Episode 7: Disinformation and climate culture, with Brandon Schauer

SYNOPSIS

Brandon Schauer from Rare, a conservation nonprofit, talks to Rachel and Dan about ways to modify behavior to help save the planet. Climate change and its solutions are often too big for an individual person to connect with, so Brandon has developed strategies to meet people where they are. These strategies short-circuit climate misinformation altogether.

STORIES

Banana propaganda

• Annalee Newitz’s book Stories Are Weapons 
• The 1954 Guatemalan Coup (Wikipedia)

NPS, the continuing saga

• National Park signage encourages the public to help erase negative stories at its sites
• National Parks Are Told to Delete Content That ‘Disparages Americans’
• This Is What Censorship Looks Like in a National Park: The First Park Sign That Came Down
• Park Service Is Ordered to Take Down Some Materials on Slavery and Tribes
• Trump moves to scrub national parks sites of signs that cast America in a 'negative light'

INTERVIEW

• Entities responsible for greenhouse gas emissions: By Country; 57 companies responsible for 80% of emissions
• Biden cites Will & Grace in endorsement of same-sex marriage
• Primetime in a warming world
• Hyperobjects is a term coined by British philosopher Timothy Morton in their book The Ecological Thought

LENSES

Social Awareness

Everyone can be part of a solution to large problems, and the ecosystem can help users understand how they may be connected to others.

• How does your system help people understand they are not alone?
• How does your system prioritize meaningful connection over gamified social metrics?

Hyperobjects

Based on the concept from Timothy Morton, hyperobjects are concepts that are so big they are difficult for people to understand them fully. Information ecosystems may be connected to or related to hyperobjects, introducing specific challenges.

• How does the structure of your system help users focus on the most relevant part of a large problem space?
• How does the structure of your system render inform

_____________________________________________________

Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

The information is one lever, but it's only one of five or six that we usually go to to help shift behaviors.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Dan 0:26

Hey Rachel.

Rachel 0:28

Hey Dan.

Dan 0:29

We're back.

Rachel 0:30

Indeed, we keep coming back.

Dan 0:32

I thought we had solved misinformation by now. We dropped six episodes of this thing, and I feel like surely it would have been fixed by now.

Rachel 0:41

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't seem like that hard of a problem.

Dan 0:44

No. It turns out it's been around for a while.

Rachel 0:48

Turns out it may be one of those wicked problems.

Dan 0:51

It is a wicked problem. I'm stacking on a banana right now. I don't mind admitting that to you. And it turns out that bananas have kind of a difficult history here in the United States. I got this story from Annalie Newitz's book, Stories Are Weapons. They describe this uh story that happened in Guatemala. Did you know that there was a revolution in Guatemala in 1944?

Rachel 1:18

No, I did not.

Dan 1:19

Yeah, that it deposed a military dictator back then. And they had democratic elections, which was fantastic for about 10 years. It was great. The problem was the US started to get worried that the democratically elected leaders of Guatemala were cozying up a little too much to guess who? The communists. Communists were playing too big a role. Not them again. Not them again. And here we are, 1952, 1954. We're right in the middle of the Cold War. Eisenhower is elected. Specifically because people want communism to just stop.

Rachel 1:58

Oh, I thought it was just because we liked him. Didn't we like Ike?

Dan 2:03

Ike was a likable guy. That's what I heard. Especially liking Ike is a company called United Fruit Corporation, the original UFC. UFC, I think, was the biggest landowner in Guatemala at the time. They were a US-based company. They owned a ton of land in Guatemala because they raised fruit there. Well, as the so-called communists came to power, they were much more in favor of labor and they started introducing kind of new regulations around labor practices and things like that. UFC became upset. UFC hired a public relations company run by Bernays. I don't know if we've talked about Bernays yet, but many people consider him the father of modern propaganda or public relations, forgive me. Um is that a Freudian slip?

Rachel 2:58

Does that qualify?

Dan 2:59

Bernays is an interesting character. There's a lot going on. UFC spent half a million dollars on a public relations campaign, which included Bernays kind of feeding information to the media about the role that communists were playing in the Guatemalan government, which was probably not true. Bernays firm also created like a 235-page report about Guatemala that sort of described the dangers of the influence of the communists, and they fed that to Congress. Eventually, Congress approved a CIA operation. The CIA operation armed and trained fighters who eventually overthrew the Guatemalan government. And the US installed a dictator, a right-wing uh dictator in there. All to make sure that we could still get inexpensive bananas here in the US. Wow. At the time, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, head of intelligence were the Dulles brothers. Of Airport Fame. Of Airport Fame, yes. The Dulles Brothers, it turned out, had connections to UFC, to the United Fruit Company. And so they stood apparently to benefit from UFC being successful in maintaining its economic grasp on Guatemala. Historians don't necessarily agree on the importance of the role of UFC in the unfolding of these events, right? Their historians are sort of torn. Was this really about United Fruit or were there other things going on, right? There was still a huge concern about communism back in the 50s, right? We're in the thick of the Cold War, and it's possible that the Eisenhower administration would have engineered this coup without UFC's influence. So obviously, misinformation wasn't the only factor uh here. What we can say is misinformation was present, right? The active disinformation campaign by UFC or the misperception of the influence of communism in this democratically elected government. So it's difficult to separate the misinformation from the people who stood to gain from the actions inspired by that misinformation. I bring that up because I feel like just this week we were seeing elements of that in our own administration. That's my transition to you have so many stories to pick from.

