When I was a sixth grader, a teacher told in class that a
Psychologist is a person who knows what a person talking to him is
thinking. I immediately wanted to be a Psychologist. It would be cool
if I could know what a person talking to me is thinking. Then I could
easily know if my friends were planning to hurt me or exclude me from
a game. Time and again I told other friend about it but we never knew
how the Psychologist know things. For me he was a kind of magician.
Time went on, and at 17 or 18, I gained some basic idea what it is
all about. Till then I already knew about other fields as well, so,
plan to be a Psychologist changed, and the plan changed again, and
again and again. However, my passion to know it still became deeper.
I read the materials. Around 2006, long before the free Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOC), some renowned US universities were offering
free lecture series in different topics. I came across a course ' An
Introduction to Psychology ' by the well known Psychologist Paul
Bloom, who has a worldwide reputation and whom I consider one of my
teacher. Despite the busy schedule, I managed time to listen to the
lectures. There were about 20 one hour lectures. Every time I listened
to Paul Bloom, my fascination towards Psychology was more than I felt
when I first heard about it. I realised, it is much more than just
knowing what the other person is thinking. Psychology is much much
powerful, it turned out to be way too powerful than I ever imagined.
It has a power to turn a saint to a terrorist and a servant to a
mass murderer. If it is used for good purpose, it can also create a
peaceful world. You can implement Psychology in every field. You use
it to know consumer behaviour to plan a sale for your company, you
use it to understand the thinking pattern of your political opponent,
you can use it to predict the strategy of your favourate team
Manchester United, you can use it in Health, Education, Economics,
Politics, Culture, everywhere.
Motivated by the course, I read my first ever Psychology book
written by Sigmund Freud, ' The Interpretation of Dreams '. Then
others, including Helene Deutsch, freud's daughter Anne Freud etc.
During the university studies in Cologne, Germany I had a module called '
Behavioural Economics ' which dealt with the decision making process
in economical life. I came to realise that understanding our way of
thinking, decision making patterns, our vulnerabilities are important
to solve worldly problems. Until recently these things were more or
less ignored. The international community has poured billions of
dollars in poor countries trying to solve problems how they thought
would work best. Then a book by Esther Duflo and Abihijeet Banerjee ,
' Poor Economics ' shed light on the issue. They spent a great deal
of effort to understand how the poor think and how they take
decision. This book in my opinion is the best ever written putting
oneself on the feets of the poor so far. Even though, there is a
separate field 'Behavioural Economics', its findings can be/should be
used in other fields as well. Similarly, the findings from
Pschological Research should also be used in other fields. If a
person doesnt take a vaccine, a doctor cant simply supply him with
more vaccines without knowing why he doesnt use the vaccine, may be
because he is scared of needles or may be he heard from a neighbour
that it will sterilize him ( meaning: you can never have a child
anymore ) or he simply procrastinate ( saying ' I will do it tomorrow
' ). His psychology should be studied in order to achieve better
result.
I was eagerly waiting for this year's World Development Report (2015) because it was about the human decision making in development policy.
The report with the topic same as the topic of this article aims to
guide the policy makers considering the psychological and social
influences on a person to understand the pattern of development.
Broadly saying, it is about behavioural economics based on the
findings by economists in various sub sectors. The report starts with
the pattern of our thinking, thinking automatically and thinking
socially. In the second part, it talks about the psychology of
poverty, early childhood development, household finance,
productivity, health and climate change. The third and last part
explains about the biases of development workers and talks about
adaptive designs and interventions. These issues are the most
important ones to understand the patterns of development and to
implement policies effectively.
What the report basically says is, we humans have a model in mind,
according to which our thinking pattern is influenced. We dont think
by our own, at least most of us. Rather, we have lots of influence
from others. Our family members, neighbours, friends, people we
listen to in TV, Radio or elsewhere, things we read build our
thinking. Then we add this influence with our learning, our
experiences from the past and make a model out of it in mind and
reflect what we have concluded or express our version of the thing.
We not only get influenced by people around us, but also influence
others. Why this is relevant in development is for example you are a
farmer and thinking about which fertilizer to use. We dont look in
internet or read what is best, rather buy according to what a
neighbour just told yesterday in the tea shop, ' You know , i used
this seed and my tomatoes were as big as mangoes ', then we simply
adopt it. It might turn out to be good, but can also be a disaster.
We dont have full information here. We dont know under what
circumstances the neighbour was successful. So, the policy makers can
intervene here and provide the farmers with best information to avoid
any such catastrophe.
We are also social animals, we run with the flow, as the water in
the river and the society shapes us as the river water shapes the
stones. The societal beliefs shapes which political forms we prefer,
to what extent we integrate religion in our daily life etc. This goes
for a long time and then it becomes our culture which is hard to
change. Culture does not necessarily mean a good thing. It can be one
of the factors that might be limiting our actions to economic
development. For example when we look at the poor in general, the
culture of dowry is the one that put poor fathers in a serious
problem when they have several daughters. As a result, there are
thousands of dowry related suicides. The culture is the killer here.
