| The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, March 042009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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The language of economic crisis. The facts are dismal enough. Economies shrinking. Unemployment rising. Whole industries teetering at the brink of a very high cliff. But facts do not speak for themselves. People do. And the language that people use in relating the facts can be as important as the facts themselves. Take what has become a standard reference point when talking about the economic crisis. "The Great Depression does appear genuinely relevant," wrote Yale economist Robert Shiller in the New York Times. "The bursting of twin bubbles in the stock and real estate markets, accompanied by huge failures of financial institutions and a drop in confidence, has no more recent example than that of the 1930s." But there is also a long list of critical differences between this era and that. So should we cite the Great Depression in discussing the current crisis? Barack Obama and Stephen Harper have. So have many other others. But language has consequences. "The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation," Shiller writes. "But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation -- because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our 'animal spirits,' reducing consumers' willingness to spend and businesses' willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy." If that sounds exaggerated, bear in mind that Robert Shiller has quite a track record. He called the tech bubble. Then he called the real estate bubble. In both cases, he figured out what was going on by noting the gap between underlying economic facts and soaring valuations. That gap was produced by psychology, he concluded. And he was right. The same psychological forces can work in the opposite direction: The irrational exuberance that inflated the bubbles can easily turn to irrational pessimism. Will it? If leaders keep talking up the crisis -- with comparisons to the Great Depression, for example -- it probably will.
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Fortunately, the idea that language matters has been getting quite a bit of attention lately. Less fortunately, much of that discussion has been constructed on a popular fallacy about how language works. "The notion that leaders have a responsibility to communicate 'noble lies' to the public in order to preserve order and the greater good dates back to Plato," writes Sarah Barmak in the Toronto Star. But she notes that "the prospect that financial information must be managed -- and should perhaps be managed more -- before it can reach our collective eardrums should give us pause. Truth, others say, is something that should be stated as plainly as possible. Anything less is mystification, or worse." That's how the choice is usually framed: Spin versus truth. Happy talk versus facts. Propaganda versus reality. For the record, I'm pro-reality. And I'd advise any public figure to tell the truth. Nothing kills trust like being caught lying. But when politicians and other opinion leaders talk about the economic crisis, the choices they face are seldom as simple as spin versus truth. Let me illustrate with an experiment conducted by American psychologist Paul Slovic. Slovic asked forensic psychiatrists to review a case study of a mental patient confined to an institution. Based on this assessment, he asked, would you release this patient into the community? All the psychiatrists involved were given the same case study. But there was one subtle change. Half the case studies said that patients like this one have "a 20 per cent chance" of committing a violent act if released. The other half said "20 out of every 100 patients" like this one could be expected to commit a violent act if released. Logically, the change should have made no difference. It's the same information. But it did make a difference. A big difference. When the risk was expressed as a percentage, 21 per cent of psychiatrists said they would refuse to release the patient. But when the risk was expressed as "20 out of every 100 patients," the refusal rate doubled.
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How can a little linguistic twist have so much power? The explanation lies in the fact that emotions play a far bigger role in decision-making than we realize. What is "20 per cent"? It's an abstraction. You can't see it. You can't hold it in the palm of your hand. So it has no emotional content. But "20 out of every 100 patients"? Now you're talking about patients. You can see a patient. And in this case, the patient is sticking a knife in someone. That image generates lots of emotion -- and the emotion drives the decision. All language works like this. It makes connections. It creates images. It generates feelings. It influences our thoughts in ways we are almost never aware of. The idea that there is some sort of "just the facts, ma'am" language that doesn't subtly influence our thoughts is simply false: There is no neutral language. Now, I don't want to go all post-modern. Some things are true. Others are not. And I would never suggest politicians dip into the latter. But the choice politicians face is very often not between truth and untruth. It is between truth and a different way of expressing the same truth. There are many truthful ways of discussing the economic crisis. Using the Great Depression as a point of comparison can be one of them. But should a politician do that? Choices have consequences, even choices about words. Especially choices about words. It would be nice if politicians thought about that carefully before they opened their mouths. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |