Participants explored the emotional foundations of morality and experienced the nuances of human decision-making. Armed with this knowledge, they set about working in small groups to identify the goals and priorities that perpetuate problematic organizational structures.  Then they considered strategies that might shift these social norms in a manner that allows us to address global threats like climate change and resource depletion.

At the core of our discussion was the keystone concept of situated identity, which I call the functional unit of social change:

Situated Identity is the story a person lives that is informed by the confluence of cultural myths, cognitive models, institutional structures, and universal constraints.  The identity is ‘situated’ in a particular historical-cultural context and reinforced through the institutional and built structures of society.

We discussed how vital it is to consider (1) the stories people live, (2)  the conceptual models that shape their understandings of the world, and (3) the incentive structures inherent in social institutions. All three elements of identity converge with fundamental aspects of human nature to constitute social behavior. Persistent change always involves at least one of these elements of situated identity.  And changes in one element will have repercussions across the others.

Our purpose for doing this was to both acknowledge how difficult large-scale behavior change is and realize that we know enough to begin designing campaigns that engage people in a significant behavioral change process.  The workshop provided a great learning opportunity for people who recognize the need to develop more systematic approaches to advocacy and organizational change.

If you are looking for tools and insights that increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, you will want to stay informed about what we’re up to at Cognitive Policy Works.  We are already beginning to adapt this workshop into a webinar so that practitioners around the globe have the opportunity to incorporate situated identity into their campaigns.

Here are five things I’ve discovered that lead me to the conclusion that change processes can be designed and implemented effectively:

#1: We now know we were wrong about human nature.

Throughout most of the 20th Century,  research into the foundations of human nature was dominated by a series of what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “scientific revolutions”.  Every decade or so a new theory would arise that pulled the foundations out from under the one that came before it.  In the early 20th Century, focus was on behaviorism with the assumption that it wasn’t possible to measure aspects of subjective experience.  This was challenged by the work of Sigmund Freud when he demonstrated that influences from subconscious experience could be measured (and were quite significant).  Later came the “cognitivist” period dominated by formal arguments about the “abstract logic” of human thought.  This was challenged by studies into the emotional influences of intention and belief for altering behavior.

The dominant theory that persisted throughout this entire period has been the Theory of Rational Action that claims human beings are abstract symbol manipulators (much like a calculator or computing machine) that seek to maximize their self-interest.  This theory laid the foundation for most of the major institutions of society today, from stock markets to government agencies.

And we know that this theory of human nature is wrong.  The first step to bringing about large-scale behavior change is finding the errors in our ways from past efforts that didn’t work.

#2: We now know how REAL human nature works (mostly).

While many puzzle pieces are still missing, scientists have pieced together enough of the picture to know that human beings are embodied creatures.  This means we work the way we do because of the kinds of brains we have, the kinds of bodies we have, and the typical experiences that pervade our evolutionary history.

The basic picture is that human nature is:

• Profoundly moral: Our behavior is shaped by value judgments, deeply held beliefs, and assertions about right and wrong;
• Profoundly social: We are influenced by the behavior of those around us through shared stories, common expectations, and the need for cooperation (and competition);
• Deeply emotional: Contrary to past assumptions, we reason with our emotions.  Just imagine trying to ask someone out on a date without those important emotional cues about alertness, enthusiasm, and appeal;
• Rational in context: Decisions are made via context-based logic determined by how we understand the situations we find ourselves in;
• Informed by the interplay of body, brain, and environment: All of these factors arise at the junction of bodily experience in the world where we interpret, plan, and act.

#3: It all comes down to good design.

Attempts to change human behavior will depend on knowledge like this.  We have to design new modes of interaction (such as social media platforms like facebook and MySpace), better structures in the built environment (to change the patterns of experience), and more human-oriented organizational forms (that take REAL human nature into account).

With positive knowledge both about where we went wrong in the past and what we now know that is right, we can engage in system design to promote socially desirable outcomes like reductions in environmental impacts and greater sensitivities to the needs of others.

#4: This includes how motivation works.

One of the most important areas to consider good design is in the incentive structures that drive much of human behavior.  The assumption that humans are self-interest maximizers has lead to many pay-for-work models that reward selfishness and greed in order to rise up the ladder.  This theory has been deeply critiqued and challenged by studies into human creativity, such as that of Daniel Pink.