Rachel 5:24

You know, I just really have a special place in my heart for the National Park Service. So, the continuing saga, you really are snacking on a banana. I thought that was just a bit to set up the story, but it's true, everybody. Dan's eating a banana. Okay, so the Poor National Park Service, they just keep getting handed orders to be the arbiters of reframing according to someone else's agenda. A couple months ago, I brought the story about how park rangers were being given kind of generic talking points and basically instructed to avoid answering questions when park visitors ask questions like, Hey, why is the bathroom disgusting? And why is that exhibit closed? So I brought that story to the podcast a couple months ago. And now uh there's several new chapters that I wanted to bring in. So the next chapter happened in March of this year when an executive order was released instructing Park Service employees to flag materials at national park sites around the country that didn't adequately emphasize, quote, the progress of the American people, end quote, and the quote, grandeur of the American landscape, these things would then be removed or covered up, according to the executive order. So then in July, the New York Times and other outlets, and actually former NPS Ranger Elizabeth Villano began reporting that signs and displays were being taken down from national park sites across the country. And now by September 16th, a couple weeks ago, at the time of recording this, one day before the deadline in the executive order, the New York Times reported that, quote, the Trump administration has ordered several National Park Service sites to take down materials related to slavery in Native Americans, including an 1863 photograph of a formerly enslaved man with scars on his back that became one of the most powerful images of the Civil War era. According to NPR, employees have reported over a thousand items for review. This is a really interesting tidbit I wanted to call out. When asked if the NPS employees who are doing this reporting are on board with the effort, this NPR reporter explained, I'm just going to quote directly from their conversation, well, I mean, some to no doubt are. They do agree with the president and they are helping with this, but the others I've talked to say that most people don't like it. They say employees are mostly flagging these signs so as to avoid getting into trouble. And they think that this is really an attempt to erase uncomfortable parts of the country's history and control intellectual discourse. Now, park employees I've talked to, they don't want us to use their names. They're afraid of being fired. But one described the Trump administration like this: quote, they want to control the narrative. If you control the narrative, you control the people. Okay, so that's the end of me quoting a bunch of other people. Back to me. You know, we're watching reframing of history happen in real time.

unknown 8:23

Yeah.

Rachel 8:23

And there are a couple things I want us to consider. One, the thing that actually gives me hope here is that people are noticing.

Dan 8:31

Yeah.

Rachel 8:32

I think often when we look back at historical stories of reframing history, I wonder, did we know at the time? Or like how broadly did we know at the time that's what was happening? And I feel like often we didn't broadly know. And in this case, I'm not naive. I know this is still bad. The fact that employees are remarking, we know that if you control the narrative, you control the people, and that's what's going on here. That does give me a little bit of hope. There's like a level of propaganda literacy, I think we're seeing here that makes me slightly hopeful. But the things I want us to consider, you know, like covering up inappropriate content is obviously a huge red flag. Inappropriate, but whose standards? Who gets to decide what's acceptable and how are they accountable for this definition? Those are questions I have. Asking park visitors to report, quote, negative information, as if this somehow makes it like a democratic process or something. Like this feels like recruiting the public into a censorship campaign, which is actually probably really smart because we've talked about misinformation is like conversational, right? And so this is an invitation to engage in that act. And then incentivizing censorship via the threat of losing jobs is just so on-brand for 2025.

Dan 9:50

I hear that stuff and I don't lose hope entirely for this for the reasons that you cited, but I also understand that perhaps more than ever before, there's no way to avoid what I sort of think of metaphorically as a mirror, right? We've seen this with late night shows attempting to be canceled and things like that. There is a persistent reflective surface in the media. I don't always love how they do it. Social media itself leads to a lot of problems, but I think there's two sides to that coin, and that it is also a mechanism for accountability to in years past. Just like people didn't necessarily know that the banana growers, the banana company, was launching a misinformation campaign. Today we do know. That is much more abundantly clear to the point where it's not like we need to go searching for it. That stuff is reported to us pretty clearly. I don't know if that if I should feel optimistic because of that, but it does help me feel a little bit optimistic that you there's no way for anyone to avoid the reflective surfaces that exist today.

Rachel 11:10

Yeah, I have mixed thoughts about that because it's like we have this mass system of record, but I think one of the underlying themes here is learning how to figure out which parts of that system of record to trust. Right. That's why we're doing this.

