Lizard Brains on Planning
September 19, 2017
by Evan Manvel, DLCD
As a fresh-faced twentysomething in Corvallis, I watched a smart plan to create a safer, more vibrant, and more walkable space get destroyed at a public hearing.
The benefits seemed clear. But the plan would have realigned a street, making the area more walkable. Business owners were uncertain; drivers were worried. And the collective nervousness caused the city council to skip the plan.
It’s a familiar scenario to planners – months or years of work are thrown out, because people are afraid of the unknown, or simply don’t understand what plans propose.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In planning, like most professions, we talk too much among ourselves. We create acronyms and use technical terms, we submerge ourselves in a common base of knowledge and understanding of the world — and we forget how average people see our work. And yet we’re surprised when we present strong plans, and see them shot down by decision-makers and the public.
Know this: We’re up against lizards
Or rather, we’re up against the lizard brains people use to make sense of the world. The instinctual side of our brains is engaged more often than our reflective, deep thinking side.
Humans have evolved to use mental shortcuts to navigate a complex world, full of stimulation and uncertainties. These shortcuts often serve us well, allowing us to get through our daily lives. And while we’re able to engage in complex, difficult thinking, doing so takes some real work.
As planners, we need to make sure that when we present our plans and our work, we’re appealing to people’s intellects and their instincts.
Much has been written about the mental shortcuts humans use. To highlight a few:
Status quo bias, loss aversion and the endowment effect. These related shortcuts lead up to fear of change, especially when we think something we have may be lost. We overvalue things we already have, and have a hard time seeing the value in change or new things. It’s hard for people to start paying for parking when they’ve always been given it for free.
Confirmation bias. We have a hard time processing new information that doesn’t match up with what we already believe. It doesn’t feel good to give up strongly-held beliefs, so we don’t. Instead, we latch onto the data that affirm our preexisting beliefs. We share the article that furthers our belief, and skip reading the one with the contrary headline, because it seems wrong.
Observational selection bias. We have a tendency to see only those things that match up with our understanding of the world. We notice the bicyclist or SUV driver who breaks traffic laws, but don’t notice all those who follow the laws, nor our own breaking of laws.
Self-serving bias. We take more responsibility for our successes than our failures. Also, we interpret confusing or ambiguous situations in a way favorable to ourselves. Traffic or high costs of housing aren’t our fault, they’re the other person’s fault.
Gambler’s fallacy. We believe the past predicts the future, in the face of data showing us it will be different. Whether it’s a belief in lucky streaks on the roulette table, or that people will continually drive more, we struggle to imagine a future very different than the past, even in the face of clear math or data showing otherwise.
Availability heuristic. We use the first picture that comes to our mind as indicative of the whole. If we picture a run-down rental property when someone mentions affordable housing, we draw policy conclusions about affordable housing based on that image.
Given all that, what should we do?
Engage the lizards. Use people’s mental shortcuts to your advantage.
Listen hard to understand the existing story. Before bringing something to the public, work to understand how people think – and feel – about the issue. Listen to what you’ve heard, read comment threads, and ask simple questions to strangers. Get to know how people frame the issues, what values they evoke, what fears they may have, what connections they make. Ask people how they think a proposal might affect their lives, and ask them why they assume that. Does the wonky issue evoke questions about fairness? Freedom? Security? What do people imagine is the worst that can happen if a plan goes forward?
Tell a compelling story. We love stories that make sense. We fight to create associative coherence instead of having messy realities. So tell a story of a family that needs the housing you’re proposing, or a business that wants the investment you’re pushing, using anecdote along with data.
Use value-laden language. There’s a reason the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. Talk about the projects and outcomes in ways that highlight what we value: safety, community, prosperity, thriving cities, transportation choice, and so forth.
Use the availability heuristic. Plant the right example. A common tactic is to ask people to think of their favorite place in a city they’ve visited on vacation, and talk about it. It’s usually a walkable, dense place without much space given to cars. Using their own powerful image, people come along. The easy sell becomes “you love that – this is an effort to get more things like that.”
Or provide a beautiful picture of a happy family biking (so people don’t use their own first example of a “bicyclist”), when you introduce a bikeway. Or show a picture that helps push the first image in their brain out of it. If people are worried about multifamily housing because they imagine a run-down building from the 1970s, show a big beautiful house that has six units inside, or ask them to remember the first place they rented when they were just starting out. Or if people think there’s a parking problem, show a picture of a downtown of empty parking spaces (or a map of all the parking in downtown highlighted in red).
The messenger is the message. Marshall McLuhan, one of the leading communications theorists of the 20th Century, argued “the medium is the message”; the experience of the message is deeply affected by the delivery medium. I’d posit the messenger is the message. The public draws many of its conclusions based solely on who is delivering a message. Is it a planner who’s just doing her job? An outside “expert”? A trusted community leader? A business person? The same message will be heard significantly differently depending on who delivers it. Think hard about who presents at public meetings. And remember most of our communication is non-verbal – so having strong body language and facial expressions can go far.