The key to behavioral change is understanding how motivation works in different environments.  Then one needs to observe how people are using the environments they find themselves in now.  The combination of these two knowledge sources will provide insights into how new environments should be designed.

#5: It’s been done before (many times).

History is filled with examples of change-makers successfully driving large-scale behavioral change.  Guided by contemporary insights we can dissect past success stories and cultivate systematic methods for designed change.  A few case studies that might be particularly enlightening are:

• The first televised Presidential debate and its impact on voting behavior;
• Inspirational social movements like the Civil Rights Movement or events that led to the creation of the Endangered Species Act;
• Transformational events like the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the bombing of Pearl Harbor;
• The rise of public relations and modern advertising.

This small sampling, if properly analyzed, can be exceedingly insightful.  I will share some preliminary results of my analysis for these and other related topics in the workshop next week.

So, in conclusion, I believe it is finally possible to design campaigns for changing large-scale human behavior because of the solid foundations we now have from the cognitive and behavioral sciences.  I will share more of the practical implications of this knowledge on August 25th in Seattle — and continue developing the tools necessary to put it to work for NGOs, government agencies, and social businesses in the days ahead.

Will you join me?

In order to build a better economic system, we’ll need to be explicit about these cognitive elements of the process moving forward.  Worldviews and belief systems will always be a part of the economy because they are part of every human system.  We can no longer just accept their implicit assumptions and remain blind to the systemic effects that arise through this powerful form of cognitive bias.

Briefs and Reports

“Narrowing the Gap, Leveling the Field: How We Talk about Inequality,” an in-depth report and cognitive linguistic analysis of the myriad challenges in communicating about inequality, with recommendations for improving our linguistic practices.

“Applying What We Know: What Previous Research on Taxation, Government and Wealth Can Teach Us About Messaging Inequality,” a summary report of existing polling data, framing research, and messaging on the topic of inequality.

Two “cheat sheets,” one on the barrier and gap models of inequality, and the other on the scale and vertigo models.

(Cognitive Policy Works contributed to this effort by sharing narratives about wealth and prosperity that arise through contrasting moral worldviews.)

• Deconstructing the cultural and political frames of an academic research department at a major university;
• Analyzing media frames around health care, foreign policy, immigration, presidential campaigns, environmental issues, social justice, democracy, economic development, and more;
• Advising executive-level managers of non-profit organizations, professional unions, government agencies, and social businesses on strategic social change issues;
• Educating citizen activists in virtual classrooms and in-person workshops about the workings of the political mind.

In all of these settings I’ve found that many people have heard of frames, yet few really understand what they are or how significant their existence is for social change efforts.  Also, I’ve typically found that people have wide ranging misconceptions about what frames are, how they work, and why it is so important that people learn to identify them effectively in their efforts.  This essay is an attempt to start shedding light on this difficult topic.

What the Heck IS a Frame?

George Lakoff, a linguist famous for his insights into frames as they apply to politics, describes them as:

“Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. [T]hey structure our ideas and concepts, they shape how we reason, and they even impact how we perceive and how we act. For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic – we use them without realizing it.”

Stephen Reece, in the field of media studies, gives this working definition:

“Frames are the organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world.”

Frames are everywhere around us. They are the conceptual models that allow us to make sense of the world.  We cannot have a coherent thought without them.  There is no such thing as “choosing” to use frames, only a matter of consciously selecting frames or blindly using them without knowing it.

Can Frames Be Framed?

One big challenge of discussing frames is that we have to use frames to reason about them.  This means we have to evoke a conceptual model of something familiar to explain something that is not.  As any teacher can attest, this process often leads to misconceptions and faulty understandings of the new concept.  It is especially confounding when the new concept we want to talk about contradicts many commonplace assumptions about thought, language and behavior that are prevalent in our culture.

An example is the reaction to the word ‘frame’ as if it meant “I was framed!”  The conceptual model for being framed is one of a malevolent person placing blame for wrongdoing on another person who is actually innocent.  In this context, to “use frames” is to intentionally mislead people into believing that a good person has done something wrong.  The listener is naturally cautious about incorporating frames into their practices because they see the use of ‘frames’ as malicious and deceptive.

