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The Limits Of Cultural Nudging

Really interesting exchange here from the In The Big White Ghetto thread: arrScott wrote: It may seem trivial by comparison, but in my neighborhood we’ve had real success in changing habits and norms – culture – as people from diverse backgrounds have moved in. It’s taught me not to despair about social/cultural problems like those […]

Really interesting exchange here from the In The Big White Ghetto thread:

arrScott wrote:

It may seem trivial by comparison, but in my neighborhood we’ve had real success in changing habits and norms – culture – as people from diverse backgrounds have moved in. It’s taught me not to despair about social/cultural problems like those described above. Take dog poo. Five years ago, it became clear that many people moving to the neighborhood were used to letting their dogs poo anywhere and not picking up. Many folks became outraged, and got up petitions to the HOA to enact strict bans and engage in punitive enforcement. There was talk of canine registration and DNA testing of poo and so forth.

Side note: Despite framing the anti-poo objections mainly in terms of the health and safety of children who play outside and who are thus at risk of disease transmitted by dog poo, the enforcement drive pretty much stopped when the annual price tag came in at $20,000. Turns out the “health” of children was not worth $100 per year per household.

But I digress. We’ve almost completely eliminated the problem of people not picking up poo. It took a little negative reinforcement and a lot of positive reinforcement and a few years, but now there’s much, much less incidence of people leaving poo on the grass. The negative reinforcement came mainly via informal, person-to-person efforts. Those of us with dogs who did clean up made a habit of gently confronting people not picking up – less “Hey, asshole, you gonna pick that up?” and more “Hey, I see you’re out of bags to clean up after your dog. Here, I have a spare for you.”

On the positive side, the HOA spent a few thousand dollars to install covered dog poo trash cans with bag dispensers throughout the neighborhood, with a small annual cost to have a service empty the cans and refill the dispensers weekly. Increasing the convenience and ease of behaving properly significantly increased the incidence of people behaving properly.

The lesson I’ve learned is that you can change culture, but only if you’re willing to invest effort in both negative and positive reinforcement. By all means, outlaw abuses and prosecute offenders. The law does shape public morality. But just as important, if not more so, is positive reinforcement. Provide opportunities to do the right thing, or to do better things. Make doing right easier than doing wrong. It takes enforcement, but it also takes encouragement, and it takes time.

TomB replied:

aarScott wrote:

“The lesson I’ve learned is that you can change culture, but only if you’re willing to invest effort in both negative and positive reinforcement. By all means, outlaw abuses and prosecute offenders. The law does shape public morality. But just as important, if not more so, is positive reinforcement.”

Oh, I think you’re deluding yourself mightily here Scott, on what might even be thought of as ridiculous grounds.

Sure, if there’s some exceedingly minor cultural behavior that has no real resonance with any ideas or etc. in the culture maybe a little positive and negative pressure might change it.

But there’s that pressure already against littering generally, or maintaining an unsightly yard/place of habitation, and that pressure ain’t done much.

Wanna talk something real? Dog-related even? Look at the incredible proliferation in low-income/black communities especially I believe from my (admittedly limited) observations of the keeping of pit bull dogs. And then look at the persistence of dog and cock-fighting in some communities.

Now, these dogs are not just pooping everywhere, they are *regularly* mauling other people’s pets, and not at all uncommonly mauling people and then on occasion even killing *children.*

And then I’ve been told by a number of people who live in such communities there’s damn near an impossible ability to keep anything but a vicious dog, and especially not a small dog. Why? Because the non-vicious and especially small dogs are just dog-knapped left and right, with there being lots of evidence that what is then done with them is they are horribly used as training aids for the pit and other fighting dogs in their fighting.

In essence they are plunked into an arena with one of these fighting dogs so that the fighting dog will learn blood-lust by tearing the poor little live creatures into pieces.

As chance would have it just last week I got into a conversation about dogs to a lady who happens to live in such a neighborhood. She has had all three small dogs she has bought over the last 10 years snatched from her backyard, that latest who was being closely observed and who she left alone for no more than 1/2 hour.

You really think your mild little societal pressures and especially your little “positive reinforcements” are going to put a dent in this? Entire neighborhoods being subjected to this and yet not finding the outrage to crack down on it?

Pfui. You go into other poor but not … culturally afflicted areas and consider stealing someone’s dog and you know you’re risking having your ass shot off doing so. Or you even get *suspected* of stealing dogs for use as blood-lust bait and man then you’ll see some *real* “negative social attitudes” displayed towards such people. Maybe to the point of having their truck’s tires regularly shot out.

But that’s the kind of thing that it takes, not some namby-pamby “oh please don’t do that.” You go into *any* of the kinds of communities that I’m talking about and try even gently upbraiding the first person you see walking or harboring a pit-bull or rotweiller, much less calling them an “asshole.” See what happens to you. And see just how long it takes before anyone in that neighborhood calls 911 to assist your bloody ass.

You’re dreaming Scott, just dreaming.

And I’d further note what I at least see as a distinction between the type of community I’m talking about here and the Appalachian type and that is with the latter at least the dysfunctions tend not to be of the afflicting others sort that afflict the former. The “Appalachians” may well be on welfare eternally, and be drunkards or meth users or makers or sellers to willing buyers, and not work, but in general they ain’t out there shooting up their communities like madmen, pimping out their females, stealing like mad from their next-door neighbors and on and on. Even *their* communities don’t stand for that.

So let’s get some perspective on this Appalachian issue too I say. It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t some near phantasmagorical production like you *commonly* see in the inner cities. Not within miles.

Broadly speaking, I would say that both these guys are right, to a certain extent. ArrScott is correct to say that cultural habits are not permanently fixed, and can be moderated, even changed, with a sustained application of nudging. But TomB is correct too, insofar as he points out that some cultural habits are so fierce and ingrained that nudging them is like reminding a Mafia killer not to forget his manners.

You cannot get people to change and to accept more pro-social cultural values if they are not receptive. You can force it on them if you have enforcement capacity, but if you don’t, then you depend entirely on their willingness to change. When I lived in Dallas, middle-class people (white and Latino) in a particular inner-ring suburb were dealing with a huge influx of Latin American working-class immigrants. They brought with them very, very different habits that affected how they integrated into neighborhoods. They did not share middle-class North American norms. They stayed outside on their front lawns drinking beer and laughing until late at night. They put cars up on blocks on their front lawns. Things like that, but worse (e.g., criminal activity, like drunken fistfights among the men, and gunfire). The middle class homeowners stayed after the code enforcement authorities in city government to ride herd on these people, but code enforcement either could not or would not do its job. So the middle-class people started to leave. There was zero chance that middle-class family people could have had a meaningful dialogue with these newcomers, most of whom spoke little or no English, and many of whom lived in all-male households (they were workers sending money back home). Nudging of the sort that has worked for arrScott’s neighborhood would not have worked in that culture clash. And without the government using its monopoly on force to compel these newcomers to follow the law and custom of the neighborhood, the people from the stronger culture — the working-class immigrants — were, and are, bound to prevail.

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