attack, my PE teacher encouragingly asked me how I was. Feeling pretty pleased with myself and grinning, I replied, “I’m knackered!” I was genuinely stunned that this led to an explosion of furious admonishment from my teacher, plus the deep humiliation of an after school detention. I genuinely had no idea that the word I’d used was an expletive – as far as I knew it was as good a synonym as any to describe exhaustion. To be honest, I’m still not entirely convinced that the word ‘knackered’ really has an offensive etymology…
It seemed like a real injustice to me at the time, and I remember trying to explain to the teacher that I couldn’t have intended any offence because I didn’t even realise that the word I’d used was an obscenity. It didn’t help my case, and probably just made me come across as irritatingly precocious as well as foulmouthed. However, I do have a great deal of sympathy for Denzel Harvey, the young man who was fined £50 for exclaiming, “what the f*ck?” while being searched by police. I think the judge was absolutely right in his conclusion that the police officers who were being sworn at were unlikely to have been the victims of harassment, alarm, or distress as a result.
Quoted in the Telegraph, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Peter Smyth said, “I’m not saying that police officers are going to go and hide in the corner and cry if someone tells them to F off, but verbal abuse is not acceptable and this is wrong message to be sending out”.
I think he’s missing the point slightly, and what’s going on here is rather more nuanced. Reflecting on this case earlier today, Ellie Bloggs argues that it’s not the words that matter, but the tone and the degree of malice with which they are uttered. She points out that a bit of nonchalant swearing is nowhere near as offensive and threatening as a torrent of swearword-free vitriol. Unfortunately, the judge in this case wasn’t able to capture this nuance explicitly in his statement, although his judgement indicates an implicit understanding of it.
Personally, I’m not easily offended by swearing, but I do think it’s a shame that so many swearwords have become subsumed into everyday speech, not because I think they’re filthy and offensive, but rather because they lose their power. And what’s the f*cking point in swearing if it’s not going to get a reaction?
What’s wrong with wonky carrots?
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but today 5,000 people, including me, have had exactly that. The event in Trafalgar Square was the brainchild of Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. The aim of the event is to draw attention to the astonishing amount of food that gets thrown away every year.
Partly, the idea is to encourage consumers not to overbuy and to use up food at home before it goes off and also, to draw attention to the shocking quantities of food that get wasted higher up the food chain. UK supermarkets have much more stringent cosmetic standards than our European counterparts, meaning that tonnes of perfectly good fruit and vegetables are sent to landfill simply because they are the wrong shape.
A delicious vegetable curry was prepared by Hare Krishna volunteers, made entirely from ingredients that would have otherwise ended up in landfill. In addition to the main meal, punters could help themselves to freshly pressed apple juice made from misshapen apples deemed unfit for our supermarket shelves. Fruit, including uneven bananas and pineapples were being given away and you could help bag up wonky carrots which will later be distributed to food charities. As well as the vegan curry, there were also tongue sandwiches, and seared ox cheek on offer. The queue for these was considerably shorter than for the veggie option, and, to my amusement a volunteer was checking with people that they knew what they were queuing for.
The whole thing was impressively well organised, with fast moving queues and plenty of volunteers making sure everyone got the message as well as the free food. I spoke to a couple of staff from FareShare, who explained to me how they manage to feed over 35,000 people daily through redistributing food waste. The examples of food thrown away by the industry were very surprising – even rice and pasta with more than a year left before the use-by date get chucked simply because of misprints on the packaging. FoodCycle volunteers handed me recipe cards for great meals you can make with vegetables which are past their best, and a woman from Love Food Hate Waste told me that the average family throws away £50 worth of perfectly good food every month.
Everyone attending was asked to sign the Feed the 5,000 pledge, committing to buying only the food they need, and eating the food they buy. For me, the most striking statistic of the day was that if we all stopped throwing away food that could have been eaten it would have the same carbon impact as taking 20% of cars off the road. I don’t know why this was the figure that had most salience for me – maybe because the carbon impact of car use seems more obvious to me than that of wasted food.
