Yet most schools focus on passing on knowledge in traditional subjects rather than on developing practical skills. Generally, schools do a good job at preparing technically competent people, but they promote a ‘me-first’ culture, training us to act as detached experts providing a service for people, not as citizens working with others to solve public problems. The dominant educational model reflects the values of the highly individualistic and achievement-oriented middle-class. It treats students as largely passive clients, not as creative agents who have the potential to solve actual problems. As a result, there is no connection between the classroom experience, the curriculum and community engagement. Much of our widespread feeling of powerlessness has its roots in this disjunction between what we teach and what we need to know to succeed as a modern society. In particular, we are witnessing a growing and well-documented gap between what schools, including universities, offer us and what today’s society (and the workplace) expects from us.
We are taught to look at the world from the specific angle of our profession or discipline – engineering, plumbing, art, media, law, communication or economics.43 But we tend to be embarrassingly illiterate when it comes to public life. As a result, not only do we lack the confidence and fluency to assert our power as citizens, but – worse – we are unaware this power even exists. We have to struggle to resist the seduction of a popular culture that expresses contempt for entering public life, dismissing it as political ambition or a shortcut to a ‘proper job’. Schools in turn reinforce society’s dominant belief that the only ways to play a role in public life are to vote and to run for office. By denying the existence of any space between these two forms of participation, the education system not only fails to fulfil its civic mission, but damages our civic foundations.
My experience both as a student and as a professor has left me with a discouraging impression of what education does for us. Students seem as jaded as the rest of us when it comes to the traditional business models of education and politics. However, faced with the familiar demands to listen, read, write and study, students are increasingly asking: ‘Why?’ Sometimes they even dare to ask: ‘What for?’ They are more and more aware that the school system can no longer artificially separate learning and society. They want to learn less from the teacher and more from hands-on, real-life experiences, to write more, and to be more actively involved in their education – possibly by co-authoring their curriculum and tailoring it to the needs of society.
Schools can no longer afford to teach theories without showing how to apply them. The time has come to teach non-cognitive, social and emotional skills, such as self-awareness (the ability to recognise one’s emotions), self-management (the ability to control them), social awareness (the ability to empathise with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures) and relationship skills (the ability to maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with them).44
It’s not all one-sided. The academic community more broadly wants to connect with their communities, be exposed to the culturally rich, pluralistic and ethnically diverse world we live in, and do so regardless of class or income. They want to ensure that their work doesn’t just advance academic debate but has an impact on the real world. Demand for ‘impact’ is growing across the sciences and ‘impact teaching’,45 as well as policy-driven work, sounds more attractive than it used to.
But let’s be frank. Education and research driven by impact and policy attract more suspicion than praise in today’s academic community. Scholars who embrace this approach risk jeopardising their reputation for rigorous scholarship. There is an assumption that proximity to and direct engagement with the object of study would impoverish rather than enrich the scientific value of their work. The word ‘activism’ is often used pejoratively.
As both a teacher and a scholar, I find it difficult to accept this position. I will never forget walking into my European Affairs classroom at 8am on 24 June 2016, the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union. It was one of the most thought-provoking classes I ever experienced. By linking theory to action, we spent hours speculating about the immediate effects of the vote on my students’ lives and the world. There is nothing more enriching than sharing a research topic with a classroom of future problem-solvers. I see it in the students’ eyes. They love it when the real world comes into the classroom and calls on them for solutions. And evidence backs them up: the more you are involved in the learning experience, the more you learn.
Source: Alberto Alemanno, adapted from figures from the World Bank, and from National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine.
But learning is not just about retention rates. Studies suggest that students do far better in academic and social terms when they are exposed to settings which encourage influences from outside the academy.46 In particular, participation in extracurricular activities has a positive correlation with students’ attendance, grade point average test scores and expected educational goals.47 Researchers at California State University, Sacramento, proved this to be true both at a high school and university level.48 This is why I have emphasised experiential learning in my teaching – learning through reflection on action.
In sum, we should not just measure the return on our investment in education in terms of individual success, but on how much the next generation of citizens is prepared to fix collective problems collaboratively and creatively.
How can we persuade a reluctant educational world to engage with this urgent need for civic participation?
The same skills most needed in the global knowledge economy are the ones we need to preserve our civic and democratic life. It is exactly by embracing this shift – from what you know to what you can do – that we can overcome our widespread feeling of powerlessness and lack of control. But we need more than a paradigm shift.