Dan 11:26

That's why we're not done yet. We are about to talk to Brandon Schauer, who used to be a UX executive and transitioned into climate action. In some ways, he's the perfect guest. He's in UX, understands what we're trying to do, and also is now applying a lot of stuff that he learned and a lot of new stuff to uh a wicked problem, as you say.

Rachel 11:50

The perfect guest. Let's go hear from him.

Dan 11:59

Today we get to talk to Brandon Schauer. Brandon is the program leader at RARE, a conservation nonprofit with a distinctly human approach to creating community-based solutions. For the past five years at RARE, Brandon has directed the Climate Culture Program helping shift Americans toward the adoption of high climate solutions that reduce carbon emissions. Brandon, thanks for joining us on the show. Super happy to be here, Dan. So already I'm going to go off script because I am reading Climate Culture Program. And maybe you could just tell us a little bit about what that means. And that will tip us into the first question that we have, which is tell us about the information spaces that you play in.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

Absolutely. So climate is climate change, and culture is that big amorphous, foggy thing we all live in. And I think the big question is, what do they have to do with one another, right? We thought climate was this science problem, but it turns out it's human-caused climate change. It just didn't kind of happen. And one of the great levers we don't think about a lot is the culture. And what do we perceive as normal part of the future and part of the solutions and what we can do about it? So one of the big things is people don't like talking about it. And so what are you doing? How do you address it through the culture and help make that a norm as well?

Dan 13:29

Because Rachel and I are information architects, I tend to look at everything as sort of an information problem, but I'm hearing you talk about things like information is maybe a connected or related or subset of the larger culture problem around climate. Did I get that right? Is that how you all would characterize it?

SPEAKER_03 13:47

Yeah, I think that's fair. When you think about the long history of climate, it started off as science and reports and data and charts. And, you know, one of my first big steps into it was Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth movie, which was a lot about delivering information and charts, but with a bit of narrative around it. And that's how we've talked to politicians to try to shift policy, is like, hey, look at this chart, look at this data. But as politicians and business leaders and others who have a great degree of elite influence on the solutions have tried to communicate it to audiences, to their constituency, the information is just part of it. It's not necessarily the thing that people go, oh yeah, I get that, and I want to change, right? I want something different for our economy, for how I experience the world, and I'm comfortable with this change, right? Information alone is probably not the motivator to shift our economy.

Dan 14:56

So now our first question does seem a little strange, but it is tell us about the kinds of information spaces you play in. Maybe you can talk more broadly about the cultural spaces that you play in.

SPEAKER_03 15:07

We've played in a lot since I started working with climate culture because a lot of our job is let's pilot some things and find out actually what works, what has the most leverage, right? And so we've worked in the information space of banking, because it ends up that your credit card purchases and banking transactions are a great indicator of how much emissions you personally create in your life. We've worked in the information space of employment benefits to see if, like, hey, could we reclass some of the benefits or add to them that an employer brings to you because they're part of a more sustainable lifestyle and have other great benefits, co-benefits, sometimes we say for employees. We played in entertainment space as well. Like, what's entertaining, but also what entertains us kind of informs us. And so what are the possibilities there?

Dan 16:03

One of the things you said when we first started talking is that uh informing is important, but really your mission is about changing behavior. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. And again, our kind of bias is does information even play a role in that? Or are there other things that you are doing, other kind of prods or impetuses or stimuli that you're using to kind of affect positive behavior change?

SPEAKER_03 16:30

Yeah, if you think about it, if we all agreed on the science but nothing changed, we really haven't solved the problem, right? And so the information is one lever, but it's only one of five or six that we usually go to to help shift behaviors. Those behaviors could be something very high-level, like a governmental decision or going to vote, or a shift in a business's decision, but it could also be the things we do in our very daily lives about how we get around, how we choose to power our lives, how we choose to eat, that does add up when you start to see shifts in different segments of the population. So the real goal is those shifts in behavior, the shifts that then have downstream consequences in terms of reducing emissions, which are the things that cause climate change. So in some cases, you may have a population who, yeah, the information's very compelling and they'll go, great, I should do that. In a lot of cases, those people are already engaged. They've had decades to look at the information, right? But if you're going to say try to shift the food that's served in a corporate cafeteria, and you want people to eat less beef because beef is, well, it's unhealthy for you to have too much, but it also is emissions creating, more so than chicken or other plant-based uh selections. Well, information alone is not going to solve it. They want to know it's tasty. They want to know it's going to fill them up. They're going to want to have ways to experiment with it and try it out. Um, they're going to want to know that it's actually perceived by their friends and colleagues as something, you know, really great you're doing, not something weird and you're the oddball vegetarian. That's way more than information.

Dan 18:21

Oddball vegetarian is now all I can think about. So can you talk to us a little bit on the flip side? What misinformation have you run into that has prevented people from changing their behaviors? Is there a single kind of myth or misconception that you've run into time and again? Or is there something that we don't usually talk about when we talk about climate that you feel like is something that people don't understand or have this preconceived notion of that is sort of a consistent or occasional roadblock to making a behavior change?