Not wasting food seems like such a simple and obvious thing we can all do, and really shouldn’t be that difficult. I guess like many of these sorts of challenges, it’s about subtle shifts and changes of habit, maybe a bit more in the way of planning before we go shopping, and more flexibility to use up what we’ve got once we’ve bought it. So, before the end of the day, I’d better eat the apple that’s been sitting in my desk drawer all week…
Thinking, fast and slow
This evening, a lucky audience will have the privilege of listening to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard at an event hosted by LSE. They will be discussing Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the author’s lifetime of work on the triumphs and pitfalls of conscious and unconscious thinking.
Kahneman is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and his ideas have shaped the work of many other important thinkers, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker and behavioural economist Dan Ariely. In his new book, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make decisions – on the one hand what he calls System One, the fast, intuitive and emotional system, and on the other System Two, a slower, more deliberative and logical system. I’m looking forward to reading it, but until I have, I can’t offer my own appraisal.
There’s been a flurry of recent reviews, all of which suggest that I’m in for a treat. William Easterly’s review in the Financial Times pronounces the book a masterpiece. Easterly is ebullient about Kahneman’s choice to be upfront about the fact that ‘experts’ are as prone to making mistakes as anyone else, including him. Knowing that we are irrational in our decision making doesn’t in itself free us from falling into the same traps as everyone else. Easterly describes having to fight off the preying hands of friends and family members in order to get the book read, and says that it is ‘compulsively readable’.
Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian, is also clearly impressed. In his interview with Burkeman, Kahneman is keen to make clear that this is not a self-help book; reading it will not change the way you think. However, having a deeper awareness of how our minds work can only be a good thing, and with attention, it seems we may be able to learn when to trust our intuition and how to harness the benefits of slow thinking.
So, which system of thinking will drive my decision as to whether to buy it now, or wait for the paperback?
The medical model of mental illness: we’re not convinced
A great systematic review has been published in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry. It has the slightly less than tabloid-friendly title Biogenetic Explanations and Public Acceptance of Mental Illness: Systematic Review of Population Studies, but behind the dense title is a really useful and important piece of work.
Matthias Angermeyer and his colleagues examined 33 studies which looked at the public’s beliefs about the causes of mental illness, in order to find out whether there is a relationship between those beliefs and the degree of tolerance people show towards people with experience of mental illness. This is important, not least because the shape of anti-stigma education and campaigning is determined by the causal model on which it is based.
Historically, the dominant model for public anti-stigma campaigning has been built on the foundations of the biogenetic model of mental illness, in which it is assumed that mental illness comes about primarily as a result of biochemical or genetic deviations.
Anti-stigma efforts have led to simple messages being devised, which are designed to get people to leave their prejudices behind. Under the biogenetic model, the types of messages you end up with are ‘mental illness is an illness just like any other,’ and ‘mental illness is treated with medication’.
Angermeyer’s systematic review concludes that biogenetic explanations for mental illness are correlated with less tolerance of people with mental illness amongst the general public, and therefore, basing anti-stigma work on biogenetically based causal models is an inappropriate means of countering stigma.
This is not at all surprising to me, and you if stop and think about it, it’s no wonder that the public are unconvinced by messages like ‘mental illness is just like any other illness’. The reality is that mental illness(es) are not very much like physical illness(es). We need only to think about the way mental and physical illnesses are diagnosed to realise this.
In general medicine, diagnosis typically proceeds through the identification of signs which indicate the presence of disease. In the case of diabetes, for example, it is possible to determine whether the patient has the condition by measuring their blood glucose level. The patient may have been experiencing symptoms such as feeling thirsty and tired. These symptoms, although they do indicate the possible presence of the illness are not sufficient for a diagnosis of diabetes – the physician relies upon the results of a blood test (a sign) to make a confident diagnosis.
