“I don’t know I had the terms to explain it, but… I knew that he had turned a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’. So there was something powerful there inside what he had said.”
Robert Cialdini from a 2-part episode of Hidden Brain: Persuasion
In my last post, I introduced psychologist Robert Cialdini and the seven principles of persuasion he identified during his long career. If you don’t look too closely, this kind of talk could be mistaken for the shallow self-help advice from a get rich quick huckster, but Cialdini’s credentials and research are academically solid.
I described one principle last time, reciprocity, and gave a couple examples. This time I’ll do the same for a second principle: commitment and consistency.
Like most primates, humans are social creatures. The nucleus of a society is trust: the confidence that various people—family, friends, lovers, business partners—will fulfill their agreements and obligations. Evolution has imbued us with a concern for duty and trustworthiness. So one important piece of persuasion is our tendency to behave consistent with the commitments we have made. Cialdini gives this example:
Robert Cialdini:
It was a place called Gordon’s Restaurant. And Gordon, he had a problem that was, at the time, not unique to his restaurant: no-shows. People who called, booked a table, and then just didn’t appear. Didn’t call ahead to cancel. And it was a big problem for him. And he went to listen to what his receptionist said. When she took a reservation, she would say, “Thank you for calling Gordon’s Restaurant. Please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation.” And that ended the call. He asked her to add two words and to say, “Will you please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation?” And then he asked her to pause. So what would you say? How would you fill that pause?
Shankar Vedantam:
I would say, “Yes. Of course, I would call.”
Robert Cialdini:
And that’s your commitment, Shankar. You have now publicly committed yourself to it. And no shows at Gordon’s Restaurant dropped by 64% that day, and never went back up.
This anecdote supports the notion that people are inherently motivated to follow their commitments, in this case, a private one between customer and proprietor. The principle of commitment and consistency, though, goes further.
Robert Cialdini:
And it’s in private that you make a commitment, you get a significant increase. But if it’s in public, you get a much larger increase in congruency of a subsequent behavior. The one that produces the biggest leap forward in terms of compliance, it’s the public commitment.
Shankar Vedantam:
One of the techniques that follows from this principle is something called the foot-in-the-door technique. What is the foot-in-the-door technique, Bob?
Robert Cialdini:
It’s a technique that was uncovered back in the ’60s by Jonathan Freedman, in which he asked people to make a small initial step in a particular direction… The interesting thing is that, if they had made that first step, they were significantly more likely to say yes to the larger request.
So the classic study was, people in Palo Alto, California, Freedman was at Stanford at the time, they were asked to put a small sign in their window of their car or their home that said, “Please drive safely. National Driver Safety Week.” Some were asked to do so. Others of their neighbors were not asked to do that. Then a week later, somebody came to their homes and asked them to put a big sign on their lawn promoting driver safety week. Those people who put the small sign in their window were significantly more likely to put the large sign on their lawn.
“One assumption about compliance that has often been made either explicitly or implicitly is that once a person has been induced to comply with a small request he is more likely to comply with a larger demand. This is the principle that is commonly referred to as the foot-in-the-door or gradation technique”
So persuasion is sometimes as simple as eliciting someone’s explicit commitment to do something they implicitly know is right and achievable. Our human social nature compels them to follow through in many circumstances.
In the first-year critical thinking course I teach, I set the stage with a point about rhetoric: persuasion is everywhere, and awareness is the first step in thwarting undesired manipulation. So it was with great interest that I listened to the most recent 2-part episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, called simply Persuasion.
Over 98 minutes, the episodes draw on Robert Cialdini’s 45-year psychology career, which includes not just his peer-reviewed research but his years spent undercover in used car sales training sessions. His book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, expanded and republished in 2021, distills the scientific research into seven principles of persuasion:
Reciprocation
Commitment and consistency
Social proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity
Unity
When invoked, each principle exerts significant pressure on the people with whom we communicate. Like all strategies, these persuasive principles can be used either ethically or unscrupulously.
I am imagining using each one of these principles, one per class session, in a roughly five minute activity, to illustrate persuasion in practice.
With cue cards and props, I picture having two volunteers act out a scene, drawn from Cialdini’s book or another source, depicting the principle, and then asking the class to identify what made the scene persuasive. Importantly, I will not explain or define the principles beforehand, but allow the students to cogitate and construct the meaning for themselves.
I plan to write separate posts describing each of Cialdini’s seven types of persuasion, in no particular order.
Reciprocation
One form of influence is encapsulated in the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This basic kind of fairness, reciprocity, seems ingrained in human nature. It may be a just way to treat other people, but reciprocity can also be employed for manipulative ends.