SPEAKER_03 18:55

So I don't always start with climate, is the frame, but in the cases where you might, there's often information that lets someone off the hook personally, right? It's like, hey, I've seen the fact that 100 companies were responsible for 71% of emissions since I think it's 1988. So not my problem, right? Done. But, you know, if you actually go to that date and look at that list, I think company number one is actually China, the whole country. India is up there too because of their coal usage. The others at the top of the list are petroleum companies. So how often do you, you know, get in a car, ride around, get on an airplane, bought products from countries that use coal to produce all those products, right? Um, so we're all a part of the economy, we're all a part of the big system. But overall, a guilt frame is a terrible frame for getting people to change their behavior, right? Much better we have found is I think the short version is FOMO of you're missing out. People don't realize that other people are changing. People don't realize other people think that solar panels are a good idea, that they're considering it, or that they think their next car might be an EV, or that they are, you know, in support of policy that addresses climate. And so there's kind of this perception gap and bubble that exists that when we do the research, when we we go through studying, particularly Americans, that the awareness is really low about support and interests and climate solutions. And some of it is because it's stuff we just don't talk about. When we first began the program, we did a study, and most people said the best action they can take for climate is recycling. And when you look at it in the US, you know, what are the top solutions? It's like not even top 25 kind of thing. Might make us feel good, it's still a good thing we should do, we should still totally do that, but you know, not a climate solution. And so there are real information gaps about what are the solutions and you know, what could even be on a list of things we would want to see in the world. And I think that's part of the challenge as well, is just not creating fear about this thing that's you know people think might be far off in the future, but to show that real solutions exist, they're here now, and there are actually a lot of good things about them other than just they remove emissions. And so I think that's part of the misinformation or just lack of information world we live in for climate.

Rachel 21:43

While you're talking, I'm hearing this distinction that it sounds like you're making between like the base information itself and then the delivery of that information or the contextualization of that information. And when we were doing Our pre-interview, you teased this thing that y'all had worked on, and you just said it a couple minutes ago about entertainment as information. And what I'm hearing there is like, yes, we have this information. We know that just offering it is not enough. Like information alone doesn't drive behavior change. But y'all have some levers you like to work with that sound like almost delivery levers or how you use that information in particular ways. Can you tell us, first of all, does that distinction vibe with your mental model for how you think about this stuff? And then otherwise, like, do you have any instances you can talk about of like that delivery of information and what y'all are doing there?

SPEAKER_03 22:39

Yeah, absolutely. So we definitely look beyond thinking is information, you know, solely is the solution. If we could just drop leaflets from a helicopter and solve climate change, that would be awesome. But it's often not the most persuasive. So some of the other levers we look for emotional appeals. So we've we've talked a little bit about those. Choice architecture, I'm sure you all would love that. The whole idea of nudges, the lower emissions solution, one of my favorites is Google Flights and Google Hotels that just subtly introduces into the search results like, oh, this one is actually lower emissions. So it can can you know influence some of your decisions along the way. We also look at material incentives. So those are those things like government uh incentives, but those can be employer or other things as well. And then rules and regulations. Some of those are the classics that you tend to think about when you think about climate, information, policy through rules and regulations. But some of those, like the softer human sort of things like social influences and emotional appeals, don't come up that much. I think that's perhaps why we think entertainment and we're starting to see that entertainment is really powerful. First of all, I think to consider that it's shifted cultural norms before with great impact. Back in the 80s, uh, there's the designated driver campaign that worked on a lot of fronts to change, you know, policies around enforcing rules against drunk driving and things like that. But also three shows, Cheers, Dallas, and LA Law, whoever remembers TV from the 80s, featured shows that the characters chose to be designated drivers. Are good or bad things happened to people because they did or did not engage in it? And the public learned the same very way that we would learn from watching a friend. We learn from people on TV just as if they were friends and go, oh, okay, that's the solution. I see how it works. And actually, I know other people are watching this too. And so I might be seen good or bad because I do or don't do the signet driver thing. And we've seen things similar, like X-Files had the Scully effect, where more women became interested in STEM careers because of watching Agent Scully and knowing she was cool and respected and smart.

Rachel 25:06

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_03 25:08

We know Will and Gray shifted Americans on gay marriage and uh was something Biden-sided when he said, Hey, I'm actually now behind this, and I think it's 2012, of thinking this is a good idea, because he pointed to the show and said, you know, I think it's helping shift a lot of Americans' minds. And really good one, MTV had uh 16 and Pregnant, which was a show following 16-year-olds and their life and impacts. And that resulted in a 5.7% drop in teen births because you weren't thinking about, you know, maybe the fun things that get you into pregnancy, but you were thinking about the the downsides of what happens on the other side, and it was becoming very clear to you through the lived experiences of people we were watching. So entertainment, you know, delivers a lot of information. It's just you have to remember the first job of it is to be entertaining because otherwise, you know, you don't have an audience.