Psychiatric diagnosis does not work like this. Although it is assumed that there is a biological dimension to mental illness, there are no definitive physical indicators of mental illnesses which categorically and objectively confirm the presence or absence of a mental disorder. It isn’t possible to determine, say through measuring their serotonin level, whether a person is suffering from depression; nor is it possible to diagnose psychosis through carrying out a blood test or x-ray. Instead, psychiatric diagnoses are made by way of observation or reporting of ‘symptoms,’ which are nearly always subjective judgements about what people say and do.
The truth is that, whilst it seems there may be some biological and genetic factors in mental illness, the science is not sufficiently advanced to be able to be clear about what they are and how they act. Not only that, but, to a much greater extent than with physical illness, the social and political dimensions in the construction of mental illness are controversial.
Therefore, oversimplified, biogenetically based anti-stigma initiatives are destined to fail because they don’t acknowledge or attend to the true complexity of mental illness. They do little to engage with people’s genuine uncertainty about why mental illnesses come about, and their legitimate fears about the sometimes worrying ways in which mental illnesses affect people’s behaviour.
One of the reasons why anti-stigma work has so far tended to insist on keeping biogenetic explanations at its heart may be to do with psychiatry’s need to assert its scientific credentials in line with other medical specialisms. I particularly applaud Matthias Angermeyer and his colleagues for drawing attention to this possibility in their concluding remarks. In asking whether the insistence on neuroscientific emphases in public education about mental illness is really in the interests of patients, they show a refreshing humility, which should be welcomed by psychiatrists, scientists, and patients.
IPPR Event on Behavioural Insight: Highlights.
Yesterday I attended an event at IPPR about the role of behavioural economics in public policy. Director of the Behavioural Insight Team, David Halpern, was the main speaker, and the panel include Gerry Stoker, Daniel Read and Claudia Hammond.
Some highlights:
- Background: Whatever your critiques of behavioural insight, let’s not forget that it is an achievement to have started at all. We have moved from ‘should we do this?’ to ‘How should we best do this?’ which is a big step forward.
- Role in economic growth. It sounds like the Behavioural insight team are thinking of how behavioural insights might kick-start the economy. Halpern was quite careful not to disclose things prematurely, but it did sound like he believed there were many ways that economic activity could be promoted/supported with behavioural insight-a lot of it seemed to be about reducing the ‘hassle’ of transactions, so watch this space.
- Message Framing: Don’t say: We will insulate your home for free. Nobody wants that(too much hassle) Do say: We will clear out your loft for free. Everybody wants that(the same thing, but reframed).
- Social trust: I think I knew this already, but I was struck by the fact that in response to the question(need to check exact wording): “Do you think people can generally be trusted”, only about 30% of British people agree, and the evidence suggests there is no good reason for people to feel this way. As Halpern put it: “We drastically underestimate our fellow citizens.” Moreover, in relatively deprived areas, people see each other more AND distrust each other more, so it’s not simply a function of not knowing people. Halpern added an interesting historical perspective about Anglo Saxons “using their wealth to escape from the inconvenience of dealing with other people.”
- Indifference and the limits of Nudge: More on this later, but a key point from Daniel Read is that nudge tends to work best on issues that we don’t care too much about. So organ donation and pensions sound like big issues, but actually they don’t matter that much in terms of immediate desires. He added that the deeper problems relating to climate change and obesity etc (what we call ‘adaptive challenges’ in our recent report) arise because people basically want things that are not in their interest or the broader social interest. Nudge works when we are moved along our ‘indifference curves’ as he put it in economic language, but doesn’t really change what we want.
- What is behaviour? More on this later too, but I asked a question about the theoretical underpinnings of behaviour and how this plays out in policy terms. Behaviour can be framed in many ways, e.g. in terms of agency, stimulus response, goal seeking etc. Halpern conceded that the current approach basically was behaviourist and outcome focussed, and Read seemed to think this was right. But Gerry Stoker seemed to have a much bigger interest in what follows from viewing behaviour in terms of agency- because then your responsibility to help people understand their own behaviour, rather than just changing it for them, comes to the fore. Again, all of this is in our recent report.
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