How can civil society’s superpowers help us to start bridging the divides in society?
There are two areas where I’d love to see civil society dramatically step up its collective game: how we speak to, and how we involve, ordinary people.
Historically we’ve come to think we’re good at these things, and really, both should be absolute civil society superpowers.
But from where I sit, it looks like we’re losing the campaign in both theatres. Bear with me and I’ll explain…
It’s human nature to look for people or institutions that we can trust when it comes to topics that we’ve little expertise in ourselves, and that trust, once placed, can be remarkably resilient.
Even when those same people speak on topics we’re experts in, and we can see they’re way off the mark, we tend to forget about that “one-off”, and revert back to trusting them on everything else.
Some call this Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy, after the US journalist Erwin Knoll who first noted it, but the best-selling author, Michael Chrichton, dubbed it the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, for a particularly interesting reason.
Crighton was transparent about why he’d chosen to name it after the famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It was simply because people would be more likely to believe it if he gave it a name they were already familiar with.
That was it – the only reason. And it might sound like he was being flippant, but he wasn’t, because Crichton was right.
We are significantly more likely to believe things if we’ve heard them before, irrespective of whether or not they’re true. And the more often we hear them, the more likely we are to believe them.
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect, and it’s been demonstrated and replicated in numerous studies since the late 1970s.
So, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect helps to explain why most of the wedge issues being wielded in our current culture wars, are the ones with which most people have little direct experience. People are far more gullible whenever that’s the case.
And the illusory truth effect explains why certain politicians and influencers consistently promote the same narrow collection of issues, framing them in a very consistent set of talking points, while flooding the media and stacking the algorithms to embed that framing through familiarity.
Whether the issue is about vaccines or autism or migrants or London’s inevitable spiral towards sharia law, they know if they follow those two rules, vast numbers of people will eventually come to believe what they’re told, however inaccurate or socially corrosive those beliefs may be.
Hence, my two wishes: how we collectively speak to, and how we collectively involve, ordinary people.
Because there are two, complimentary ways, for us to counter these increasingly aggressive and, so far, depressingly effective, assaults on many of the causes and communities that our civil society organisations exist to serve and support.
The first is to create and embed an equally powerful framing, through our own consistently delivered talking points. Consistency being the key ingredient here.
One of the biggest strengths of civil society is its diversity. But the diversity of its messaging is one of its biggest weaknesses in this particular fight. We need to fix this.
The second is to involve more people in our work; to give them personal experience that counters what they’re being told.
This what Matt Hyde described as “social bridging” in our conversation on communities back in May, and it’s by far the strongest antidote to the “othering” effect of the rhetoric coming from the radical right.
Everyone goes on protest marches for their own unique reasons, but everyone gets the same three big psychological benefits from doing so: belonging, purpose, and agency.
The exact same benefits those same people could get from a great volunteering experience.
They are the essential ingredients of what Danny Sriskandarajah described as “human flourishing” in our conversation on civil society earlier this month, and they underscore the huge indirect value that volunteering offers, beyond simply the labour.
Unlocking a dramatic expansion in volunteering, particularly for those causes in and around these big cultural wedge issues, is not something that a single organisation can do on its own.
Just as with framing and with talking points, this is an opportunity we can only fully unlock by charities working together.
Nobody else can do this. Collectively, charities have more members and supporters than all the political parties and protest marches put together.
The question is, can we collectively unleash what could be our single greatest strength to start bridging the divides and countering the social fragmentation that, right now, seems to be in the ascendancy?