Use the oxy. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter love molecule that helps our lizard brains bond with those in our own group. It makes us suspicious, fearful, and disdainful of those who are not. So use messengers and examples that emphasize your similarities to the audience – perhaps it’s sharing a love of baseball or picnics, or missing a local bookstore that departed, or worrying about speeding traffic.
Focus on the gain. Our lizard brains have an endowment effect – we overvalue what we already have, we dislike losing things. We have loss aversion. Talk about boosted traffic safety and travel reliability, or about the increased likelihood of a local restaurant and grocery store in a walkable neighborhood.
Use visual-mental shortcuts to your advantage. For example: green is good, red is bad (think stop lights, red ink, etc.) If pushing for parking reform, color areas where parking spaces are less than 70% full in red (problematic), not green (open for use). The red highlights public space being unused, and customers or residents who aren’t present. Then color the areas where parking is 70-90% full in green – that’s the goal we’re after.
Help decisionmakers experience the future you want. People build reality from their personal experiences. In 2009, safe streets advocates pushed for a law to let bicyclists to yield, instead of fully stop, at stop signs. Idaho has had a similar law since 1982. Advocates provided testimony from police departments, health experts, and Idaho legislators, based on 27 years of real-world experience, demonstrating the law boosted safety.
All for naught; the advocates were engaging the wrong part of the brain. Legislators argued the idea seemed dangerous, and found various excuses to ignore the mountain of data. One notable exception: Representative Nick Kahl, who had been opposed to the idea until the previous weekend. That weekend he had biked around his neighborhood, and realized the bill made good sense.
Time it well. Introduce new or complex information weeks before decision-makers have to decide. In stressful times, such as when we have to make a decision, people rely more on their intuition, not the facts.
Frame non-action as risky. Decisionmakers are risk-averse, unless both outcomes are negative. If there’s a risk in a road safety project by losing some parking, the counter risk is people being injured on the street, or a dead downtown with traffic just speeding through.
What should we avoid doing?
Avoid engaging negative shortcuts. Think hard about the language and images being used. For example, calling something a “road diet” evokes a diet. And while people may connect that to health, it evokes pain and sacrifice, and doing something hard. People can also (rightly) be skeptical about the effectiveness of dieting. Instead, call it a “road safety project” and lead people through the story of thriving businesses and safer streets for everyone. Highway builders have done this forever, calling highway expansions “improvements.”
Avoid acronyms. Use pictures and easy words connected to valued outcomes. Replace every ADU or Comp Plan in your talks with an in-law apartment and a vision for the community’s future.
Evoking the non-lizard brain
While we use our intuitive brain and short-cuts to make most decisions, we are capable of doing more analytical, deep thinking. Here’s how to engage those parts of the brain:
If people are against your idea, ask them to frown before you talk. When people frown, they start to engage the critical side of their brain. Overconfidence in preexisting beliefs is reduced, and more vigilant thinking is sparked. We question things we might otherwise reflexively presume as true.
Ask questions. And follow-up questions. Ask people to explain themselves, and explain themselves further. On a tough subject, try to engage the brain in active processing. When pushing an idea on people’s minds doesn’t work, work on pulling their ideas out of them. People can open up their own minds when they’re asked to really explain how things work, when they discover uncertainty. Initially angry people may realize they don’t really know how our roads are funded, or where the new affordable housing should go, or exactly how to provide the right amount of parking without boosting housing costs. The Vision Zero movement uses this trick when they ask first how many traffic deaths there are annually, then how many are acceptable, then how many are acceptable in the listener’s family, then returning to how many are acceptable. Most respondents move to a goal of zero traffic deaths.
Try to get people in other’s shoes. Called analogic perspective-taking, we should work to get those in the room to imagine the life of those not in the room. Urbanist Sara Maxana talks about growth in cities by putting faces on the people moving there. Faceless growth becomes our kids needing a place to live when they grow up, or a researcher at the university wanting an apartment, or an elder wanting a simpler lifestyle with less yard and housework. Few decision-makers remember that roughly a third of people are too young, poor, infirm or old to drive; they need to be reminded of those outside their personal experience. Advocates make progress by getting decision-makers to spend a day in a wheelchair, or a week on a limited food budget. Work to get your audience to think through the challenges of others.
Learn through iteration
While marketers have used these strategies for decades, many planners are learning this through trial and error. If you try these strategies, I’d love to know how it goes. Please e-mail me at evan.manvel@state.or.us.
Additional reading
Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) is the seminal work on this subject. Kahneman makes a distinction between “System 1” thinking, which is fast, instinctive and emotional, and “System 2” thinking, which is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
“The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt, (2012). Haidt is a social psychologist who writes about persuasion and politics.
“You are Almost Definitely Not Living in Reality Because Your Brain Doesn’t Want You To,” Buster Benson (2016). QZ.Com/776168
“Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda in the News,” Sightline Institute (2016), www.sightline.org/research_item/seattles-housing-affordability-livability-agenda-in-the-news/
“Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker (2017), www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
“Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (2017). Public health specialist Sara Gorman and psychiatrist Jack Gorman explore psychological, neurobiological, and evolutionary reasons we make the decisions we do.
“The Enigma of Reason” (2017). Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber explain about how mental habits that don’t make sense from a logical perspective can be productive if one considers the social benefits.