Recently journalist and writer David Roberts, who hosts the podcast Volts, had on an interesting guest to talk about misinformation. The guest, Samuel Bragg, and David discussed how the lack of trust in information and truth producing institutions has led to more tribalism and social identity leading to beliefs rather than “truth”. And because we can’t “do the research” on every topic, we turn to those we would otherwise trust for information.
The answer Samuel and David then believe isn’t writing a new paper with the facts, re-framing an issue with new language, or trying to get someone to believe the earth is actually round if they are already so positive that it is not, but rather changing people’s social identities through organizing.
To do this, people need to get involved and go through something together. Which is exactly what Carter Lavin discusses in his recent book (and on Talking Headways) on transportation organizing “If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight”. Going and talking to people in person, getting them involved in a cause, and even better winning a policy fight is going to change people’s perspectives more than a white paper.
This is why I think some get “The War on Cars” podcast and the movement around safe streets and urbanism wrong sometimes. Because its more about a movement and bringing people into the fold on the issues that matter to that movement in order to get policy wins.
The War on Cars, Not Just Bikes, and urbanist shows like CityNerd and many others like it have changed people’s social identity to connect with certain values on active transportation. We often diminish YouTubers and social media stars in this respect to our detriment as they are often the ones setting social identity markers and culture.
We talk about congestion pricing a lot as a positive outcome and a winning issue, but what we haven’t talked much about is the all out organizing war that took place after Governor Hochul paused the implementation.
After pausing pricing, safe streets and active transportation traditional organizing and social media went nuts to push people to call the governor and state representatives to turn the system on. Thousands of calls were made and I personally believe that if there was no pushback from a movement that had been cultivated over many years, pricing wouldn’t have happened despite Governor Hochul’s claims.
But people don’t like being told what to do, they want to come to that finding together.
There’s a new study out from the Santa Fe Institute that finds people hate being told what to do on climate change. Even more than previously thought, people (3,000 Germans specifically in the survey) don’t like forced bans on things that would positively impact climate change like reducing meat consumption or setting thermostat limits.
And setting aside the fact that I don’t think anyone has called for central city car bans in the name of overarching climate change rather than improvements in air quality and traffic safety, people don’t like the idea of government entities taking away the ability to drive somewhere they did before. Anyone who reads this newsletter knows that fact. But European cities have been enacting center city car restrictions more and more, but not necessarily for “climate change” writ large.
So what’s interesting from digging into the paper is that the researchers come to the same conclusion as Samuel and David did with respect to the car free city centers, though not other bans that were considered invasive of personal control like meat.
“Nonetheless, changing peoples’ beliefs about policy effectiveness could support agreement with the targeted green behavior. If a person came to believe that, say, banning cars from cities was effective in mitigating climate change, dropping one’s opposition to the car ban would reduce cognitive dissonance.”
So if someone organized with people enough to get them to change their mind because it now fit their beliefs and identity, then the policy would become more palatable.
I don’t believe this is the whole answer, but it’s part of a whole. We still need white papers and good information, but we also need way more organizing that we have now to get the policy wins we want. As Carter mentioned on the podcast, no one will say that we have too many transportation organizers…we still need a lot more.
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