4th February 2015
JICA Ichigaya building
10:00 AM
The vice president of JICA, Mr. Kiyoshi Kodera, opened the seminar on World Bank (WB)’s recently published World Development Report (DPR): Mind, Society, and Behaviour. The number of audience were about twice as big as the other World Bank seminar that Sayori, Prof. Abe, and I attended several months ago on “A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity” in WB’s Tokyo office. It was interesting at the same time encouraging seeing a WB’s seminar this time held in JICA’s office. The vice president mentioned that he has worked for WB for quite sometime, and then he recalled the last couple of decades of DPR publication topics. One thing that I cannot help to not to think about was that our research group has been taking interest in a parallel manner to the last couple of DPR’s topics. Maybe some of us could recall that we have covered them in some of our lab seminars, including WDR 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography. And now that some of our research group focusing ourselves in well-being objective and subjective measurements, the two previously mentioned seminars in one way or another are related to these current interests of our research group.
Dr. Varun Gauri, a co-director of WDR 2015 was the main speaker of this seminar. He brought up a number of examples on the three ways of how human being tend to think; 1) automatically, 2) socially, and 3) through mental models. When people think automatically, often we take the easiest ones that we can think about and ignore the hard ones. How is this reflected in development context? For example, when a development project, say, installing tap water system closer to a community in morocco to reduce the workload of women and children in getting water for household, people could be discouraged with the lengthy paper work to realise that project and rather choose to live with the stress-causing burden of collecting water instead. What the government and development agencies can do to solve this problem is by simplifying the procedures to what people would find doable and accessible. For example, the paper work can be simplified to evidence picture taking – something that the people can understand and do easily.
The second way of how human mind work is through social frameworks. Our sociality is hard wired. For example giving recognition is more powerful than financial incentives. And so is social control. For example, in an initiative of reducing traffic accidents due to reckless bus drivers, the effectiveness of introducing policies on driving speed limit and seatbelt laws was lower than putting stickers on reckless bus drivers, saying “Don’t just sit, stand up and talk when the driver is driving recklessly”.
The third way is through mental models. The example given by Dr. Gauri was the declining of birthrate in Brazil due to watching soap operas. In the soap operas shown in Brazil, the modern, rich, and successful women are pictured as having less children. The Brazilian women was said to give birth to less children following this model.
Of course there could be biases in the understanding of the causative effects, but the underlining message to these thinking frameworks and example was to redesign and restructure development so that people can make better decision for themselves. Nobody knows which strategy would work best until we try it. Everyone, including the experts, is prone to bias. An experiment to WB staff actually proved that they are also biased for the very reason that they have been trained and worked on development so that they think they know what is right. What we can do to minimise bias is thus, going through the process of defining, diagnosing, redefining, and re-diagnosing as the crucial steps in redesigning development.
Professor Sawada, Japanese prominent developmental economist from University of Tokyo gave comments to the report. He mentioned that developing countries have been subjects to experiments in behavioural economics and nobody is free from being biased. He also recognised that these are well taken note of in the report highlighted by the experiment on bias to WB staff. The professor also talked about the missing points in the report including; 1) The role of infrastructure to nudge people behaviour and 2) The importance of new technology and innovations to address bias.
One interesting example that he gave was on the malaria net. The net distributed to prevent malaria was designed in a way that it could be washed again and again with insecticide. But this practice of washing a net is not part of the social norm. Why not design a net containing (a long term effective) insecticide? A technology is not only has to be human friendly, but the community social norms should be embedded in the technology.
The second commentator was also from the University of Tokyo, Professor Norito Kawakami, he gave comments from a medical doctor perspective. The professor talked about being busy, stress and well-being. Stress changes our cognitive performance and in a severe case it may cause serious complications such as suicide, back pain, and mental disorder. When this occurs, one can see it as a loss in development resources or social capital. There are three keys in avoiding this loss; 1) Education and training, 2) Psychological support, and 3) Improving social determinants.