Years ago, members of the Hari Krishna sect would occupy airport lobbies, raising money and seeking converts. A very effective tactic was to hand flowers to travelers as “gifts”. Cialdini explains it this way:
They would walk up to people and press a flower into their hands, a passenger in the airport somewhere, and they wouldn’t take it back. And they say, “No, no, no. That is our gift to you. However, if you would like to give a gift to us for the good works of our society, that would be greatly appreciated.” And I remember watching them operate like this and people, they weren’t able to simply walk away with the flower, they felt a need to give back because they had received. The interesting thing was if I followed them, I would see that the first waste container they came to, they would throw the flower with force into the garbage because they didn’t want it. They wanted to be released from violation of the rule for reciprocity. That’s what they paid for.
Notice the last two sentences: the hapless travelers wanted neither the flowers nor to give the donations, but having the former, an intrinsic reciprocity drove them to the latter.
In another example, Cialdini retells a psychology study done by Dennis Regan of Stanford University:
It was a lovely study. And about halfway through he said [to the subject], “Okay, it’s time for a break.” In truth, one of the subjects was a confederate of the experiment. This person said, “Do you mind if I leave the room?” Researcher said, “No, that’s fine.” The confederate left and came back with two bottles of Coca-Cola, one for himself, one for the other subject. He said, “I was thirsty. I got myself a Coke. I thought you might like one as well.” Then the experiment begins again, and at the end, the experimenter leaves the room to go get some materials. And the confederate says to the subject, “I wonder if you could do me a favor, I’m selling raffle tickets and the more I sell, the greater I will be able to get in return and you could win whatever the prize was, I don’t remember, let’s say it was a big screen TV.”
And what Regan did was to look at how many raffle tickets people bought. Those who didn’t get a Coke, there was a control condition where the confederate left the room [and] just returned with nothing, and the experiment began. Bought half as many tickets as those who got the Coca-Cola. Those who received the favor were now going to return the favor by buying twice as many of the man’s raffle tickets in reciprocation.
In that controlled study, as in the case of the Hari Krishnas, the principle of reciprocity is deployed preemptively to foster a certain outcome. With a little thoughtful reflection, one could imagine numerous ways to utilize this reciprocity principle to satisfy their own ends, in both personal and professional settings.
In the classroom
Perhaps the best way to teach the principle of reciprocity would be unannounced. Instead of explaining the principle and building up the activity, placing the class in a simulation of reciprocity in action would force students to interpret the exercise and construct the concept for themselves.
I’ll recruit two volunteers and give them index cards with their lines written. Including a few props, like a few flowers for the Hari Krishna and some travel documents for the airline passenger. After encouraging them to read and act out their parts with creative panache, I’ll ask the rest of the class what was going on in the mind of the passenger that led them to give money to a cause they cared nothing about.
The Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community began during a simpler, less harried time. Oh there were crises, mind you, but nothing prepared us for what was to come: a pandemic, campus closures, an unemployment spike, racial reckoning, remote-learning-at-gunpoint, and an insurrection: tragedies with which you, dear reader, are all too familiar.
The opening of my Prezi session on sustained Project-Based Learning, 2022.
In spite of incessant turmoil at home and around the world, our learning community engineered many successes. We articulated values and clung to them like the drifting planks of a splintered shipwreck: openness, accessibility, equity, humanity.
I was a neophyte when the CPLC launched, and I’m perhaps one of its greatest beneficiaries. The knowledge, experience, and empathy of the other CPLC members challenged and inspired me. I owe every successful exercise and positive evaluation to them. Well, almost every: I did create and collect ideas from my own personal learning circles.
One of the first professional development experiences was a two-day program on Project-Based Learning. The presenters from the Buck institute taught me invaluable skills for teaching TWP. In those same sessions, wizened psychology faculty gave me excellent insights for constituting student groups.
Most vital of all, though, Josh Eyler’s book How Humans Learn was a seminal source of expertise. The book, one of several provided to us early in the CPLC, was accessible, clear, and evidence-packed. Through it, I gained access to exceptional scholars and their ideas:
Reflecting on this partial list is a humbling reminder of how far I’ve come as an instructor.
The momentum I gained from the CPLC led me to create several Jan Jam and University Days presentations. Hoping to pay it forward in some modest way, I led presentations on:
Question Formulation Technique
Habits of Mind
The Righteous Mind
Prior Knowledge
Project-Based Learning
I feel proud of what I’ve accomplished, and what we’ve done together as a community. The challenges were daunting and the psychological toll formidable, but we persevered, I hope, to the long-lasting success of our students.