Education can do much more for society than it does today. Students must be taught to act with citizens (by listening and working with them), and not upon them (by fixing their problems, arbitrating their disputes, building their homes, convincing them to consume), so they can engage with the civic life of their communities. The talents and intelligence of people who we’ve previously judged to lack the ‘right’ qualifications must be recognised. Professionals’ citizenship must be cultivated, not weakened. We must all learn to see our work in communal and public terms.
By reconnecting with the real world, education can empower each of us, not as spectators but as world actors.
Somebody Decides for You: Powerless by Design
‘What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.’
Archibald MacLeish
Life is about choices: what to eat, what to read, who to vote for, what to buy, where to live. Our innate ability to choose is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings. We like to think we live in freedom-loving societies. We like having choices because it makes us feel in control and therefore powerful – even though we now know that too much choice makes people unhappy.49
Although we cannot always choose in life, when we do so we generally consider ourselves good at it. We tend to pause and ponder the costs and benefits of different options before making up our minds. Yet our ability to make rational choices is increasingly being questioned, as we discover more about cognitive biases – the predictable mechanisms that prevent us from acting in our own best interests. In our busy lives, these mechanisms work as ‘mental shortcuts’ by easing the cognitive load of making a decision.50 They were originally identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in a seminal article published in the magazine Science in 1974. This led Kahneman, after the premature death of Tversky, to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002.51
Let me share a few examples of the major cognitive biases that affect our daily behaviour. As a teacher, I regularly see my students taking these mental shortcuts. So if I
ask: ‘How many members of the European Union have adopted the Euro currency? More or less than ten?,’ my students will use the figure of ten countries as a reference point in coming to a conclusion. Behavioural scientists call the numerical figure that people use to make decisions an anchor. As the right response is nineteen,52 my hint is potentially misleading, as students infer the number to be somewhere between five and fifteen. When I don’t prompt them with the figure of ten, the range of responses is typically broader (between six and 28 states).
Here’s another example. You go to the doctor for a check-up. He tells you that you need surgery. Before agreeing, you immediately ask about the likelihood of the operation being successful. The doctor knows the answer, and he can convey it to you in either of these ways: (a) 90 per cent of patients are fine, or (b) 10 per cent face complications. If he uses (a), 70 per cent of patients will accept the intervention, but if he chooses (b) only 35 per cent will.
What this illustrates is the framing effect – how the way choices are presented influences our decisions in life. In other words, context matters. This applies whether you’re picking a mortgage, going shopping, posting on social media or going to the polls. Rearranging a food display can make you more likely to choose the healthy option. Publishing an image next to your Facebook or Twitter posts makes them more likely to be read and liked.
Have you begun to doubt your ability to be in full control of your choices?
How free are we when we choose? And is it really us who is doing the choosing?
Mental shortcuts can be even sneakier. Inertia means we tend to stick to default settings and rules. When you download a new operating system and are prompted to choose the recommended version, you go with the suggestion. Of course, you can opt out and manually download a different OS instead, but very few people will. Likewise, if you are offered the chance to renew a mobile phone plan, it is very unlikely that you will change it, even when it would be in your best interest and it could be done fairly easily. Small hurdles matter a lot.
One consequence is that people have a strong tendency to stick to the default option. In some cases this default option is set by law, but most of the time it is left to the market. The best example is organ donation. Where the law presumes consent and people have to opt out of the scheme (explicitly refuse to donate their organs), the proportion of donors in the population is much higher than where people have to opt in (sign up to a register as a donor).53 As a result, many countries are switching from opt-in systems to opt-out systems. The same thing is happening for things like magazine subscription renewals and pension schemes. The default situation matters.
Social influence (or peer pressure) is another important factor. Our natural tendency to adjust to the dominant behaviour of a group – often called ‘herd behaviour’ – explains why you often act differently when in company. Social context matters too. So if the framing effect explains why we pick food that is closer and easier to see, social influence makes us eat more of it when we are with other people.54
These mental shortcuts – anchoring, framing, the power of inertia, defaults as well as social influence – are often called heuristics. Because of our cognitive laziness, we constantly (and unconsciously) rely on these mental shortcuts when making decisions, including, of course, decisions about our political leaders and civic life. Which is why it’s worth getting to know a few more heuristics, so you can become aware of their influence on your behaviour.
Among the most common cognitive biases, one could mention:
Availability heuristic: events that come to people’s mind immediately are rated as more probable (i.e. a recent plane crash) than events that are less mentally available.
