INSPIRING VIRAL SOCIAL CHANGE
New research holds up hope for countries like India looking to effect a mindset reset to tackle vexing challenges like growing road crashes. EPISODE #14
Hi Everyone,
A very happy Monday to you.
Last week was eventful indeed.
The spotlight was on politics following a spike in the political temperature in West Bengal—a clear indication that the stakes are very high for both the incumbent, Trinamool Congress, and the challenger, Bharatiya Janata Party. The election is turning out to be riveting.
This apart the first meeting of the QUAD, the grouping of US, Australia, Japan and India, captured one facet of the ongoing recalibration of the global order. So far India seems to be a key part of this conversation—partly because of the need to address the threat posed by China as well as India’s own rewriting of its foreign policy playbook.
For this week’s column I departed from the usual drill of following the news and instead decided to do a sequel to my last week’s post on the growing trend in road crashes. The reason is you: dear readers.
Thank you to the very talented Akriti Sondhi for the wonderfully composed photograph.
Once you read this post, please, please do drop me an email with your thoughts or ping me on twitter at @capitalcalculus. It is key to growing this newsletter community.
A big shout out to Rahul Sharma, Vandana B, Aashish, Yu Yu Din, Balakrishnan, Premasundaran, Gautam, Yugainder, Balesh, Murali, Ajit and Nimesh for your comments and amplifying the post. Like in the previous week when I wrote about the sorry state of the Congress party, the post on growing number of road crashes too seems to have struck a chord. Would be nice if more of you joined the conversation. And, many thanks to readers who hit the like button 😊.
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Read on
RE-EXAMINING CHANGE
My last week’s post on the vexing challenge posed by the growing number of road crashes in India elicited unprecedented feedback. Thank you! The sub-text of the response was two-fold: One, the problem is for real. Two, it requires an urgent solution. Connect the dots and we have a pointer to the solution—also something that several of you have hinted in your responses.
Obviously, the problem is so far gone that any solution will need all stake holders to pull their weight. One in which the road users are the primary focus. In short India needs a behavioural mindset reset and it has to begin with road users—which includes all of us.
It set me thinking. How can India actually create this social change—which everyone agrees is imperative but are unable to rally around collectively.
As luck would have it I stumbled upon a recently released book by a sociologist specialising in studying revolutionary change inspired by social networks. The book in discussion is Change: How to make big things happen—written by Professor Damon Centola, Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania.
It is one which believes desirable social change is eminently doable as long as it is implemented by tapping extensive social networks that foster both trust and intimacy.
Come to think of it, community networks—which you will see is at the core of the argument put out by Centola—are actually India’s social signature; think ‘mohallas’ (something that defined my growing up years in Delhi) or the famous ‘paaras’ of Kolkata or the ‘wadis’ of Mumbai (I had the good fortune to spend a few summers at my aunt’s home in Kotachi Wadi, a potpourri of the Indian cultural mosaic). So India has a head start here.
The book starts off by boldly challenging the accepted dharma—which claims that ideas, social change and innovations spread like a virus--on how things spread. And instead makes the case that to create real change you need to more than just spread information virally.
“You must change people’s beliefs and behaviours. And those are much harder to influence (and are influenced by our social networks through what sociologists call ‘network bias’).”
The Network Effect
Often the decision to adopt a new belief, Centola argues, does not happen automatically. The decision is often complex, emotional and guided by the intricate web of social networks.
The sociologist then goes on to explain that social networks are not necessarily digital.
“They have existed for as long as humans have been around. They include everyone we talk to, collaborate with, live near and seek out. Our personal network makes up our social world. The science of social network studies the web that binds these social worlds together—from neighbours living on the same street to strangers on different continents—and how social contagions can spread among them.”
Importantly, he argues, that social change emanates from the periphery of the connected network. This is because this is where the bulk of the population resides. Accordingly Centola claims that instead of looking for “special people” (or influencers) we need to start looking for “special places”.
In other words to spark a revolution an individual needs to be located in the right part of the social network—so as to tap the massive social coordinating network around them. Exactly why we remember Rosa Parks (who refused to vacate her seat for a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama as one of the focal points of the civil rights protest) and not Claudette Colvin or the many other protesting racial discrimination.
Centola draws our attention to the remarkably successful social experiment in South Korea to universalise contraceptives. Where other countries failed they succeeded and in 20 years it had spread to the entire country. And where did they begin? Villages, where social ties are the strongest.
The moral of the story: A simple idea, like say a viral video, can spread rapidly. But a contagion of ideas powering social change—like hitting the reset on behaviour of road-users—requires substantial personal investment and has a playbook embedded in social networks.
Using Centola’s check-list in the Indian context I can think of the campaign to end open-defecation. Till recently India used to suffer a regular humiliation at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly when the rankings of this depressing statistic was called out. At 600 million India had by far the most number of people indulging in open defecation—something which lies at the heart of India’s biggest killer, diarrhoea.
But then the union government launched the Swachh Bharat campaign to fund building of toilets; Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about it in his verry first Independence Day address in 2014, which shocked purists, making a case for a fundamental behavioural change towards sanitation practice.
We may quibble about the quality of toilets and the number of people using it, but you can’t deny that it is making a difference.
Clearly we have recent history of effecting radical behavioural makeover for a social cause. Exactly what inspires me to believe that we can do the same to address the behavioural challenge underlying road crashes by tapping the social network principle propounded by Centola.
We could probably begin with two-wheeler drivers—a cohort which intersects with all classes of road-users and hence are bang in the middle of social networks. There is bound to be push back because a lot of the bad behaviour is steeped in accepted practice—if wrong side driving goes unpunished/uncorrected then social networks send out the message that this violation is acceptable. But then that is what behavioural change has to overcome.
To me it is an idea whose time has come. And let me leave it that.
Recommended Reading
Last week the digital world added NFT to our lexicon. So we thought.
Non Fungible Token has been around since 2017. But then last week a piece of digital NFT art was sold for a staggering sum of $69 million—paid out in a cryptocurrency. And overnight NFT mania was here. Big question is whether this is a tipping point in the cryptocurrency trade? The jury is out on this.
But given the complexity I thought an NFT explainer may be worthwhile. Dug out one done graphically—succinct.
Till we meet again next week. Stay safe.
Anil, ur insight is like a bolt of lightning. It jolts us all who are concerned about our Nation. Like all things Indian, our lives are soo complex that one solution leads to another problem, BUT we can achieve the impossible like ISRO's Chandrayan mission. Still believe that with a bit of pushing and with extremely high levels of prosecutions we can AND we must bring discipline. We need to change centuries old ingrained thought that baachane wala Marney wale is prabal hota hai. So if you have brakes, it's ur duty to stop to save the offender.
Yes the problem has to be eradicated with a wide sweeping change in society, as to how an offence is to be viewed. Right now these offenders imagine that they are admired as daredevils for their courage (actually recklessness) but documentaries by the government, showcasing the negative effects, will be a step in the right direction. There was a time in Delhi (which also has the highest vehicle population amongst cities in India) when the burning of excessive crackers during Diwali was a way of showing off wealth and opulence, but by sensitising the school children on the matter, a significant change has been noticed. This matter is equally, if not more, critical. Once again Anil, you have not only identified the problem but also the solution has been pointed out. Great going.