This conceptual model evokes an important semantic frame having to do with the distortion of truth that is linked to it in the meaning-making process.  This happens because a particular philosophical tradition – what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call “objective realism” in their ground-breaking book Philosophy in the Flesh – is prominent in Western culture.  Objective realism presumes that there is a single, objective reality that is true and knowable.  It asserts that the way language works is for every utterance (or written text) to either be true or false relative to some kind of “God’s eye view” of the universe.  As such, to ‘frame’ something is seen as putting an additional layer of interpretation between a word and its correspondence with the world, thus ‘distorting’ it by creating a layer of interpretation between it and its ‘true’ meaning.

Ironically, one of the major implications of frame semantics is that no such “God’s eye view” exists.  A single word or phrase can correspond with many different, equally legitimate meanings.  Linguists call this phenomenon polysemy and it has been extensively documented by the cognitive psychologist Raymond Gibbs in his research on communication intent. (An excellent overview can be found in his book, Intentions and the Experience of Meaning.)

This leads to two obstacles for the practitioner seeking to implement frame analysis in their organization:

1. The need to correct misconceptions as they arise;
2. The need to anticipate and manage doubts and concerns that are bound to deeply held assumptions in Western culture.

The practitioner will need to be mindful of misunderstandings about frames while giving careful consideration to his or her communication strategies in order to avoid defensive reactions where new discoveries about the mind conflict with standard assumptions that happen to be incorrect.

The Critical Piece – Psychological Process of Change

As I’ve attempted to convey strategic insights about frame analysis to practitioners, I’ve learned a valuable lesson:

Pay attention to psychological processes in the face of change!

Attempts to convey new understandings of human thought and behavior will inevitably tap into personal feelings and predispositions people have about their own minds (and their unstated theories of human nature). Unlike other kinds of knowledge about “objects” in the world, learning about the workings of our own minds requires us to consciously grapple with and update our notions of ourselves.  In other words, to use frame analysis effectively a practitioner has to go through a personal change process.

The reason for this is simple.  The conceptual models we have about human thought apply equally to ourselves as they do to those around us.  If we have assumptions about rational thought being purely conscious, quantifiable, logical, and literal we’re going to measure ourselves relative to this ideal.  As we learn that none of these attributes accurately reflects the workings of our own minds we have to reconsider our sense of ourselves.  This is a psychological change process.

My colleagues and I handle this by establishing a safe learning environment and building trust with our students so that we can guide them through the strange landscape that is the accurate depiction of the human mind.  We take care to incorporate our understandings of psychology into the learning process to help us see when a student is uncomfortable with the material and help them along.

The Challenge of Institutional Structures and Norms

Ultimately, frame analysis is only useful if it leads to a change in organizational practice.  Merely identifying problematic (or helpful) frames won’t get practitioners very far if the exercise doesn’t lead to changes both in communication and outreach strategy.  Furthermore, the deconstruction of cultural narratives (which frame analysis is a key part) often reveals hidden assumptions on the part of the advocacy organization itself.  Improvements in overall effectiveness will be contingent on the ability of executive-level managers to be self-critical and reflective about how their organization is framed and what its practices mean to key publics it must engage with in order to have success.

Even more challenging, however, is the adoption process for replacing existing practices with new ones.  Any practitioner who has attempted to bring new ideas into a bureaucracy knows how difficult initiatives like this can be.  One of the reasons frame analysis gets relegated to the “messaging silo” is that this is the easiest way to dismiss its implications for organizational change.  And such resistance is commonplace when people are confronted with the uncomfortable prospect that they may have to do things differently.

At a higher level, shifts in organizational strategy will implicate new configurations of alliances and partnerships.  When the innovative organization adopts frame-based methodologies, it will have to get other organizations on board in order to cooperate.  This “trans-organizational” level of application is the most difficult we have attempted so far, having some success with two coalitions of NGOs in the UK around the theme of Identity Campaigning.

