How and why people think the way they do
Decent homes, like other social and structural infrastructure that form the foundations of our health are mostly unseen by the general public. People may hold shallow ways of thinking (mindsets) about decent homes. These ways of thinking can make it difficult for people to understand some of the complexities of home health issues, and the actions that need to be taken to improve it.
We may assume that by leading with technical details, evidence, or corrections of misunderstandings, people will develop a deeper understanding of the issues and make decisions in the context of this new information. This is called the ‘information deficit’ model which assumes that people will support a solution when they are filled up with sufficient detail and facts. Unfortunately, this strategy has been shown by scientists to be ineffective for building deeper understandings of complex issues, especially when working with the wider public. Instead we need to communicate in ways that tap into and bring to the surface more helpful ways of thinking about decent homes. We can do this by focusing our communications on addressing the underlying the shared mindsets and mental models people use to make sense of the world. This is the cultural context that our information is being ‘filtered’ through.
Where do these shallow or incorrect mindsets and mental models come from and why do they endure?
Daniel Kahneman coined the term “thinking fast” to explain the many mental shortcuts we use to reduce the work of assessing the vast amount of information we are exposed to. These mental shortcuts:
- protect our existing beliefs and knowledge
- encourage us to grasp the concrete (what we see, touch, smell and hear) and shy away from the abstract (unseen systems and structures, that impact our day-today lives.)
At the same time, there exist in our culture many stories or explanations about the world, and how it works. These can be shallow and dominantor deeper, more nuanced and productive, but recessive. The digital age has brought new, faster and more targeted ways for us to be exposed to unproductive shallow explanations.
People acquire mental models that both inform the stories we tell and are informed by the dominant stories in our culture. If thinking and stories that are dominant are too shallow, our fast-thinking system defaults to protect unhelpful thinking. This makes it hard to have productive public conversations about complex issues.
As knowledge holders and communicators on home health, we also play our part:
- We draw on the information deficit model of communication, or we focus on compelling personal stories.
- In doing so we can inadvertently surface existing unproductive narratives, instead of navigating around them and strengthening more productive narratives
What shall we do?
Building understanding and support for complex scientific issues involves dealing with often invisible public narratives and mental models. While dominant narratives in our culture and the mental models they feed into may be unhelpful, other narratives and mental models exist (or can be developed) that can be built upon with well researched strategies.
Rebalancing public narratives and the mental models they inform has been proven to deepen people’s understandings on complex issues. This change happens over time when strategic communication is used across a field of practice.
Using narrative change approach
Changing the narrative on decent homes takes intention and practice. We created a couple of short videos to introduce the key elements of taking a narrative change approach. Go to the videos here.