I was a brand new assistant professor entering the classroom for the first time. In spite of my assiduous—at times agonizing—preparation, I was anxious that my delivery might fall flat. I was idealistic and naïve, brimming with optimism, yet without a wisp of pedagogical grounding.
It was the fall of 2014, and I was like many young teachers in higher ed: engaged and engorged with my own disciplinary knowledge, but lacking the scholarly underpinnings of effective teaching and learning.
I labored under this implicit assumption: I’ll tell them exactly what they need to know in a fun and engaging style that drives home the importance of the material.
You can’t argue with that ambition, but the hidden premise—that students automatically assimilate new facts into their existing mental structures—is woefully off base. It completely overlooks the role that prior knowledge plays in learning. Students connect new information to preexisting beliefs, values, experience, and assumptions that vary widely from person to person (Ambrose, 2010). This prior knowledge serves as the subconscious foundation on which new knowledge is constructed.
Ambrose, et al, state “it is not what students do not know that hurts them but rather what they do know” (p. 12, 2010). Only through understanding the forms prior knowledge takes can we begin to use it as a help rather than a hindrance.
Prior knowledge that is active, appropriate, sufficient, and accurate aids learning. Prior knowledge that is inactive, insufficient, inappropriate, or inaccurate hinders learning (see figure 1).
Figure 1. Qualities of prior knowledge. How Learning Works p.14
Examples
To explore real life cases, let’s consider a typical sentence from the mouth of a librarian:
“As a college student, you must decide when to seek out peer-reviewed journals, popular articles, and ordinary websites.”
Sounds like something I would say.
I’ve chosen the above sentence for two reasons: 1) it’s fundamental to a university librarian’s thinking, and 2) it contains a kernel of each type of prior knowledge.
Activated Knowledge: Journals
When librarians begin blathering about peer-reviewed journals, students are unlikely to know precisely what they mean. Few high school graduates have encountered those three words in exactly that order.
Yet, there’s a well-known concept lying dormant that’s just waiting to be exploited. The simple act of relating the word journal in this new context to something they already know, magazines, will tap into their existing understanding:
“By journal I mean something like a magazine, but often more scholarly; a journal is any regularly published collection of articles that’s in print, online, or both.” We can thus activate their prior knowledge.
Sufficient Knowledge: Peer Review
Peer review is an important concept for understanding research in the sciences and humanities. Yet, a discussion of peer review with undergraduates is prone to insufficient knowledge. It is likely to trigger thoughts of 18-to-23-year-old college students looking over each others’ work. That is accurate, but doesn’t go far enough.
As with the word journal, a helpful analogue can establish students’ existing knowledge and build on it:
“How many of you have had a teacher ask you to swap papers with a classmate and provide each other with suggested improvements?”
[Several students nod or raise their hands]
“That’s how peer review works, but it’s usually done by people, like many of your professors, with PhDs in the field.”
Having laid this foundation, the instructor can elaborate on peer review’s finer points. However they proceed, it all hinges on establishing sufficient prior knowledge.
Appropriate Knowledge: Popular Articles
Ambrose, et al, refer to a psychology class that discusses behaviorism. Negative reinforcement, the removal of an aversive stimulus in order to increase a desired behavior, is misunderstood by more than half the class. The cause of the confusion is the implicit association of negative with bad and, by extension, punishment. As a result, sixty percent of the students get it wrong on the test. Try as they might, the professor simply can’t overcome the interference of inappropriate prior knowledge.
Any in-depth discussion of academic research will elucidate the distinction between peer-reviewed and popular sources. But any librarian or instructor who does so risks making an inappropriate link in students’ minds. Popular, in everyday parlance, refers to that which is very widely used, read, known, or liked, as in popular music. For our purposes though, popular is that which pertains to regular people, as in popular vote. A concise explanation should aid learning:
“Popular articles aren’t necessarily the ones that got the most clicks or the most shares. Popular here means for everyday people. They’re written for the average person in society.” A statement such as this should foster appropriate prior knowledge.
Accurate Knowledge: Websites
The foregoing examples show how to harness prior knowledge that is active, sufficient, and appropriate. It almost doesn’t need mentioning that, to be useful, prior knowledge must also be accurate.
Today’s college students have been Internet users since preschool, and over the years they’ve been given all sorts of Internet advice by teachers and parents. One that I consistently encounter is the notion that dot-org websites are more trustworthy than dot-coms because they are not trying to make money. I was even taught this in graduate school, but it is based on a misconception. This typical dialogue shows how I draw out and correct my students’ prior knowledge:
“Have you had teachers tell you before how to avoid misleading websites?”