Rachel 26:07

We think of the default is to deliver factual information, and then maybe we can do it in an entertaining way. And I think it is very interesting to explore flipping that. What is the entertainment and how do you integrate information into it that can help shift norms, shift beliefs, shift expectations?

SPEAKER_03 26:31

One of the most pat phrases in conservation and nonprofits is meet people where they are. That's a marketing concept too, right? Like go where the people actually are. But it also means understand what engages them, where their life is at. And some of that is being entertaining and delivering the content that they came for. We have a program going on with unscripted creators, um, people who do reality TV, game shows, cooking shows, that sort of thing, to support them when it's appropriate to show a climate solution, they have the sport they need to do that. It's a great format because people are showing up to those shows to get ideas, like how should I fix up my home next time I have a chance to do it? Right? What would be something tasty or fun to create that my kids would like? That format even is designed to show you again and again, you know, what was done and the results or the benefits of it. And so it's a great format for delivering that kind of information, but that's the kind of entertainment people came for.

Dan 27:38

You mentioned some shows from the 80s, and I remember as a kid when they would promo the show, it would be like a very special episode of blah blah blah. And it was sort of like priming you like you were gonna learn a moral lesson from this show. A very special episode of Different Strokes or whatever it was. And we never shied away from those episodes. It was like, well, we still care about these characters, we still want to be entertained, so we'll watch it, but it did sort of like set expectations. I'm confident my kids have never seen anything that was referred to as a very special episode of anything. And I wonder if we're trying to avoid that now because we've become kind of wary, cynical, skeptical of the kind of messaging that could be embedded in shows.

Rachel 28:31

I feel like what we've done is instead of putting it up front, we put it at the end of the show now. Where you'll see a lot of shows where they'll do a special call-out at the end for like the suicide hotline or an addiction center because that whole episode maybe centered on that subject. So I feel like it's still happening. We've just moved it to the end credits where it's probably not getting seen.

SPEAKER_03 28:54

I also think that there is a false belief that climate, for example, is a 50-50 thing in the US. And when you read the research, like YPCC, the Yale Program for Climate Change Communications, does annual studies, and it's like, oh yeah, about 56% of Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate. And then it's only like 22 that are dismissing or are denying it, right? And so actually, most people, it's pretty high up on the list in terms of things that worry them. But still we shy away from like the big theme about climate change. I think Abbott Elementary does a great job, for example, of just sneaking the comments in. Sometimes it's part of a joke, sometimes it's something a character is subtly worried about or compares a worry to, right? And it's just, you know, part of the conversation. But there are times I think if you really want to engage the audience, you don't want to frame it that way at all. We did recently did some work looking to measure the impact of an episode of Gray's Anatomy. And others like Sustainable Entertainment Alliance and NRDC worked with the creators to make sure the episode tied into real science. But the first job of the episode was to entertain, and it was about heat waves. And looking at what happens when a heat wave happens in a city, how does it impact the ER? How does it impact the health of the people? And we then studied people who watched the show. We showed one group, just another show. We showed groups of people the episode that was featured, and then asked them, you know, questions before and after as one does in a kind of randomized controlled trial. The really cool thing was how people shifted. So looking at liberal leaning voters, right, people who might normally support climate, without even saying climate, we just said, would you support government funding of cooling centers? And about one to three percent shift, percentage point shift in people who change their opinion from watching the show. But they were already, you know, perhaps someone who would have supported that. So we also looked at conservative leaning voters, and there is a 9 to 10% shift in that group who said, Oh, you know what? I now support government funding cooling centers because this is a worry. Like I've seen what happens to a city, to people when this happens. You show me a show of people being put in body bags with ice to cool down their bodies, and that seems dramatic to me. So I think it's a good idea to help people, and the government can do that. So I think that's a good example of just, yes, a very special episode of Gray's Anatomy, but it's the entertainment you came for. We're not painting it as a liberal climate change do gooder thing. This is just the reality of what's going to be happening, uh, unfortunately, more frequently, and it's helping people with real solutions that are out there for us to address it.

Dan 32:06

That's amazing that you had that much movement for people who were sort of reluctant in the first place to buy into it. Um, it really just goes to show you that from my perspective, it seems like there's even more opportunities to do that sort of thing. Was there anything that you tried that didn't work as well as that?