After the insightful talk, the floor was given opportunity to ask questions. Some of the interesting questions were:
Q1. “Relating to the last talk on being busy, I feel that those who are poor tend to be busier. The rich ones are protected from this condition (of being busy) because the poor people are doing the busy and hard work. How can we respond to this?”
A1. “By redesigning and simplifying procedures we can help people to make (more efficient) decision, for example by reducing the paper work. We also need to make better diagnose to social norms and biases, for example racial biases where judgments are placed (based on our automatic thinking) that certain race should possess this and that characters, should be avoided, (so that a fair environment could be created)”
Q2. – A question from private IT company employee: “What can we do when the social norms are based on corruption? I encountered government officials in the developing countries asking for money and practicing bribery (when our company is trying to implement technology for development projects).”
A2. “We need to increase the probability (for these corrupted personnel) for being caught. (Unfortunately) it is known that when someone has been audited, their behaviour became worst because they do not understand the concept of probability. They thought, if they have been caught once, they would not be caught the second time. Sadly, often, people do corruption unintentionally (because it already seem like the norms). Therefore, we should trigger reminders (that what they are doing is unlawful). In most cases, standard approaches have to be adjusted because they only make things worse.”
Q3. “I feel that the concept of thinking automatically, socially, and with social model, could be intertwined. How do we take this on the implementation of designing development?”
A3. “Examples would be making user friendly products, building on mental models, or taking bottom-up approaches. (The important task is) Whether we can present it as a package of a robust policy.”
One of the take-home message I can pick is the understanding that mental health (should be considered) as resources, so we can think of it in a development context. In my current research, I have been thinking that a high well-being is the ultimate goal of development, but in fact, we should (also) be thinking of it as a social capital. Development initiatives would not work effectively if the community were stressful or depressed for example. To put it in a simple way, we should not be trying to be happy. Because happiness is not a goal, it is a mean, it is a condition, a resource. Through happiness people are productive, creative, and pleasant. The product output, the creative work, the pleasant environment are the outcome of happiness. But this does not mean that we cannot do anything to flourish well-being, policy makers could facilitate, or using the speakers term, “nudge”, people behavior through policies and infrastructure. For example designing a city with efficient public transport so that people would choose to take lower emission, less energy consuming alternatives over the polluting ones, thus creating more pleasant environment and happier people. With the same argument, policy and design in development could also negatively affect on the existing well-being. I found many publications about wellbeing, mostly by the prominent scholar in subjective well-being, Ed Diener, it is known that 50% of our happiness is embedded in our DNA, but the rest of the 50% is from experiences, external environment, and our behaviour in coping with challenges.
On a side note, a couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to meet the Mayor of Bandung city, Mr. Ridwan Kamil who happened to visit our campus. It was encouraging to see some of his 5-years-plans. As an architect-background person, he aims to develop Bandung city into a smart city with a lot of public spaces for social interaction, upgrading community environments where traditional values are nurtured, and continuous inclusive measures where people would be encouraged to participate actively in the city’s development. He is planning the city in a way that it should enhance the happiness index of the people living in the city.
In the post 2015 context, often times, as a bottom-up practitioner I am inquired by people working on goal settings and political approaches; “how would you relate the on-the-ground practices to the international discussions?” on the other hand, my fellow grass-root movement researchers would convey their anxiety, “do our efforts in making a difference matter? Are we really making changes for the betterment of this world?” As someone who have seen both worlds, I would say that they are doing great works. I can see some of the on-the-ground problems and aspirations reflected in the international development goals, at the same time, I can see that the efforts made on the ground really do make a difference, with great multiplying effect and scaling up in a promising speed. I can talk for hours to give more examples of inspiring projects and people I have encountered, but I think the ones that I mentioned in this blog are great representatives demonstrating that the two sectors are progressing towards a more thoughtful planet for our well-being.
Andante Hadi Pandyaswargo
(Anna)