By now, I hope that it is clear why more people haven’t adopted frame analysis in their work.  Many enthusiastic readers of George Lakoff express frustration that his brilliant ideas have not been more widely adopted.  Complications like the ones presented here should begin to clarify why the change process has taken so long.  To summarize:

• Frame analysis is based on nuanced and unfamiliar concepts that are easily misunderstood;
• Skilled use of frame analysis involves an introspective personal change process that must be guided by expert trainers;
• Implications for changes in organizational practice are often met with resistance;
• Merging the innovative practices of one organization into the web of institutions they cooperate with is a time-consuming and difficult process.

Through our work at Cognitive Policy Works we are carving a path for others to follow.  We will continue to share our insights as we provide the valuable services of frame analysis, professional trainings, and strategic management in the midst of organizational change.

In the service of this vital work,

Joe Brewer
Founder and Director
Cognitive Policy Works

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Here’s the link to the full description and registration.

Here’s a taste of what we’ll cover:

One of the most confounding challenges facing the sustainability movement is how to bring about a massive shift in human behavior.  This master class explores a variety of powerful insights from cognitive science for developing successful social change strategies.  You’ll learn how meaning arises in the workings of the human brain, why emotions are absolutely vital for engaging people in a process of persistent change, and what the root causes are that have driven societal institutions to the edge of ecological collapse.

Participants will explore the evolutionary origins of morality and discover the psychological foundations of identity that merge values, ideology, and institutions into the powerful stories we collectively live in the modern world.  Techniques will be provided to begin using this knowledge to communicate effectively, increase civic engagement, and design better structures for bringing about large-scale behavioral change.

Join me in Seattle on August 25th for an informative and empowering experience!

Here’s a snippet:

“To sum up: the market fundamentalists who have nearly destroyed the American economy have done so under the banner of the so-called free market, raised to the level of an almighty controller of all things, including democracy. They have essentially said that with rational actors making economic (consumer) decisions, not just the market but politics itself, the welfare of the entire nation itself, is automatically and invisibly regulated. There is no need for government to regulate anything. There is no need for compassionate politicians to look out for the welfare of the people. There is need only for “rational” consumers making “rational” decisions. But what their beloved science—now in the form of behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and linguistics—has begun to tell them is that the whole structure is based on a lie. And the response among those who have drunk the cool aid is predictable: outrage, irrationality, attacks on those who violate their most deeply-held beliefs, and the threat of violence against the violators.”

I encourage you to read the entire article.  Well done, Lawrence!

To understand political behaviors like these, you’ll need to become familiar with the psychology of disgust.  Researchers have learned a lot about it in recent years, such as:

• Disgust – like all emotions – is biological and can be explained through the workings of the brain;
• Disgust is the physiological foundation for moral notions of purity and sacrilege;
• Disgust, once felt, creates a persistent association that is very difficult to get rid of;
• Disgust is a powerful motivator of behavior, helping deter us away from perceived threats to our health.

So what does this have to do with politics?  In a word, everything.

Politics on the Brain

If you’ve read the work of George Lakoff, Drew Westen, or Jonathan Haidt you’ll know that there’s quite a buzz in the academic world around recent discoveries into the political mind.  Distinct moral worldviews have been systematically explored.  Profound biases have been demonstrated in the ways brains process information depending on whether the person identifies as a liberal or conservative.  And distinct moral sensitivities have been found across different political groups that correspond with key social emotions.

As I argued in a recent article, the understandings coming out of this research are absolutely critical for cultivating a political culture that is conducive to participatory democracy.   This is especially true for the emotion of disgust.

Emotions are physical.  They are very complex processes that occur in our brains, each serving vital purposes for our survival.  Disgust in particular is the result of our bodily need to avoid toxic substances, especially rotten and poisonous foods.  Thus it is most closely associated with bodily functions having to do with digestion.

At its most basic level, disgust can be thought of as the unpleasantness that arises when the body is contaminated.  The brain has sensors to recognize when the body has been contaminated and it uses specific chemical markers to remember events that may have lead to the unpleasantness that followed.

The Feeling of Morality

For a long time, the study of morality was relegated to the halls of our philosophy and political science departments.  This has changed in a serious way.  There are now a wide variety of scientific research programs dedicated to understanding the physical, biological, and evolutionary foundations of morality.  When Sam Harris took up this topic a few weeks ago, he barely scratched the surface of what is known today.