Moreover, governments throughout the world pour money in development,
then it doesnt work, and the money is gone, poor remains poor, diets
fail and then they left as it is and we start blaming others and find
reasons why things didnt work. Governments always wondered why the
poor does not perform better in schools when they start providing
school meal for free. But rarely any government tried to understand
the poor. Most government policy makers come from rich families. They
dont always know how it means or feels to be poor. Poor Economics and
the World Development Report and other scholarly journals report that
children in poor families face stresses and other pressure from
people around them. In their mind, there is something else, may be
food or a wish of a good house and they cannot concentrate solely on
studies. They are shaped by poor nutrition, bad health, dirty
environment, aggressive parents etc which will all impede cognitive
development and their abilities in learning. Consequently, they
perform bad in schools and will have lower chances of getting a job
and they will continue to remain in poverty. Female in poor families
face even more problems, mostly no education, poorer nutrition than
male children and are subjected to all forms of violence. This all is
the loss of human potential. If we have a society or a country where
there are so many people like this whose potential will never come
out, it is a loss to the humanity as a whole.
Poor families, when it comes to financial decision making, policy
makers often ask why they are so reluctant to save, also when they
are getting external support. Why people, regardless of wealth are
not so rational decision makers ? Because we decide based on emotions
than rationality. Behavioural Economist Dan Ariely conducted
experiments in Duke University in the USA to check students
rationality. We can take an example. I show you a second hand
football tshirt and ask how much would you pay for this. You might
say 10 pounds or 15 or 20. So the average price you are ready to pay
is 15 pounds. But when I tell you later that this tshirt was worn by
Andreas Brehme , the penalty shooter who scored the only world cup
final goal against Argentina in 1990 during the game making Germany
world champions for third time, your willingness to pay for the
tshirt will sharply rise. When psychology comes to health, it is more
important than ever. How to make people exercise regularly, how to
ensure that patients dont forget to take medicines are real
challenges of today that psychologists are struggling to solve.
Generally people dont follow you when you just tell them. Tell people
not to drink Coca Cola because it has lots of sugar in it and
increases your risk of diabetes, they will rarely follow you. Show a
small documentary of a person who is suffering from diabetes and
limits she faces in life, people are more likely to follow the
advice. Add a sad music to the documentary, the likelihood will
increase even further. This is a universal problem. In poor countries
in general, the rate of vaccination is too low, people spend too
little in prevention but too much in treatment. They dont buy a
chlorine bleach which will cost 30 cents a month but go to hospital
to treat diseases that cost much more because of the disease caused by drinking dirty water. Why does this happen ? Even if you dont
vaccinate, the effect you will face might be in the future and the
future is still too far away. People are natural procrastinators. So,
especially development workers can intervene in this matter. They can
bring some incentives. Economists believe that incentives always work
best. Give a kilo of rice to the poor woman if she vaccinates her
child, the probability that she comes will be higher and this will
make the society healthier. Thatswhy, sometimes you save by paying
people.
Climate is another issue that will be a matter of life and death
to developing countries but also a big issue in developed countries.
Psychology could be equally integrated to climate change to understand
the pattern of thinking. The World Development Report gives various
examples about the way people react to this issues. It says, how
people think about this is based on the theory of Marx and Weber
called 'availability heuristics ' which means that humans tend to
judge an event by the ease with which examples of the event can be
retrieved from memory or constructed anew. People get information from
their own favourite media and from people they like. They are not
open to new information rather, they already have opinions and they
look for justifications in various sources to prove them correct. In
such environment, changing peoples behaviours for good like being
environmentally friendly, becomes much more difficult as they are
literally politicized. People are less likely to support actions to
stop climate change if they are told that humans didn't cause climate
change. However, if you say that, we did this, support will increase.
Similarly, if people have experienced the climate catastrophe
themselves in the form of floods or heat wave etc, they are more
likely to support the CO2 reduction measures.
These are few areas which the world development report briefly
dealt. The gist of this report is simple: it shed light on how
humans think, how their thinking patterns work in mind, how history
and the society they live in influence their lifestyle and behaviours
which is then again aimed at making better policies that is more
practical, more real because it puts humans in the center of decision
making. This was the findings of many areas, Psychology, Economics,
Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Sociology, Anthropology and
Political Science and can be used in inter-disciplinary areas. So, psychology is powerful. It should be used in every sector to understand the depth of a problem. These findings will add the information to international development to combat
poverty and solve other issues that we are facing today. However, we
should also think that this is the beginning of looking things from
different perspective. It should develop further and if used
intelligently, we might reach the ultimate goal some day that is
sustainable development and prosperity. For those who are interests
to learn some basics about the issues mentioned here and Psychology in general, there are few
well written books.
Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijeet Banerjee
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann
No comments:
Post a Comment