SPEAKER_03 32:24

Oh man, we've tried so many things. So we've tried, uh I mentioned working with banks, for example, before. We tested with a major bank and their concepts and innovation labs, and we found you know, customers scored it more innovative than anything they've tested before. And consumers also said, and I wouldn't use it. The takeaway was, okay, this is not a job that people wanted their bank to do. Really had too much of the guilt framing, right? And maybe you already feel bad enough about you know the direction of your banking balance. You didn't also want to receive information about your emissions at the same time. We tried the employer space and found it a great intervention where we got to see people's behavior change from first learning about a solution to being able to go through the process of figuring out how to add it to their lives to making it a normal thing and then spread it to others. But wow, the amount of sales you would have to do to get each employer to then adopt that solution, and the amount of people inside an employer you'd have to get to say yes were just way more than a nonprofit could probably pull off. So we pulled out of there as well. So even when we test entertainment, there's things that can be off the scales, and then there are some things that are like, yeah, we actually did not shift people that much. We have some research coming out with a show called Recipe for Disaster that's a kids' cooking show. Really help people feel like, okay, I know how to do this. I believe that this is a good idea, I believe kids would do it, I have better confidence in my ability to do it, but did we actually see people immediately go and do it?

unknown 34:05

No.

SPEAKER_03 34:06

And so there's still steps in those interventions where you can only get people so far, and you realize that you may need another touch point or more social proof of like others are doing this, or happy trigger in their way, where they can go, yes, and then I can immediately order the meal plan or whatever to go and do it to really make it a behavior change.

Rachel 34:28

This is making me think a lot about the like nudge theory and sludge theory. You mentioned the nudge theory earlier, where I think it sounds like with this employer benefit space, I'm imagining there were some nudges y'all were trying to put in place. And then you said, but oh wow, the amount of sales it takes to convince a company to actually put that thing in place. That's the work we don't talk about really when we hear from economists and nudge theory, where we're like, yeah, you could make the default to opt into your 401k, and then you have to opt out if you want to. And maybe that one's a bad example because it's really easy to convince companies to just change which box is checked in their payroll software. But other nudges, right, like the work of convincing the powers that be to change the system settings, to redesign that environment to make that nudge possible, I'm guessing is the quiet and very difficult work space that y'all find yourselves in quite a bit.

SPEAKER_03 35:27

Aaron Powell That can be some of the magic of when you go, okay, we've got a pilot, something's working here, but you know, can you replicate it? Can you scale it? And then you have to realize, yeah, we do work in an economy, and a lot of the players in the space may have profit motives as one of their strongest frames. And so that's why we looked into it and said, oh, look, we we did a really robust evaluation, and seven to ten Americans want to see climate solutions on screen in mainstream content. That sounds like a pretty good indicator that there's interest in this happening and that there may be an underserved majority audience in there who wants to see this. And so you've got to start aligning and thinking, you know, where do these nudges show up that are also aligned with what the business cares about, what the customer cares about. In a lot of cases, they are. So many of these climate solutions, there's at first maybe a supply problem or a lack of understanding problem, or an economics issue. And more and more often it's like, nope, the science is there, the economics say this is the better approach, and there's just some small things holding us back of like how quickly can people adopt, how quickly can people change, is where many of them are now. And so finding that sweet spot of both implementing the nudge, and it's also a win for the supply chain or businesses that support it, um, is kind of where the magic happens.

Dan 36:57

So, what is the best thing for consumers to do? I literally would have said recycling.

SPEAKER_03 37:03

So it comes down to the way you get around, the the things you do to power your life, and the way you eat. But also, we gotta say just talking about it goes a long way because it normalizes it as a topic. The best way to talk to people about it is understand what they care and love because chances are climate addresses it, climate puts it at risk, right? Right. But in terms of the things you can do for how you get around, moving from gas guzzler to EV or hybrid, um, great solutions, saves a lot of money over the life of the car. Misinformation is that there's more emissions in uh EV. Yes, that's true when it comes off the factory line, but within about a year of normal driving, you're just dropping emissions from that standpoint. When you fly, fly smart. So, you know, don't do the three different flights to go to three different places if you're visiting all in a week. You know, put your sales trip or whatever you're doing all in line with and reduce it down to one flight. If you are looking at upgrades in your home, going with the heat pump, or other uh heat pump solutions, heat pump water heaters, and things like that are commonly available now and reduce your bills, solar on your roof if you own your home that uh pays you back uh over time. If you don't, if you're a renter, there is a thing called community solar and uh food. We talked about eating less beef. That can be a shift to chicken or other things that are more healthy for you, or a shift to more plant-based food. You don't have to go entirely to vegetarian. Sometimes you need to think of meat as a, you know, that extra condiment and something special. With food waste, when we throw it into the trash can, it basically becomes like a carbon bomb because it does not biodegrade in the landfill. It just sits there and becomes methane, which is many, many more times more powerful than your normal carbon emissions. Composting, shopping well so you don't actually spend all that money, uh, but just for what you do, and then storing it well so it lasts longer, or the solutions there. I was going to teach you one last fun word in case that's helpful. Let's do it. Interesting concept I've come across is hyper objects. Have you come across that yet? I'm intrigued.

Dan 39:21

We like objects and we like things that are hyper.

SPEAKER_03 39:24

It's the idea that there's just these things that are so massive, they're just hard to consider, right? They're not local, they exist in many things, but yet not any one thing. And so climate change is one of the you know often referenced examples of hyper objects. And I think of it as like it is freaking everywhere. Like we've had a discussion about food and voting and policy, but also Dan's feelings and uh the vehicles we drive around, right? But also at the same time, we can't touch it. Like none of us have ever seen what a ton of carbon looks like.

