How to change a culture: the art of crowdshifting

OpEds

Leon Neyfakh, |Globe Staff September 23, 2012 

The Boston University hockey team has a crisis on its hands. Last December, one player was charged with sexual assault; just a few months later, another was charged with rape. And though only two of the team’s players have been formally accused of wrongdoing—and the rape charge was dropped in June—there has been a sense ever since the scandal broke that their alleged crimes were not isolated incidents, but symptoms of something deeper.

Then, earlier this month, the task force conducting the investigation confirmed that suspicion. In a disturbing report, it identified a “culture of sexual entitlement”1that had taken root among the players. This was not a matter of a few individuals that could simply be kicked off the team: It was something intangible and pervasive. Now, as the university responds to the problem, it faces the challenge of stamping that out. What it needs to do, in other words, is change a culture.

"The inner conformist is stronger than the inner activist,”

The notion of transforming a culture gets tossed around so frequently —by corporate consultants, political candidates, overexcited entrepreneurs —that it’s hard to appreciate just how difficult it can be. Culture, the mix of rituals, values, and traditions that defines a group, is tenacious and sticky. Whether the culture belongs to a sports team, a neighborhood, or a country, it persists because it’s one of the main ingredients in the glue that holds the group together—because it exists in the space between people, rather than residing in any one individual. Studies have recently shown that cultures can be almost unimaginably persistent. In Germany, for instance, towns in which Jews were blamed for the Black Plague still exhibited more anti-Semitism than other towns 600 years later.

What researchers have found is that there are techniques for changing a culture that appear to work, but they are not always the obvious ones. Doing so in a way that produces lasting results, but doesn’t involve destroying the  group entirely, requires finesse, subtlety, and patience. It also requires a certain suspension of optimism about human nature. To really change how a group of people thinks and behaves, it turns out, you don’t need to change what’s inside of them, or appeal to their inner sense of virtue. You just have to convince them that everybody else is doing it.

“The inner conformist is stronger than the inner activist,” said Michael Morris, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies the role of culture in decision-making.

We want to think of progress as the spread of enlightened thinking and the expansion of morality. We’d like to think that in trying to change the culture of a hockey team, we can just appeal to the players’ sense of right and wrong, and awaken their better angels. But in order to actually achieve that kind of progress, we may need to stop trying to tap into people’s desire to be good or virtuous, and instead take advantage of something less lofty and, frankly, harder to admire: the powerful drive to be normal.***

A culture of respect and kindness Isn’t necessarily made up of angels —just people who have come tobelieve that that’s what everyone else thinks is the right way to act.

When a toxic culture takes root—whether it’s a culture of corruption, or domestic violence, or cheating in school—the most simple and dramatic way to deal with the problem is to take the scorched earth approach. In 2005, when the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, decided to rid his country’s police force of corruption, he fired 30,000 officers and hired new ones. It’s the equivalent of dealing with a bedbug infestation by selling your house, or burning it down. [Editor's Note: This shows the author's own mind being hostage to the western phony narrative.  Mikheil Saakashvili may have acted correctly, as the case warranted, but he is a notorious international crook and gangster, a tool of Washington that plunged his country into a completely unnecesary war just to annoy the Kremlin.—Editor)

But starting over is arguably not so much a way to changea culture as to end it. When you take such a radical step, you inevitably throw away the good with the bad —institutional memory and know-how, or the spirit and pride that come with a team tradition. Stopping short of that —saving the house while killing the bedbugs, or saving the system while condemning the behavior it once fostered —is significantly harder.

One straightforward way to bring about that transition is to start monitoring people and punishing them with devastating severity for stepping out of line. That’s what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did when he wanted to stop visiting diplomats from taking advantage of their immunity to park illegally all over his city. “Bloomberg [got] permission to remove their plates,” e-mailed Ray Fisman, a professor at Columbia who studied the diplomats’ parking habits as a window into the connection between corruption and culture. “That worked in a hurry.”

But sometimes that simple, blunt tool doesn’t go far enough; you can punish wrongdoers, even expel a handful of players, and still not fix the deeply ingrained attitudes that producedthem. Luckily, researchers say there’s a workaround that produces lasting change, but doesn’t call for somehow reprogramming people’s inner values. What it does seem to require is changing their perception of what everyone else thinks. A culture of “sexually entitled” hockey players is driven not by bad people, in other words, but by their shared, and likely inaccurate, belief that that’s how all the other guys on the team—as well as the coaching staff—really think a hockey player should behave. By the same token, a culture of respect and kindness isn’t necessarily made up of angels—just people who have come to believe that that’s what everyone else thinks is the right way to act.

The idea that we’re often mistaken about our compatriots’ beliefs and behavior has been deployed in anti-binge-drinking campaigns on college campuses, which aim to reduce the pressure students feel to drink by showing them that their peers don’t drink nearly as much as they assume. A poster campaign at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill presented students with hard data about their classmates: “Whether it’s Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, 2 out of 3 UNC students return home with a .00 blood alcohol concentration.” The program worked: After five years, people at the college were drinking less.