How to Achieve Your Goals By Creating an Enemy

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews and ask me a question by leaving a review. I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com Can conspiracy theories be Good for Us? How the Unexpected psychological Benefits of Scapegoating Can Help Us Achieve Our Goals by nir eyal@nearandfar.com DJ Khalid, the one man Internet meme, is known for warning his tens of millions of social media followers about a worldwide conspiracy he euphemistically calls they. They don't want you motivated, they don't want you inspired, he blares on camera. They don't want you to win. He rails when invited. On the Edeln degeneres show, Khaled urged the host, please Ellen, stay away from them. The they Khaled invokes are clearly a sinister force. But who is they? Khalid offers clues when he told DeGeneres, they are the people who don't believe in you. They is the person that told you you would never have an Ellen Show. Although Khalid's claims may seem outlandish, he is in fact leveraging a powerful psychological hack. Scapegoating. The practice of imagining a conspiring villain can be an amazingly effective way to motivate yourself to change your behavior. Of course, as history has shown, when people act on baseless conspiracy theories, terrible things can happen. But sometimes the antidote is in the venom. Why we Scapegoat Harnessing a malicious they can help us accomplish difficult goals, resist temptations, and ultimately live a more fulfilling life if we use our ideas about they to empower ourselves rather than to oppress others. Manufacturing boogeymen conspiracy theories and scapegoats is an age old practice. We're hardwired to fight threats to our bodies, our property, and the people we care about. But when we lack the power to stop bad things from happening, our minds often make up enemies, be they minority groups, immigrants, witches, or evil spirits. When the Black death killed off 60% of Europe's population in the mid 14th century, no one knew the cause was a microscopic bacterium called Yersini pestis. This was 500 years before the rise of germ theory. In their desperate attempt to make sense of the carnage, Christian mobs blamed Jews for the disease and organized massacres across the continent. Meanwhile, Pope Clement VI decreed that the planetary alignment of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars had caused the plague and blamed Catholic followers seduced by that liar, the Devil, for the killing of Jews. Psychologists call this tendency to conjure up a menacing force projection Assigning blame is a kind of psychological defense mechanism that frees us from the uncomfortable feeling that we don't understand why something bad has happened or worse, that we may bear some responsibility in the matter. The Blame Game Our scorn is not reserved for people alone. We have a tendency to fault animals and even inanimate objects as well. In his 2012 book A History of Blaming Other People, Charlie Campbell describes how ancient Greeks made a practice of criminally prosecuting swords used to commit murder. Several hundred years ago, Campbell writes, mice throughout Europe were prosecuted for stealing cheese, weevils were tried for killing vines, and judges handed down death sentences to animals caught in sex acts with people, though by the 18th century, Campbell claims a female mule was given clemency based on her prudish reputation. Today we blame all sorts of inanimate objects for screwing with us. Food is blamed for being too delicious, movies, television shows, and Netflix are compared to hard drugs. And of course the Internet and our connected devices are blamed for all manner of sins in articles with headlines like how the Internet Is Making Us Stupid and How Technology Hijacks People's Minds. But being too quick to assign blame to these things can backfire in unexpected ways, can in fact make us more likely to give in to temptation. Which means the impulse makes about as much sense as putting mice and mules on trial. Simple Solutions the trouble with scapegoating, the unproductive kind that is, is that it fixates the mind on just one possible source of the problem. We assign blame to something or someone specific. To free ourselves from the psychological pain of uncertainty or responsibility. We heap our sins onto something outside ourselves that can then be conveniently discarded, like the goat sent to the desert to die in Leviticus. For a dead goat to solve our problems would require a miracle. In reality, if we don't find ways to change our actions, we continue to indulge in self defeating behaviors, make our troubles worse, and persist in heaping blame on scapegoats. The cycle continues, but nothing really changes. It doesn't have to be like this if vilification at its core is driven by the psychological need to manage uncomfortable feelings. Surely there's a better way to make ourselves feel better. Correct Causes it turns out the way we view the problem has a profound impact on how we deal with the threat. It also affects whether we're able to change our behavior or whether we simply continue to assign blame. To address underlying causes, we first have to recognize the behavior we want to change. This requires fundamentally understanding the source of the problem. When we scapegoat the wrong source, change is as unlikely to occur as it is when humans engaged in superstitious acts of sacrifice. Solutions to entrenched problems are rarely obvious. Getting to the Core of the problem Whether it's understanding the epidemiology of the bubonic plague or the cause of technology, infatuation requires asking difficult questions, coming up with hypotheses to test, and methodically experimenting to find cause and effect. As is often the case when we discover deeper truths, our intuitions about the source of our problems is frequently shown to be wrong. Maybe we don't binge on junk food or YouTube videos because of the pleasure in what we're consuming, but because of deeper problems consuming us. Perhaps the true reason we allow our cell phones to interrupt dinner is not that we're addicted to our phones, but that we're addicted to work. The solution may involve changing the way we use these products, but without pinpointing a specific behavior at the heart of the matter, the problem will go unfixed, powerless. If you think you are. Once we've identified the causal behavior, the next challenge is to implement a change. It's here that scapegoating can be used to our advantage. In life, we tend to think of what happens to us as binary events are either within or beyond our control. Unfortunately, we also tend to be horrible judges of what's within or beyond our control. Scapegoating makes us feel more powerful, more in control, because it gives us a place to direct our