Nods of agreement.
“What advice did they give you?”
The dot-org notion usually comes up first.
“Has anyone else heard that from their teachers?”
More nods.
“I hear that all the time, but let me ask you: who here has their own website or blog?”
A hand or two goes up.
“Basically anyone in the world can do what you did: buy an available domain for $8.99, install WordPress with a nice-looking theme, and start publishing content within a few minutes. There is no one policing the motives of dot-org, dot-com, or any other websites. More to the point, no one is fact-checking the web. We need different rules to guide us if we are to avoid misinformation.”
This brief exchange engages students and gently, but effectively corrects their prior knowledge.
Conclusion
I hope the preceding examples convincingly conveyed prior knowledge in all its forms, both helpful and hindering. Even a seemingly innocuous statement like the one I provided can succumb hindrance. Here’s the sentence again:
“As a college student, you must decide when to seek out peer-reviewed journals, popular articles, and ordinary websites.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Early in my career, I naively spoke such sentences blithely unaware of which sorts of prior knowledge were invoked. My naivete almost certainly resulted in misunderstanding and confusion. But with a little conscientious inquiry, any instructor can carefully draw out prior knowledge that is active, sufficient, appropriate, and accurate, much to the benefit of students. Instructors are free and encouraged to contemplate such examples from their own teaching disciplines.
I began blogging about Hacking Project-Based Learning a few weeks ago. Specifically the first chapter: Encourage Risk-Taking. In it, the authors explained how building relationships, showing empathy, and inciting curiosity help foster perseverance and intellectual growth.
by Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy
The second chapter, or “hack”, described in the book is Teach Collaboration Skills. A successful project depends on fruitful collaboration, and several teaching strategies can be employed to help students work together effectively.
A Marketable Skill
Teamwork is not just academic. Cooper and Murphy point out a National Association of Colleges and Employers 2016 survey. It found that the ability to work in teams is valued by 78.5% of employers surveyed, the second most highly prized attribute. (This updated 2018 survey finds much the same.)
Pre-assessment
A first step in teaching collaboration is assessing students’ current skill level. You can do this by asking them to reflect on previous experiences working in groups. Also, instructors should observe student groups throughout the process to gauge their collaboration.
Formative Assessment
The authors encourage the use of rubrics for formative assessment, but caution teachers against using them to assign grades. They say merely handing down a final verdict may constitute “educational malpractice”, as it misses every opportunity to learn lessons and ameliorate weaknesses.
Teacher Self-awareness
As an instructor, be attentive to your own collaboration habits, such as:
Communication
Body language
Transitions
Prioritization
Task management
Four Steps
Cooper and Murphy set forth these steps for teaching collaboration skills:
1) Define and model what collaboration looks like
Bring students to existing collaborative classrooms to observe. Or, gather video examples of teamwork from other contexts (classroom and non-classroom) to showcase effective collaboration. Have conversations with your students to provide direct feedback on their communication and organization.
2) Define and model what collaboration sounds like
Using your curated examples of teamwork, highlight moments of stress or disagreement. Prompt them to find strategies to avoid getting personal and focus on ideas for conflict resolution. Explain how questions should be used to elucidate or draw out, not to embarrass or evade.
3) Define and model what collaboration feels like
Strive to balance passion with sensitivity. You want students to take pride in their work, but not to become peevish or captious. Praise in public; critique in private. Emphasize that compromise is used to achieve the best possible result.
4) Repeat
Attempting to teach collaboration skills just once will fail to impress. Iterating and reemphasizing these steps will solidify the students’ collaboration skills and drive home their importance.
Conclusion
By posing a wicked problem and having groups propose a solution, the necessary discussion and exploration, brainstorming and iteration, will make collaboration integral to the activity
I’m in the middle of Hacking Project-Based Learning by Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy, a concise, practical guide for teachers wishing to deploy PBL in their courses.
Cooper and Murphy are primary school teachers, so their examples are often calibrated to the elementary grades. But, as they remind readers, instructors can scale and adapt PBL to the learning level of their own students.