Probability neglect: the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty (for example, in the year following 9/11, 1,595 Americans died in car accidents, as they were more inclined to drive than fly).
Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions or hypothesis. As a result, this leads to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.
Loss aversion: people’s inherent propensity to strongly prefer avoiding losses to making gains. Thus, in experiments, most subjects would prefer to receive a sure $46 than have a 50 per cent chance of making $100. A rational agent would take the bet. Would you?
The sunk-cost fallacy: people seek to avoid feelings of regret; thus, they invest more money and time in a project with dubious results rather than give it up and admit they were wrong.
Status quo bias: the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same.
Optimism bias: the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating your ability to commit and deliver so as to attain favourable outcomes (I am definitely a victim!).
Omission bias: the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).55
Like Homer Simpson, we think much less than we think we think. The more we know about these findings, the more powerless we are likely to feel. As one of the leading researchers in the field, Daniel Ariely, explains:
Behavioural economics is depressing because it shows us that we are just not that wonderful. It shows us that we are myopic, vindictive, that we don’t know what we want, that we are easily confused, it shows all the mistakes we can make.56
This can be an unsettling discovery. Realising the power that doctors have over patients or the ability of town planners to influence the number of road accidents is arresting. Behavioural science can be used for good or bad. While it can ensure more people receive organ transplants, it can also be used to make you carry on subscribing to a magazine even though you no longer read it, or make you click on a Google AdWord. (That’s the ubiquitous ad that appears when you do a search on Google.)
It won’t surprise you to learn that marketers have been exploiting mental shortcuts for some time. They do so by steering our choices towards their best financial interests.57 If you have ever watched the US TV series Mad Men (you should!), you will recognise this. Marketers routinely make us engage in actions we would never willingly have taken without their prompting. Sometimes they trick us into buying items we don’t need, or into choosing more expensive options. In short, they help us choose what they want us to buy. The same tricks are used to steer political behaviour. The merging of politics and consumer marketing has been happening for half a century, originally through direct mail campaigns aimed at personalising political messages.
While companies and politicians have been exploiting our mental shortcuts for quite some time, the ability of marketers to take decisions on your behalf has grown exponentially. While mental shortcuts don’t explain everything we do, our habits, routines and social interactions are surprisingly predictable, not least because marketers collect thousands of pieces of metadata about each of us, including our purchase data and online browsing habits. By playing with this data, it is possible to actually predict future consumer – and increasingly political – behaviour. As a result, our behaviour and choices are increasingly steered by micro-targeting. This consists of personalised advertisements and search results and e-commerce recommendation systems like Amazon’s. You might have heard the story of how a supermarket, Target, worked out a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did.58 Target’s consumer tracking system identified 25 products that when purchased together indicate a woman is likely to be expecting a baby. The value of this information was that Target could send coupons to the pregnant woman at an expensive and habit-forming period of her life. That is targeted marketing.
Society’s ability to collect, process and analyse information in new ways to generate valuable insights is generally referred to as big data.59 As a result of the commodification of big data, companies can increasingly manipulate our decisions, behaviour and feelings.60 And they are already doing so.
This emerging phenomenon is n
ot driven exclusively by economic motives. Critically, it is not confined to the market. Governments increasingly embrace big data – triangulating the openly shared personal information from about a dozen social media sites – in order to inform the police, or shut down protests in real time.
We know that Facebook conducted experiments to encourage people to vote in US elections from at least 2010 onwards. By prompting users to publish ‘I voted’ updates, the social network was nudging Americans to carry out their civic duty. The underlying mechanism of the ‘voter megaphone’ was social influence and peer pressure to vote. In so doing, researchers tapped into tens of millions of pieces of data to identify the most effective ways of encouraging voting. It turned out that, largely due to social influence and herd behaviour, notifications from friends were what most influenced people’s behaviour. After comparing voting records, the experiment is estimated to have led to 340,000 extra voters.61 Needless to say, this is more than the extra votes a candidate usually needs to win a swing state in the US.
The intentions may be good. The hope is that big data can improve our lives and revamp governance by overcoming irrationality and biased debates. Yet systematic reliance on it evokes philosopher Immanuel Kant’s warning: the ‘sovereign acting … to make the people happy according to his notions … becomes a despot’.62 It is for this reason that the US Declaration of Independence emphasises individuals’ pursuit of happiness, while EU foundational treaties aim to improve their wellbeing – a marker that can be more objectively assessed.
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