Rachel 40:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:05

And we can't go and go, hey, that's climate change right there. Unfortunately, that is going to become more evident over time as it shows up in the world around us. But as a hyper object, I think that's one of the things that makes it really hard from a dis and misinformation perspective. I think that it's one of the hard things for us to realize where we could put those nudges in the things we create every day for humans. And I think that's one of the things that the climate world needs to do better for for-profit and the rest of the world is make some of these solutions and the information about them much more readily available so that it's like, hey, as I'm designing this food ordering app, I can actually have a sense of what's the right direction to lean with the defaults. What's that little bit of extra information that gives people a sense of agency in their lives and the outcomes we all have by all those little decisions we make? And I think that's the opportunity here.

Rachel 41:20

Dan, what'd you think of that conversation with Brandon?

Dan 41:22

You know, it was different than the ones that we had had before. And in some ways it was very refreshing because we're seeing sort of the other part of the ecosystem. We're seeing the part of the ecosystem that has already chosen to route around misinformation. Yeah. Well, their agenda is different. It's not to inform, it's to change behavior, right? And to do so in a way that is, I think, not manipulative. Yes. So much of the stuff, Rachel, that you and I are sort of immersing ourselves in is all about manipulating people, perhaps to hold beliefs that if they were better informed or you know, had a wider range of kinds of uh perspectives to choose from, that they wouldn't necessarily choose that perspective, but they've been manipulated. What Brandon is doing, and I really appreciate what he's doing here, is trying to draw people into the conversation in a different way and give them behaviors that they can exhibit that aren't about being manipulated to do that.

Rachel 42:24

Yeah, it feels very expansive as opposed to reductive. Yes. When I have examples in my head of ways that I feel people are getting manipulated by information, it always feels very reductive. Like this is the right thing, ignore everything else.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Yeah.

Rachel 42:38

Everything else is wrong. This story I'm telling you is the correct one. And that's absolutely the opposite of what Brandon was discussing with us. Totally. In a way, like expanding minds. I almost think of it of the way you might show someone new flavors of food, right? You're not saying like, I never want you to eat this one food. That food is wrong. Here, do this one instead. Right. Instead, you're like, oh, you know, you've had really uh salty food. I'm gonna actually teach you like what vinegar is like, and I'm gonna teach you what lemon is like, and these other spices, which is a much more optimistic outlook than I think the spaces we normally are sitting with.

Dan 43:16

Yeah. And in fact, the the story that I told earlier, I feel like there's a lot of complexity to it, but it ends up getting kind of boiled down to its simplistic side because of the misinformation involved. Why don't we talk lenses? This was it was hard for me to kind of find some lenses here. Did you find a lens that you liked?

Rachel 43:38

I came up with a bunch of lenses that all felt like they overlapped quite a bit. I I didn't have the mutual exclusivity that I normally have in my lens synthesis, but I think that's a sign. There's there's some pattern there that I'm touching on. My lens I'm choosing today is social awareness.

Dan 43:57

I like it.

Rachel 43:58

And this is where we ask. How does the system make users aware of other users' perceptions or usage of the information being provided? There's some follow-up questions to this one. If the system is making users aware, why? Like, is there a good reason behind that? Or are we verging on persuasion, which was another lens I was kind of wrestling with, but I think they're overlapping so much. And then the second follow-up question to this lens is how does this social awareness affect the receipt of information or affect the action taken with the information? And this lens to me almost felt too vague. I was like, is this really a lens about information? But in my history working on products, I've seen often this desire to bake in kind of social constructs to the delivery of information, liking a thing, sharing, like publicly sharing a thing, some gamification aspect of that exchange of information. And the question that I always ask is why? And I'm a pretty deep skeptic of that. Like you can tell in the way I ask why. But I think this is a lens that really came out for me in Brandon's conversation is really thinking about why is the system using that social awareness, if it is, like to what ends? And then I think the dot dot dot there is like, and do you feel good about that? Why?

Dan 45:40

I like that you've included the word awareness there because I think a big part of the stories that Brandon was telling had to do with, hey, you may not realize this, but there are other people who are interested in this too. And I I like that the intent is not necessarily to sort of say keep up with the Joneses, right? You should do this because everyone else is doing it, but hey, you may not be as alone as you feel.

Rachel 46:05

Yes, yes. And I think in the way I framed that lens, it feels like a why would the system do this? And I actually think there are so many situations in which it is an excellent tool for a system to help communicate more information more clearly.

Dan 46:21

I've got a real-world example. I've been helping a company or an organization design a system. This is an organization that that deals with professional licensing. They're introducing a new set of tools to help people achieve their professional license. And this new tool, the intent of these tools is to not lower the bar by any stretch, but make it more accessible for people, right? So lots of people have different ways in which they can demonstrate their competency. How can the system be set up to take advantage of all those different ways that people have to demonstrate competency? And one of the things that we were talking about including is, you know, if there are a variety of methods to demonstrate competency in an area, we could highlight the method that most people chose. And again, I'm not sure this is the right decision. We're still very early in the design process, but I pitched the idea because I felt like this is a hard decision to make.

