How Norms Change

STORIES TO COMMUNICATE VALUES

Common language, stories, and social norms are a powerful part of Communication in any given society, and it is up to the leader to establish and maintain the norms.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/language-trump-era/595570/a

http://newyorker.com/science/maria- konnikova/how-norms-change

I recently read a book, The Language of the Third Reich, by the German scholar Victor Klemperer. Klemperer, a Jew who was married to a non-Jew, survived the entire Nazi reign in Dresden, Germany. His diary of those 12 years, published posthumously in the 1990s, recorded daily life under the Third Reich so scrupulously, so objectively, with such attention to ordinary detail, that the reader lives through the almost too-familiar story of Germany’s descent into barbarism as if each step were as shocking, unbelievable, and yet inexorable as it was to him.

Klemperer was a literary historian, and to preserve his mental balance under Nazi rule, he used his diary to continue doing the academic work from which he, as a Jew, was officially banned: He studied the language of the Third Reich. He recorded how, after Hitler took power, certain words in various forms—Volk, fanatisch—soon became ubiquitous in public and in private; how religious terms imbued the ruling ideology; how euphemisms such as evacuation and concentration camp were coined to make massive crimes sound bureaucratically legitimate; how the German language grew impoverished and uniform; how Nazi language became a total system outside of which Germans could no longer think, and which did the thinking for them, to the bitter end.

The language of the Third Reich—Hitler’s speeches, Goebbels’s newspaper articles, books of Nazi theory, government diktats, the pervasion of all these through everyday life—kept the German people in a state of perpetual fervor, bordering on hysteria, to the last cataclysmic days of the war. Every day was historic, the highest word of praise was fanatic, and Hitler’s rants against Jews and other enemies were also a summons to superhuman feats of exertion and sacrifice on behalf of the highest cause—Führer and Fatherland. The appeal of Nazi language was emotional and irrational, as Klemperer wrote, but it didn’t just lower those who came under its spell. It also aroused the most sinister form of inspiration in history.

One can see similarities in the profound shift in relations between the Hutus and the Tutsis at the time of the Rwandan genocide. Prior to the carnage, Hutus reported good relations with their Tutsi neighbors; then, in an instant, one group massacred the other. What happened in Rwanda wasn’t the power of age-old hatreds—Hutus and Tutsis had always had stereotyped ideas about one another—but of quickly shifting social norms. To a great extent, the norms in Rwanda shifted so rapidly because they did so from the top: influential radio stations broadcast a powerful, persuasive, and constantly repeating message urging listeners to join killing squads and organize roadblocks. Suddenly, people saw violence as something that wasn’t only possible, but normal, a new norm.

The social psychologist Bibb Latané argues that norms are more readily transmitted when the person modelling them has a high degree of personal influence and is physically close by the person absorbing them. A student, for example, is more likely to be affected by her professor than by a fellow student or a professor at another school. One possibility to fight new and dangerous norms, therefore, is to call upon influential people in small communities to fight the perceived new norm created by larger authority figures. Thus, the new behavior will look more like an outlier than like a norm.

“Implore your neighbors to get their formal or informal leaders to speak out,” Paluck said. A broad-based, authoritative counterbalance may well have an impact.

In both cases, stories played a powerful role in influencing the social norms. The story that Hitler told Germany about the Jews and the story that Hutu leaders told about the Tutsis changed the course of history. On the opposite side of the coin, positive stories from leaders can completely change their followers’ perception. Never underestimate the power of story-telling as a leadership tool.

The beauty of social norms is that, unlike ingrained hatreds or any other ingrained belief systems, they are flexible. They shift quickly; with the right pressure from the right people, they can shift back. But the response, crucially, must be broad, and it must come from sources of authority across the spectrum. Otherwise, behaviors we think of as socially stable may prove to be far more fragile than we’d like to believe.

“Communication leads to community.”

ROLLO MAY