The social weak link

In simple, right/wrong situations, information or data is often the key to solving problems. The right username and password, the right replacement part, the right analysis or diagnosis, the best practice to fix a dysfunction--these simply work.

In complex situations (such as those involving people, land, and money), ambiguity, conflict, and power struggles are reliable companions to almost any kind of problem, whether past, present, or future. With complexity, the habit of information delivery often persists. Experts, often self-appointed, supply facts, data, logic, and best practices to convince wrongheaded people to change their views, supposing that they are rational actors and will see the light. If that fails we can try ridicule, shaming, satire, and name-calling. We are defending our definition of the problem: a self-evidently simple one, with right and wrong answers or solutions. Who learns in this scenario, and what do they learn?

Conflict and power struggles are about people's values, feelings, perspectives, experiences, culture, and identity. I'll throw out a conjecture which I doubt is original: there are three primary pathways for acquiring beliefs, for learning, and for addressing and resolving conflict:

1. Relationships, which address our need for belonging and identity. Some of our beliefs, the stories we tell ourselves, we acquire through contagion, surreptitiously, like our gut bacteria, from family, tribe, the people and messaging we pay attention to. These beliefs may be difficult to identify or even acknowledge, but like our gut bacteria, are profoundly influential. These can include role models, our expectations of life, judgments and prejudices, fears and anxieties, faith, superstitions, and moral values. Through relationships, we acquire stories and beliefs consciously as well---from people, teachers and mentors, institutions, groups, and books and other media that we admire and trust. Sometimes these can supercede or cover over older beliefs.

Through relationships, through peer pressure, our stories and beliefs provide identity and a sense of belonging. By itself, unchallenged by other pathways, this pathway can result in groupthink, where there is no opportunity to test or refute a belief or story. 

2. We learn from experience, which addresses our need for pattern, predictability, and offers us a sense of agency or control. Learning from experience, and from our responses to experience, involves repetition and reinforcement, training and conditioning. We acquire habits and skills, such as making a grazing plan, training a horse, or washing the dishes. Like the relationships pathway, learning from experience can supply mental and emotional shortcuts that save energy, where we don't have to work out our response or choice from scratch every time. Based on learned patterns, we can provide predictions, judgments, and justifications at a moment's notice.

By itself, the experience pathway lacks flexibility, and can devolve into predictable or stereotypical patterns. One year's experience repeated twenty times becomes twenty years of experience.

3. Evidence, which addresses our need for feedback, for increasing certainty, for confirmation or refutation. Does the new information, the data, the news of a difference, fit with our existing beliefs and stories? If so we can verify, confirm, accept it. If not, we can deny, distort, ignore, or forget it. Or, we can adapt some of our stories and beliefs to fit the evidence.

Evidence and feedback are often ambiguous, and change often. If our learning relies on evidence alone, we may be unstable, fickle, unable to stay a course of action. In 1951 Canadian professor Harold Innis noted that "Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult."

These three pathways combine into a kind of ecology of beliefs, where they can complement each other or clash, creating internal conflict or cognitive dissonance. In conflict and power struggles over complex issues and problems, one of these pathways may be the weak link. 

Data or evidence is rarely the weak link, though as mentioned, information delivery is a habitual response to conflict or disagreement. People tend to guard and defend the problem definitions (such as simple and predictable, right/wrong) that privilege their expertise, their habits and skills, and their power.

With complex issues, most often the weak link is relationships and trust, because we learn from people who listen to us, who we trust, and who we listen to in turn. It can be a slow process to get beyond listening to win an argument, beyond listening to fix a problem, to listening to understand and expand our perspectives and information base. Raw information delivery can get in the way. As Canadian professor Harold Innis noted in 1951, well before our digital age, "Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult."

The absence of firsthand experience, or trying something, can also be a weak link. Confucius supposedly said: "Tell me, and I'll forget. Show me, and I'll remember. But let me do, and I'll understand."

Learning that combines all three pathways addresses our needs for 1) belonging and identity, 2) for prediction, pattern, and agency, and 3) for certainty and feedback. For some tips on facilitating this kind of learning, see https://soilcarboncoalition.org/tips/