How the book is organized
As the subtitle suggests (“10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom”), the book is designed as a toolkit for quick action. The short chapters are presented as “hacks,” expedient solutions to common classroom problems. Chapter sections like What YOU Can Do Tomorrow and Overcoming Pushback show how the book is tailored to help you clear hurdles and achieve rapid adoption. The hacks:
Develop a space that promotes risk-taking
Teach collaboration skills
Magnify PBL-worthy content
Create a vision for your project
Wrap the learning in inquiry
Shift the ownership of assessment
Make feedback everyone’s business
Reserve the right to mini-lesson
Guarantee understanding
Finish off your project in style
In separate posts, I plan to write a synopsis on most of these hacks, to convey some of each chapter’s main points. Here’s the first:
Hack 1: Develop a Space that Promotes Risk-Taking
How many times each day does the following conversation take place somewhere in western civilization:
Parent: How was school? Child: Boring. Parent: What did you do? Child: Nothing.
The opening chapter of Hacking Project-Based Learning presents a problem I discussed in an earlier post titled Children Are Curious; Students Are Not, that schools kill curiosity.
Human children exhibit great curiosity and wonder. Babies and toddlers are inquisitive and experimental to the point of annoyance. Anyone who has seen a plastic spoon thrown repeatedly from a highchair or fielded a barrage of Why? questions can attest to this. Kids want to learn and they don’t care how much Gerber hits the wall.
Sadly though, our old-fashioned education system, designed to churn out nineteenth-century factory workers, wrings most of the curiosity out of kids. Salvaging some of their youthful curiosity, Cooper and Murphy suggest, is good for education generally, and PBL in particular.
Ken Robinson’s TED Talk Do schools kill creativity?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Learning occurs when class is active and engaging. Students confined to a lecture hall doing passive, rote learning are all-but-certain to become incurious and disengaged. To encourage emotional and intellectual investment, there must be stakes: risks and rewards.
A successful PBL classroom relies on a culture of inquiry and creativity to ensure students engage in deeper learning driven by their curiosities.
p. 19
Of course, instructors must strive for the right amount of risk. If students suffer failures that are traumatizing or dispiriting, the learning process itself will fail. Cooper and Murphy suggest “removing the stigma from the word ‘failure'” by creating a failure board for students to post their mistakes. They also urge teachers to talk through their processes and share their own failures.
Blueprint
The authors list several steps to foster risk-taking. Here are a few:
Build relationships: A risk-taking environment must contain trust, so instructors should talk with every student, every day. Further, show empathy toward students. This individual attention will forge the student-teacher relationship.
Teach students to ask good questions: Fruitful inquiry arises from effective questions. Three methods for this are mentioned:
Question carousel: Each student group writes down one problem. Then groups rotate through each problem, brainstorming a list of questions for each one. Once each problem has cycled through each group, a list of critical questions comes back to the original group.
Question formulation technique: The QFT is detailed in this earlier post.
Why? What if? How?: Journalist and speaker Warren Berger designed this 3-step sequence to tackle any problem.
A brief overview of the QFT
In the final step of the blueprint, the authors caution us that “the verbal and nonverbal cues we offer students who are experiencing setbacks can make or break a learning experience.” Thus, it’s essential to calibrate our responses to foster perseverance rather than despair.
Conclusion
The practical advice in this chapter will help teachers create the right classroom culture, that of inquiry and creativity. Having established trusting, empathetic relationships, students will feel empowered to triumph over adversity. This will foster healthy risk-taking, accomplishing hack one in the movement toward PBL in the classroom.
I began reading Creating Wicked Students by Paul Hanstedt (2018) some time ago. While my progress has been slower than I’d hoped, a passage inspired me to think of a novel idea for class discussion:
Consider the following: Three students are assigned a book chapter. The first one reads the chapter carefully then makes an outline of the chapter using key words and phrases in the text. The second student finishes the chapter then answers a number of questions at the end, referring to the text when necessary. The third student finishes the chapter then generates a list of questions that might be useful to discuss with the class the next day.
p 14
After laying out the hypothetical, Hanstedt asks the reader which student is most likely to recall the material in meaningful ways two days, two weeks, or two months later?
The scenario struck me as salient for its many implications for TWP. All that we’ve heard and read in the CPLC drives home the importance of authenticity, learner agency, and curiosity, exactly what Hanstedt is touching on here.
Before answering, let’s recap, giving names to the students:
Alex creates an outline of the chapter’s main points
Bailee answers the end-of-chapter questions from the text
Chris generates a list of questions that would be useful in class discussion
Hanstedt says only the third student, Chris, is likely to achieve meaningful understanding of the content because, he says:
“Deciding what questions to write down requires thinking about the material and making decisions about what matters and what doesn’t.” This thought process nudges Chris to recall previous discussions, questions, and experiences. It also prompts Chris to consider the types of questions that have stymied students before, and to ponder the sort of responses each question is likely to elicit.
