This series started out by focusing on ‘The people who stop you getting things done’, followed by thinking about how ‘You may not be interested in change, but change is interested in you’. An earlier piece here focused on NIMBYs: ‘Building a Better Future: A Radical Proposal to Overcome NIMBYism’
Distributional and blocking coalitions can really block progress. Here, I focus on overcoming distributional and blocking coalitions with some approaches derived from psychology and neuroscience that go beyond the traditional shouting back, counter-organising, saying ‘no’ loudly and frequently, and harassing politicians to do something, anything, whatever it is.
Remember, politicians have a particular problem because their immediate incentives are straightforward: they depend on votes in the here and now, from those already living in their constituencies. Building houses and rail and cycle paths and hospitals and wind farms is disruptive, and what guarantee do you have the newbies benefiting from all that lovely new development are going to vote for you? None. So tough. Go build somewhere else.
Zero sum thinking
What I have, I hold; if you have more, I have less. So it was for most of human history: we were in a Malthusian trap, with little to no economic growth, resource poverty, short lives, and a world where life was harsh. This is the core of distributional coalitional thinking: the pie is a fixed size, and what I get, you lose. Look at the first one thousand years on the graph below: life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.
However, the secret of our success is our great capacity for peaceful cooperation and for learning from each other.
Viewing our interactions as win-lose scenarios undermines the cooperation critical to human success. One major study explores (with 3,297 participants in the UK and the US) how a zero-sum mindset reveals this worldview erodes trust and cooperation, increasing hostility and resource scarcity.
a zero-sum view of the world thwarts a society’s ability to flourish by undermining trust and cooperation, with serious consequences for the foundations upon which our well-being and our society is built.
This is true even of social intangibles: in a series of ten studies contrasting dominance-oriented strategies (grounded in fear and intimidation) and noncoercive prestige-oriented strategies (grounded in respect and admiration) involving 3,372 participants, (including a high-powered preregistered replication), it was found that individuals' beliefs about social hierarchies play a crucial role in shaping their preference for dominance strategies. Those holding zero-sum beliefs about social hierarchies (where they think one person's rise in social rank must come at the expense of others), are more inclined to favor dominance-oriented tactics for gaining status.
As I was writing this, the Marginal Revolution blog posted the following summary:
“…zero-sum thinking can causally lead to lower growth because it leads to anti-growth policies such as tariffs, anti-immigration, NIMBY, low-trust, high taxes, redistribution, identity politics and so forth.”
This is in part based on a new NBER paper (Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides).
Planned for Brain Pizza: next week for paid subscribers only, another in my series on writing - this time on collaborative writing (most how to writes focus on solo writing); future plans include a piece riffing on a quote from the late Amos Tversky I often think about: ‘The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.’ (source: ‘The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds’ by Michael Lewis) - basically, lots of downtime is good for your brain; and a piece thinking about nationalism as the ultimate distributional coalition.
We need to go beyond zero sum thinking to confront the difficult problems we have.
Here’s a selection of strategies derived from psychology and neuroscience.
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