Research centers include the International Institute on Cognition and Culture at the London School of Economics, the Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley,  the Institute on Cognition and Culture in Belfast, and the Center for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture in Vancouver, just to name a few.

One of the major discoveries so far is that morality is grounded in our bodily experience.   We literally feel right and wrong in our bodies.  Disgust is a physical experience that applies to notions of moral purity, moral health, and our judgments about how to handle situations like incest, cannibalism, and rape.  For each of these emotionally potent topics, the strength of our feelings corresponds directly with our sentiments about how they should be handled in society.

Research tailored to the study of moral purity and the emotion of disgust was conducted by Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Rick McCauley.  (A copy of their seminal article can be requested here.)  They showed that the physical experience of disgust provides the bodily foundation for the moral concept of purity.  Put succinctly, when you experience the feeling of moral disgust – via the tainting of something you hold sacred and pure – it is produced by the same neural and chemical process that arise after biting into a moldy piece of bread or some rotten fruit.

Avoiding the Rotten Apple

The experience of disgust is very persistent.  Once we associate those negative feelings with an idea (like ‘liberalism’ or ‘Obama the Muslim’) it is very hard to shake off.  The explanation for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology, which explores the evolutionary origins of human thought and behavior. Animals that remember the foods that make them sick are more likely to survive and reproduce.  So those who have a long memory of disgust are better adapted for survival.

Applied to politics, this phenomenon implies that once a political idea becomes a rotten apple it will remain a rotten apple.  Disgust tends to stick around.  This is why so much time, effort, and money is dedicated to painting the opposition with negative feelings.  If a disgust response can be evoked, it will tend to stay around.

Think about the ramifications for gay marriage.  If children are taught that homosexuality is disgusting, they will want to stay far away from it.  As their moral sentiments develop, they will begin to see homosexuality as a contaminant in society.  When thinking about the sacred institution of marriage, they will feel the threat of this impurity to something they want to keep clean.  It’s pretty easy to mobilize them against this threat because the feeling is long-lasting and easy to activate with a political sound bite.

There are two lessons to learn from this.  First, if you want someone to support your idea (like the notion that addressing global warming might be a sensible thing to do), don’t let it get associated with disgust (such as how people feel about the elitism of scientists -  be it real or imagined).  Second, if you want someone to oppose an idea, just riddle it with associations to the profane and impure.  Do so with references to basic bodily functions and you’ll be particularly effective.

These tactics have long been used in politics to the detriment of civil society.

Mobilizing an Opposition

How do different political communities respond to the phrase “Rush Limbaugh?”  For progressives, a strong feeling of disgust will arise at the mere mention of his name.  He is associated with hate speech, xenophobia, and violent rhetoric that violates our civil sentiments.  Yet, conservatives who have been primed by repeated messages on Limbaugh’s show will experience a powerful sense of solidarity with anyone opposed to the revolting ‘liberal elite.’

Same stimulus, different response.  Yet both are examples of disgust influencing political behavior.

Disgust is a social glue that binds people together against a common threat.  Once opposed to a person, policy or idea at this basic level, it is very easy to mobilize around any effort to remove the threat.  This is a foundational theme in politics.  So if you ever hear an assertion that people are rational actors who reason their way to conclusions, remember this powerful ability of disgust to stand in for reason and compel action.

Why Am I Telling You All of This?

Knowledge about the psychology of disgust can be detrimental to democracy if held in the hands of an unscrupulous elite.  When political strategists learn about the power it can have to influence behavior, they may play their hand at being gods and use it to manipulate the citizenry.  This begs the question why I’m publishing these findings to the world.

My answer is that I firmly believe in the democratization of knowledge.  The more people know about how the political mind actually works, the more likely it will be that tactics that exploit disgust are recognized and called out for being unethical.  This extends beyond politics proper.  I like to imagine a world where marketing techniques are based on fundamental trust between people that grows out of honest communication intended to resonate authentically with an audience.  To get to this world, a lot of people are going to have to learn about the workings of the political mind.  Eventually, it will need to be taught in our schools as part of the standard curriculum for civic life.

For too long, insights like these have been held in secret to be used for elite control of the populace.  I hope to do my part by sharing knowledge about the political mind with the world so that we can work together to build safeguards into the fabric of our society and restore faith in our democratic institutions.