By connecting the present content to both past experience and future discussion in this way, the student is “mentally engaged” and “emotionally invested”. Hanstedt cites research that suggests “firing these established networks” increases memory in meaningful ways (Kole and Healy, 2007).
Although Handstedt doesn’t mention it, this activity helps alleviate the problem of inert knowledge, a phenomenon in which pupils can retain the information, but are unable to apply it practically, and perhaps only long enough to regurgitate it on an exam.
[ See also my post about authenticity, which includes a couple paragraphs on inert knowledge. The fact that thinking about Hanstedt’s ideas hearkened to related ideas from a book I’d read previously proves his point. Bonus points for metacognition! ]
Class Activity
Having thought about Hanstedt’s hypothetical in the context of authenticity and learner agency, I had an idea to modify the well-known think/pair/share formula. This exercise would incentivize mental engagement and promote student accountability. Incorporated into class discussions, it could be done once, a handful of times, or repeatedly throughout the course.
The classic think/pair/share activity
Think
As the instructor assigns readings, videos, or other materials, they ask the students to return to class with two open-ended questions inspired by the material.
It’s important for the instructor to emphasize that the questions should not have well-known, definitive answers. Here are some good examples:
What are some of the costs of remediating the international e-waste problem?
Is there something you wish you had done to prevent cyberbullying?
Are efforts to adapt to climate change better than measures to prevent it?
Individually brainstorming such questions would evoke the meaningful connections Hanstedt described. And by making students accountable to one another, it would likely increase assignment completion.
Pair
Then, in class, initiate discussion by having the students pair off and take turns asking and answering each others’ questions.
The teacher could allot between 5 and 10 minutes for this step, allowing more time as needed.
Share
Finally, the class would rejoin for a plenary discussion of the material. Students eager to share their questions and answers should be invited to do so. At the teacher’s discretion, inviting, nudging, or cajoling the withdrawn students could be done with care. Calling on students at times should tend to diversify the perspective. It would also help establish a participatory expectation as a class norm.
Summary
Paul Hanstedt wrote about how thoughtful brainstorming fosters meaningful memory of material. By adapting the simple think/pair/share approach, teachers can promote learner-driven inquiry and authentic learning. The end result should be deeper engagement with and understanding of our wicked problems.
Nowhere in the US Constitution is there an express right to privacy. Wouldn’t it just be bonkers if the government could intrude in your personal affairs as long as it technically didn’t violate any clauses of the text? Thankfully, it can’t, because in 1965 the Supreme Court held that an individual right to privacy can be found in the collective shadow cast by others in the Bill of Rights. Privacy is, therefore, a penumbral right. Thus, penumbral came to refer to an implicit concept that’s logically entailed by other, explicit ones.
Introspection, I submit, is a penumbral Habit, logically entailed by PSU’s four explicit Habits. It’s only fitting, then, that professors like me would be asked to undertake this introspective exercise, assessing their own progress in the HOMs.
Purposeful Communication
You would hope a person with two degrees in information, combined with two decades of practice using information, both analog and digital, would have reached the proverbial summit.
And while I believe I have, I am reluctant to claim such a pinnacle. As I tell students, these Habits are lifelong pursuits, and proclaiming success is likely to let your guard down.
I always “seek additional knowledge” for contextualization and “recognize implications” of text (probably to a fault given the amount of time I often take composing emails).
I intend to work on “organizing and synthesizing information” to generate “new insights” in my communication. This has always come slowly to me.
Problem Solving
I face the day’s challenges, large and small, with a repertoire of approaches. When confronted with, say, a workplace conflict, I apply strategies to “survey the problem from various points of view.”
Often, that involves seeking common ground and showing empathy. Good faith efforts like these foster compromise.
Sadly though, I still sometimes succumb to the Lebowski Trap. The Lebowski Trap, if you haven’t heard of it (because I just made it up) is the condition of having the facts on your side while being so abrasive that the other person still resents you.
The Lebowski Trap
This means I must need more practice “exploring and incorporating multiple perspectives.” I am close to, but have not yet, reached the summit.
Integrated Perspective
Speaking of perspectives, I think I excel at “analyzing the interconnectedness” between systems and “augmenting my own limited perspective.” Being a research librarian prepares one for that.
I have become well versed at seeking facts from diverse sources and disciplines, then provisionally cobbling them into an incomplete whole… like a 1,000-piece puzzle you’ll only ever see 12 pieces of.
Considering not only outside perspectives, but unheard-of perspectives, and even as-yet-unknown perspectives, gives me a sense of intellectual humility on my way to the summit.