Rachel 47:46

We had heard things about the infrastructure not being great, all this stuff. And looking back, I realized, yeah, we did a lot of reading, we did a lot of research. But ultimately, what helped us make that decision was talking to other people who had grappled with that decision and who had made the decision one way or the other, and talking to people who had gone the route of an EV and like learning and seeing that is persuasive, honestly. Um, also in Seattle, like EVs are becoming more and more common. You see so many of them on the street. So I imagine there's also social awareness impact of literal just seeing the volume, the frequency of EVs I'm driving by. Right. It doesn't seem like a weird standout decision to make anymore. You're you're kind of gathering this implicit proof of concept just by seeing other people doing it and being able to talk to other people about it.

unknown 48:39

Right.

Rachel 48:39

I wish we had an anthropologist in the room with us right now. This seems like a core way that humans probably gather information and make decisions is by uh talking to other humans about their same experiences with that decision.

Dan 48:50

I mean, this then plays into sort of how the internet and social media and uh all sorts of things are encouraging a certain amount of loneliness to, you know, certainly those of us who've been working in the internet for a long time have always sought, I think, to see the internet as a connecting tool, not a dividing tool. And I wonder to what extent we can incorporate that into this lens of like not only creating social awareness, not only creating a sense of belonging, but how are you helping kind of bridge some of these gaps?

Rachel 49:22

Yeah, this takes me to our conversation about online patient communities in a previous substance.

Dan 49:29

Yes.

Rachel 49:29

Yeah, yeah. Dots are connecting, we're synthesizing. I love it again.

Dan 49:33

Synthesizing.

Rachel 49:34

This isn't all for naught. What was your lens?

Dan 49:37

I'm so nervous about some of these ones that I came up with because I think they're kind of interesting ideas, but I feel like I'm not ready to unveil them to the world. So I'm gonna cheat a little bit and just say one of the last ideas that we discussed with Brandon was this idea of hyper objects. And, you know, I think a lot about complexity and the role that information architects have in helping people deal with complexity. And one source of complexities these days comes from the fact that we're dealing with problems that seem insurmountable, that seem just so big. You know, even in the work that I do day to day and the user research that I've done, say, for professional licensing, that in and of itself may not be a hyperobject of the scale of climate change, but to a person just getting started out, it can seem too big to get your arms around.

Rachel 50:33

Oh, yeah.

Dan 50:34

What we didn't talk about with Brandon is the fact that these hyper objects exist creates space for misinformation. Because it is too big, you know, for you to get your arms around for you to understand, it's sort of like newly breaking events creates a vacuum of information. A hyper object creates a similar kind of vacuum of information. It is occurring to me now. And that vacuum is obviously a great place for misinformation to thrive. I think we're going to be seeing a lot of this as we talk to some of the folks in subsequent episodes about some of the big topics that they're dealing with. That these things feel too big. So I guess the lens here is what kind of hyper object are you putting in front of people? And what steps have you taken to make it accessible, to break it down? Another phrase that Brandon used is to meet them where they are, right? All of these things are challenges that we should give to ourselves to make sure that whatever the complexity is in front of the users of our tools, our systems, our information spaces, they have a way of taking it step by step so they can make sense of what's in front of them.

Rachel 51:47

The question that comes to my mind that I would tuck into that lens is how is the system acknowledging ambiguity and what is the system doing to reduce it? How are your structures acknowledging ambiguity? I think in a lot of bad user experiences, there's no acknowledgement of the ambiguity. It just kind of keeps shoving this hyper object in this giant bucket and moving it around. Right. And a good user experience addresses that ambiguity and tries to propose some mental model for making it less ambiguous.

Dan 52:27

Right. I think there's there's almost like a here's what you need to know now type attitude, right? And we understand that there's a lot going on that you don't understand, that we don't understand, that is not understood. But for right now, you can talk to your neighbors about their EVs and see if that's a good move for you. And does that explain all of climate change? Does that explain all of the activism to try and help deal with climate change? No, but it's that small piece uh that you can start with.

Rachel 53:00

Yeah, it feels like an aspect of scaffolding in teaching, how wonderful educators think about scaffolding information so that you can give someone the right information at the right time, not overwhelm them with too much information that doesn't actually help shed any light on the topic based on where they are. 100%.

Dan 53:26

And that was unchecked. Thanks so much for listening. We really want to hear from you. If you've got ideas for topics or guests or stories, drop us a line at unchecked at curious-squid.com. If you made use of the lenses that we described today in your practice, we want to hear about that too. Hey, check the show notes for any of the links that we talked about today, and it would really mean a lot to us if you shared this episode with a friend and rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.