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Have you noticed that a lot of people seem to think that appeals to self-interest lead to a moral and just society?

No, I’m not merely talking about economists.  Self-interest evangelicals have been spreading the good news for decades in public policy programs, political science departments, and financial institutions too.  Converts can be found in environmental organizations that tell us we’ll save on our energy bills if only we change those light bulbs.  And blind zealots run polling companies that deploy the doctrine of self-oriented rationalism when they tell us that the preferences of individuals exist in a meaningful way to be measured – with nary an inkling that the way polls are conducted might influence how people respond.

Is self-interest fundamentalism dying?  Cracks are certainly spreading through its foundations, as I’ll discuss in a moment.  The more important questions we need to grapple with are whether it should die away and, if so, with what should we replace it? Consider your answers to these questions.  I’ll share some of mine below.

Yes, rationalist fundamentalism still has a stranglehold on society.  It’s meteoric rise to dominance goes all the way back to the nuclear arms race that poured truckloads of cash from public coffers into defense contractor piggy banks through the “game” of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War.  We saw it clearly during the Vietnam War when “body counts’ laid the foundation for an entire generation of video game players to score points by killing more enemies – never mind that we were slaughtering innumerable civilians.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time before schools fell under the knife of test-based bookkeeping to “hold students accountable” to rationalist ideals of performance measurement – at the expense of actual learning.  A web of trans-national organizations have come into existence – the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank being the best known – that push the ideology of self-interest into the center stage of world affairs.

Theory of Self-Interest: A Creation Story

How could an impoverished model of human-as-self-focused-calculating-machine have ever come into being?  A common myth is that self-interest theories rose out of behavioral studies conducted by psychologists.  A nice bedtime story perhaps, but it isn’t true.  Would you believe me if I told you the behavioral model underlying the global economy came, not from the human sciences, but from mathematics?

Back in the 1940′s and 50′s, a research center was created to explore fundamental issues of concern to the Air Force.  This Research ANd Development institute was aptly named the RAND Corporation.  Within the high security walls of this military think tank, mathematicians developed abstract principles for nuclear strategy during the Cold War.  In the midst of this particular, historically contingent environment – and motivated by concerns of defense contractors in the air combat arena – the notion of self-interested rational action was born.  Proof positive that the most bizarre stories are found in the non-fiction section of your local library.

(If you’d like to read the full story, check out S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism.)

So the birth place of modern market fundamentalism, in the guise of “rational choice theory”, was the military think tank that gave us the disastrous arms race.  Untested and theoretical, it quickly spread throughout the highest levels of government during the tenure of Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, then whipped through the economics departments of many prominent universities, spurred the creation of public policy analysis as a “scientific” field, and undergirded today’s global institutions of economic governance.

But things are starting to change.

Looking Forward: 21st Century Institutions

The first experimental studies of rational choice theory by behavioral scientists, principally Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, showed that a foundational premise of the theory was wrong.  (As a technical side point, they showed that preferences can be reversed by merely framing a question differently.)  The “prospect theory” that arose through these experiments became the bedrock of a new field – behavioral economics – that has grown in prominence since its birth in the 1970′s.

Throughout the subsequent decades, researchers found more damning evidence against self-interest.  Paul Slovic and his collaborators at Decision Research have systematically explored how risk perception influences our decisions in many ways that fly in the face of rational choice theory.  Human beings depend on emotional cues to make decisions.  And many of these cues are associative rather than based on inferences – thus they do not fit the paradigm of rationality presumed by rational choice theory.  In fact, human beings cannot manage risk – especially in the highly complex social situations we often find ourselves in – when regions of our brains that process emotional information are damaged.  Antonio Damasio sealed this argument in his 1994 book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

A new view of human reason is on the rise in academia.  Unlike its predecessor, the new paradigm is profoundly based in the workings of our bodies.  This “embodiment” view incorporates insights from computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and robotics.  Its adherents include people like Gilles Fauconnier, Raymond Gibbs,  Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Eleanor Rosch, Mark Turner, and Drew Westen.