Self-Regulated Learning
Oof. I did not save the best for last. Learning I do with alacrity; it’s the self-regulation at which I fall short. Unfortunately, I need to make much more progress at “setting high expectations for myself and “developing a plan” to meet them.
Never has this deficit been more clear than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Setting organizational goals and deadlines has never been a strength of mine. The pandemic has given me even more slack. My work and personal time have started to run together, and I often fail to hold myself accountable. The struggle, the climb, is real.
Conclusion
As I tell students, these four Habits of Mind are not the only ones a university could have chosen to pursue, but they are extremely worthwhile.
Introspection has always been my forte. Even if I have much progress to make in the four HOMs, this penumbral habit will serve me well.
While I am at or near the summit in most of the Habits, my philosophy forces me to believe it’s always just a little further.
I wrote the title of this post in the style of a personals ad not (only) to showcase my bottomless wit, but because, like a good personals ad, it suggests there’s a match which, once made, makes the world just a bit happier and more fulfilled.
And like any good match, the eventual partners are unaware that their ideal mate is out there.
Integrated perspective is well known to us as one of the four Habits of Mind that make up Plymouth State’s Gen Ed program, but to what does Righteous Mind refer? The phrase belongs to professor Jonathan Haidt and is the title of his 2012 book.
Side note: Haidt (Stern School of Business, New York University) is a social psychologist whose ideas I’ve followed with interest for some time. His 2016 talk at Duke University, Two incompatible sacred values in American universities, is a provocative critique of what Haidt sees as academic orthodoxy.
The Rationalist Delusion
Haidt’s primary research is in moral psychology, the biological underpinnings of human ethical development within societies and cultures. His is among a growing body of scholarship that describes our minds’ surprising and innate tendencies (although Haidt is quick to say innateness is not destiny).
Work like Haidt’s fascinates me because it contradicts common assumptions of what our minds must be like. The popular misconception is that our brains are computing organs, rationally weighing our self-interest against the interests of others. It’s also tempting to believe that our internal states follow external states—that our feelings are responses to conditions in the world. On this rationalist view, the right choices are merely the outcome of the right information. Or, as Plato put it:
To know the good is to do the good.
Plato
Haidt calls this the “rationalist delusion.” In reality, our decisions and actions are buffeted by temperamental undercurrents created by ancient forces of natural selection.
In experiments, subjects are asked to judge the rightness or wrongness of hypothetical scenarios. Then the experimenters gently interrogate the respondents’ reasoning. Time after time, subjects exhibit moral dumbfounding—standing by their judgments even when all their stated reasons are shown to be irrelevant.
https://youtu.be/26Z4LWfgv94
Example and explanation of moral dumbfounding
In other words, when pressed to explain why they believe what they believe, people will essentially concede I don’t know; I just do.
Moral dumbfounding is a sign that we reach conclusions viscerally, then subconsciously send our reason on a fact-finding mission to support these conclusions. Hence, this phrase repeated like a mantra throughout the book:
Intuition comes first, reason second.
Jonathan Haidt
Thus, Haidt seeks to replace the rationalist delusion with an intuitionist model. Just as Plato was the forerunner of the rationalists, David Hume presaged intuitionism when he said reason is the slave of the passions.
This gets to the book’s title: The Righteous Mind. The pretension of reasonableness is held by us all when, in fact, intuition is the tail that wags the dog. So when people’s views clash, each one wrongly believes the other will accede to their superior reason, and none does.
But how could evolution have imbued us with such a fallacy? What adaptive purpose is served by making brains that harbor this logical conceit?
The musings of biologist JBS Haldane come to mind: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Whether there is yet a convincing explanation for the rationalist delusion, it seems to be a fact of human psychology. Which is why I think our students should become acquainted with it in order to begin practicing the self-awareness and perspective-seeking at the heart of integrated perspective.
Moral Foundations Theory
Haidt, together with fellow psychologists Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, developed Moral Foundations Theory(MFT) to offer an intuitionist account of moral psychology. MFT is a purported antidote to the rationalist delusion.
Five Innate Modules
MFT posits five moral dimensions, each one corresponding to an innate module—an evolved tendency inscribed in our psyches. They’re innatebecause they are “organized in advance of experience.” These innate features can be encouraged, suppressed, and channeled by one’s environment, which includes a person’s culture and upbringing. Haidt and his colleagues allow that dimensions may be added or modified as the theory incorporates new evidence.
Differences between individuals and across cultures emphasize certain dimensions over others, and invoke them in different ways. The dimensions, in other words, are universal but not uniform.
