Alrighty, so today I want to write about an idea that I spoke about first in my effective speaking course in college, and that has resurfaced in my workplace, tabooism.
TL;DR: Education and careful consideration for allowing human beings the freedom to make their own decisions is better for the world than telling people things we know they won’t listen to and creating more dangerous situations than if we had only taught them how to be safe in the first place.
Education > Obfuscation
Tabooism is the idea that because we tell people not to do X, X is now less safe, people are more at risk while inevitably doing X, and there’s lots of obfuscation about X, which are things that are taboo, as opposed to education.
If you remember one thing from this post, let it be this: Education > Obfuscation.
The easiest example I can write about without gathering research and getting “facts and figures” and the like, is marijuana (or any illicit substance). We (royal we, as in ‘society’) told kids, don’t do drugs! They melt your brain. You’ll be stupid. Only losers do that. The people who do that are criminals. Now, some of this is stereotype based, and while we tend to view stereotypes as something negative, they’re a way we understand our world, and shouldn’t always be viewed as such.
So we tell “the kids” to “say no to drugs.” But we don’t have an empirical basis for saying that. We tell people not to do it. What happens if you tell someone, “hey don’t push this red button.”? They push the button. People are more likely to do things when they’re told not to.
What do we tell people not to do?
-Drugs
-Text and drive
-Unprotected sex
-Eat things off the floor
-and many more…
We obfuscate and don’t provide reasoning as to why those things are bad (or how they can be good). We just say no. Which is SO ignorant. We should provide education about these things.
In my college speech, I talked about marijuana, and texting and driving. The former, since it became mainstream, has been illuminated so much through clinical research that the benefits really do seem to outweigh the negatives. If we had only told “the kids” to use safely, and not just “no.” then we could’ve been doing research sooner. Beyond that even, my opinion is that if someone wants to put something in their body that doesn’t directly affect others, why not? We do this with cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, but not with something we really don’t know about, lets just fearmonger and not educate anyone… (#ObviousSarcasm).
About texting and driving, lets think about it for a second. If I drive a standard (which is how I learned to drive) then I only have one hand on the steering wheel a majority of the time. The car was manufactured to only require one hand on the steering wheel, so it’s not a matter of hands. People eat, read, do their makeup, whatever while they drive, so clearly hands isn’t the issue. However, the majority of marketing for why texting and driving laws were put in place included “hands-free” devices being okay, but not a cellphone held up to your ear.
So if it’s not holding my phone, then whats the danger? My eyes. Ahh yes, how can I look at the road if I’m looking at my phone? Well, I can’t. However, since we know that people will do it anyway (see the earlier point about what happens when you tell someone not to do something) we should be trying to make it more safe instead of “just say no.” What if, you could hold your phone up so your eyes were closer to the road? No you can’t do that because if you get seen with your phone in your hand you get pulled over, so you hold your phone down near the middle console, or between your legs, and when you go to glance at it your eyes are completely off the road. Awesome job making roads more safe legislation.
Too bad we can’t hold our phones up so we can see the road…
Too bad drivers education courses don’t cover how to use the dictation feature on most smartphones (you’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t know how to use it)…
Too bad we don’t require students to memorize the keyboard…because they aren’t texting and on social media all the time anyways and likely nearly know it by heart anyways…
Too bad we obfuscate instead of educate.
People are going to do drugs. They will text and drive. They will do things that we tell them not to. The obvious counter-response to my entire point here is that if people just didn’t do it, it wouldn’t be a problem. Well friend, I have my response. You can’t control other people’s behavior. You can only control your own. So I see two options:
1. Create laws that people won’t follow, or will purposefully break in order to be rebellious, while failing to educate people on the issues because the only way you can attempt to change behavior is through punishment (which anyone who took any psychology course knows that reinforcement is a better agent of behavioral change than punishment)
OR
2. Educate people about the positives and negatives of various behavior and create incentives for those who exhibit the desirable behaviors regularly, while establishing a better system to look at the ethical, legal, social, and societal repercussions of legislature from a psychological perspective (opposed to political).
This came up in my work in a team meeting where a co-worker was talking about a clients parents who wanted support around how to pick their fights with their child because they, frankly, were a little controlling. My co-worker asked the team what to do about it and the first thing I mentioned was that people are more likely to do things that they are told not to do. It seemed like it wasn’t common knowledge and like the following remarks were lackluster, and lacked a simple understanding. In full, I would’ve liked to talk about it more and include how parents (or anyone) should understand the impact of attempting to control and obfuscate instead of educate and explain why they were attempting to create a set of reasonable rules, and working together to create a common understanding. This prevents the development of an Us vs Them mentality, which is arguably one of the most damaging outcomes possible of a poor reaction (see American political system).
This was a much longer post than I had intended and it look more time and space to get out what I wanted to say and explain it how I wanted to. I’m sure I could write even more but I want to keep this readable for folks and I’m glad to respond to any responses.
I hope to continue to develop these ideas and include a reference to this post as a way to continue to write about things like tabooism, politics, and psychology.