Arising with this new view is a profound shift in how we understand human thought and behavior.  Just as the institutions of yesteryear grew out of the old paradigm, research in the cognitive sciences beckons us to think differently about the institutions of tomorrow.

This is where I do my work.

I’ve seen how methods like cost-benefit analysis fail utterly when applied to environmental challenges.  Future costs are weighed against current gains in a false choice between short-term profit seeking and long-term sustainability. I’ve also watched as public policies built on outdated performance measures undermine that which they are meant to improve.  A key example is the educational paradigm that gave us No Child Left Behind – high-stakes testing – which flies in the face of what our teachers know about real learning.  Any effort to treat moral pursuits – like making the world safe for future generations or educating a child – will demand broader measures of success than numbers alone can describe.

In a previous article, I described some things we’ll need our institutions to do in the 21st Century:

In a world based on this new perspective, things work very differently:

• Citizens recognize fear-inducing news reports intended to inflate manufactured risks and hide awareness of genuine threats, thereby reducing the effectiveness of these manipulative tactics.
• Journalists understand the consequences of how facts are presented and beliefs are promoted in the structure of news reporting, resulting in coverage that enhances—rather than erodes—the democratic process.
• Policy-makers abandon contrived and faulty presumptions about “economic rational actors” and instead craft solutions to societal challenges that improve the lives of real people through deeper insights into the human condition, culminating in robust policies that stand the test of time.
• Advocates articulate clear and compelling calls to action that resonate deeply with the values of the citizenry, thereby promoting greater civic engagement and community empowerment.

What’s more, we’ll need to build a new foundation for our economic institutions.  A recent example shows that the old approach is inadequate.  Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, two Nobel prize winning economists, led a commission to improve upon the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when measuring economic well-being.  They spent most of the 79 pages of their personal reflections describing a long history of criticisms that show GDP to be grossly inadequate.  Yet, very little of substance was offered to take its place.

What does it mean that a group of leading economists don’t know how to measure economic progress?  In the words of Sen, when talking about the limits of rational choice theory:

It seems easy to accept that rationality involves many features that cannot be summarized in terms of some straightforward formula, such as binary consistency.  But this recognition does not immediately lead to alternative characterizations that might be regarded as satisfactory, even though the inadequacies of the traditional assumptions of rational behavior standardly used in economic theory have become hard to deny.

This tells us that many economists recognize the limitations of rational choice, but they don’t have ready-made alternatives.  Yet the old tools are well-known and ready for use so they pick them up again and again.  They are looking for something better, but haven’t found it yet.

I’d like to offer that the alternatives are starting to emerge in the unexpected corner of academia where researchers study the human mind.  New tools cannot be found so long as the old paradigm of human nature remains.  My colleagues and I are in the process of developing these new tools.  What does our paradigm look like?  Here are the key features:

• Human beings are profoundly social. We are wired for empathy and we learn how to act in the world through interactions with other human beings and the natural world;
• Human reason is embodied. We think and act through the interplay of brain, body, and environment.  Emotions are vital to effective decision-making.  And our understandings are shaped by the contexts we operate in;
• Human thought is evaluative. We interpret the world through core values, our sense of identity, and conceptual models for how we believe the world works.  There’s no such thing as “an objective world” when dealing with social and political issues because we a co-creators of the realities we experience.

Each of these features tells us something about how a human-based economy should work.  It should recognize the value of community in our dealings with one another.  It should be designed around our biological needs for survival in a world where things like potable water and fossil fuels are becoming limited and the planetary climate system has been disrupted in a manner that threatens us all.  And it should acknowledge that interpretations of human well-being are perpetually contested by competing perspectives.

Yes, it is time to let self-interest fundamentalism go the way of monarchy and feudalism.  It may not go silently into the night, but the end is nigh.  Pretty soon we will have laid the foundation for a sustainable future – both ecologically and financially.  In order to do so, we’ll have to acknowledge how human beings actually are instead of how theorists engaged in military strategy presumed us to be 60 years ago.

This is a huge undertaking.  It won’t be completed overnight.  Nor will it be the sole effort of a few visionary thinkers.  But it must start somewhere.  My suggestion is that you’ll see it starting to take shape at the boundary between cognitive science and the world of expert practitioners at all levels of governance.

Look there and you’ll probably find me too.

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