Each dimension is a pair of opposites. For each pair, preference for the first and aversion to the second is found throughout humanity.
Care/Harm
In contrast to reptiles and other mammals, Homo sapiens invest extraordinary resources into care for their young. That is the basis for the care module.
Our proclivity for caring extends well beyond child rearing, however. This module moves people to protect kin, classmates, and compatriots.
Fairness/Cheating
Humans are a social species: probably the most social species. As survival came to depend on cooperation with non-relatives, we developed an aversion to cheating to combat the free-rider problem.
This module explains why societies punish theft and look down on laziness. It’s why we admire Robin Hood and despise Bernie Madoff.
Loyalty/Betrayal
Societies old and new thrive on trade, which depends on cooperation. The loyalty module is akin to fairness in that it counters the free-rider problem, but, unlike fairness, loyalty sustains relationships through time.
People who abandon their families or strike off to join new tribes do not foster viable, long-term societies. Today, the loyalty module adheres nations and religions comprised of hundreds of millions of people who have never met.
Authority/Subversion
Every human society contains a division of labor. Whereas the loyalty module maintains relationships, authority establishes order, hierarchy, and duty.
The authority module accounts for our deference for law enforcement, our adulation for statesmen, and our stopping for red lights when there are no other cars on the road.
Sanctity/Degradation
Our capacity for disgust evolved to keep us safe from pathogens and parasites. Unclean or degraded things generate a sense of revulsion. That is the sanctity, or purity, module at work.
But sanctity can be repurposed for metaphorical uses, as when we tend a loved one’s grave site or hold sacred a creed or flag. It can also be turned against society’s perceived enemies: when dissidents, immigrants, communists, or capitalists, eg., are assailed as decadent or insidious.
Understanding our Moral Foundations
Humans are capable of a vast spectrum of kindness and cruelty, selfishness and generosity. Haidt’s research reveals that our praise and blame for virtue and vice—our moral psychology—is driven not by reason, but by intuition.
The moral foundations theory says that we are all in some measure irrational. Moreover, it suggests that our disagreements arise not from factual differences, but from divergent intuitions, of which we may not even be aware.
This prescribes a dose of humility. When in conflict with a partner, colleague, or Internet commenter, we ought consider the moral foundations behind the other point of view.
For as long as we cling to the rationalist delusion, we burnish the fallacy that we’re objective, fact-driven creatures even though the opposite is true.
Haidt, Graham, and Joseph designed the website yourmorals.org to gather data and give participants a sense of their moral foundations. The site contains numerous surveys, but I encourage TWP teachers to have their students take the moral foundations questionnaire. The questionnaire will show students where they are on each of the moral dimensions.
I also encourage teachers to show their students Haidt’s TED Talk that explores the differences between the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives.
If our students get a basic grasp of the MFT, and see themselves within it, they will almost certainly grow in their integrated perspective. Particularly:
Listen to other perspectives when collaborating
Recognize the interconnectedness between and within natural and social systems
Acknowledge the limitations of a singular perspective
Understand various perspectives and how they came to be
I close by returning to the title: Righteous Mind Seeks Integrated Perspective. This is a match worth making, and one that will make the world just a little bit happier and more fulfilled.
Shockingly, although I had taken part in discussions of interdisciplinarity before, I had not really considered my own disciplinary affiliation in those discussions. At least, I had hitherto failed to contend with the fundamental question Do I even have a discipline? Watching Matt Cheney’s ID video a couple times woke me from my dogmatic slumber.
In libraries, information is the coin of the realm, but it is rarely minted in the realm.
Of course, a body of scholarship exists describing the information-seeking behaviors that go on in libraries, but librarians most often deal in others’ intellectual domains: education, economics, kinesiology, the life sciences, eg.
Library science, or information science, is at once everything and nothing. Put that way, it sounds like I am coveting a mystique–the pretentious pedant that I am (a job requirement for all librarians).
Contemplating Matt’s framework–content (what), method (how), and epistemology (why)–I began to notice something. The same fascination that attracted me to librarianship also drew me to TWP.
The tenets of critical thinking, problem solving, and information fluency drive at those epistemological questions: What counts as evidence? How do we value that evidence?
This metaphysical curiosity is why I am excited to engage with students in their educational journeys: to interrogate facts and probe our assumptions.
As Matt quotes Cathy Davidson, you reward faculty and their students “for constantly rethinking options.”
Not only is this constant rethinking integral to indisciplinarity, but I daresay it’s essential to each one of the four Habits of Mind.