anger or anxiety. But the truth is, we're often far less powerless than we think we are. Researchers have found that our perception of how much power we hold matters more than we may think. Several recent studies have observed a surprisingly strong connection between the way we think about our ability to act and our actual follow through. For example, to determine how in control people feel regarding their cravings for cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol, researchers administer a standard survey called the Cravings Beliefs Questionnaire, the cbq. The assessment is modified to the participant's drug of choice and presents statements like once the craving starts, I have no control over my behavior and the cravings are stronger than my willpower. How people rate these statements tells researchers how powerful or powerless respondents feel in the face of temptation. Lower scores reveal that subjects believe they are more in control, while higher scores correlate with people who believe the drugs control them. A study of methamphetamine users titled it's the Thought that Counts, which appeared in the Journal of Substance abuse treatment in 2010, concluded not only that people with low CBQ scores were more likely to stay sober, but also that participants who scores decreased over time, indicating that as time passed they felt more powerful, had increased odds of abstinence. A study of cigarette smokers published in Behavior Research and therapy in 2014 found similar results that smokers most likely to fall off the wagon after quitting were the ones who believed they were powerless to resist, though the logic isn't surprising, that is, if we believe we're powerless, we don't even try. So we fail. The extent of the effect is remarkable. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their cravings were much more likely to drink again. In fact, beliefs of powerlessness were as much a determinant of relapse after treatment as the level of physical dependency itself. These studies should give us pause when we find ourselves assigning power to manufactured goods like booze, fast food, or Facebook. Claiming that something like technology is hijacking our brains helps no one but the makers of the product. Thinking we're powerless makes it so. Embracing the enemy but we can leverage an enemy, real or imagined, to make ourselves feel more powerful. Psychologists have long known of a phenomenon they call reactance our instinct to resist threats to our freedom and autonomy. For example, when your boss micromanages you and tells you to do something in a patronizing way, you feel crummy and decide to do the opposite to stick it to the man. Now imagine if you could harness the power of reactants towards more productive ends. Eliciting reactance has been used successfully in public health efforts such as the Anti Smoking Truth Campaign, which aims to prevent teen smoking by leveraging the fact that rebellious high schoolers feel reactance towards just about everyone. Whereas less successful anti smoking campaigns miss their mark with teens by showcasing far off consequences like emphysema and black lungs. The Truth Campaign did away with the go and instead changed behavior by painting the tobacco industry as a bunch of scheming jerks. In one ad, activists attempt to deliver a case marked lie detector to the headquarters of a tobacco company and are promptly kicked out. In another spot, cartoon characters interrupt smokers at a party by shouting, it's a trap. Of course, reducing smoking rates among teens was a multi pronged approach. Along with the ad campaigns came lawsuits, legislation, new cultural norms, and tobacco free alternatives like nicotine gum and e cigarettes. One can imagine that in the future similar efforts may be made to temper the bad aspects of new technologies. But if history is any indicator, these changes will come slowly. In the meantime, what do we do? This is where the thoughtful use of scapegoating comes in handy. Vilification is one way to manage harmful habits by using reactants to supercharge how powerful we feel Scapegoating for Good it's here that DJ Khaled's method of creating a they is so effective. By projecting the temptation onto a faceless they, Khaled gets all the benefit of scapegoating with none of the bad bits like pogroms, hate crimes, and mule trials. Khaled isn't the first to use this technique. In his 2002 book the War of Art, the author Steven Pressfield uses an entity he calls resistance to describe the force conspiring against creative output. Most of us have two lives, pressfield writes. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance. Throughout his book, Pressfield reminds us, resistance is always plotting against you. More recently, the author and game designer Jane McGonagall describes a similar conspiracy of bad guys in her 2015 book Super Better. McGonagall blames villains like Mrs. Volcano and Snuff the Tragic Dragon when she loses her temper with her kids or feels selfish pity Khalid, Pressfield and McGonagall know that they resistance and the bad guys don't actually exist. For DJ Khalid, that's the joke that powers the meme. If Khalid were to point a finger at a real group of people intent on sabotaging him, such as an ethnic group or a particular corporate entity, his scapegoating wouldn't be funny. It would be malicious or dangerous. At the end of the day, it's just us against ourselves for the times. We don't want to admit that creating a they who doesn't want you to leave that extra cookie on the plate or get back to writing that blog post provides a clear enemy to rebel against, even if in reality that they resides in each of us. Here's the if used correctly, scapegoating can be a powerful tool for resisting temptation and sticking to hard goals. It can also be dangerous and backfire if used incorrectly. Assigning Blame is a kind of psychological defense mechanism that frees us from uncomfortable feelings when bad things happen out of our control, or when we don't want to accept that we are responsible for our own problems. Nothing can be done when bad things happen as a result of circumstances truly beyond our control. But we're often more powerful than we think we are when it comes to our own behavior. Studies have found that people who believe that temptations control them are much more likely to give in as long as we target the behavior at the root of the problem. Creating an imaginary enemy Projecting our struggles onto a scapegoat can make us feel more powerful and help us resist temptation or achieve our goals. Thanks for listening. If you like this article, please find more at my blog nearandfar.com near is spelled n I r Like my first name. Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore on a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.