- I believe our society's gotten to the point
where you can't question, you can't provoke.
You just have to adhere to consensus.
For whatever value we think we're creating,
I can guarantee you the end result
is the establishment and maintenance of norms
that do not reflect public consensus.
You need to be aware of the forces
that influence your behavior,
and cultural norms are a massive influence
that we're often unaware of.
Cultural norms are essentially group consensus at scale.
Norms lurk in the background.
We rarely think about them,
and unless we are actively challenging them
and making sure they are valuable,
they will eventually become 'collective illusions.'
And because the people themselves
are upholding the illusion,
only the people themselves can dismantle it.
As human beings, our brains are absolute energy hogs.
Your brain's always looking
for ways to reduce energy expenditure.
Well, one of the best ways to do that
is through the use of cultural norms.
There are things we agree to as a society
that help us grease the wheels of social interaction,
and they make life predictable for us.
Cultural norms usually reflect
the prior generation's group consensus, not our own.
Because we're born into them by and large,
we just assume that this group consensus
reflects something that is true and good,
that people really want.
But it's not correct⁠—
a lot of norms are just entirely arbitrary,
and we need to be skeptical about norms
because norms can exist for a very long time,
not because they were ever true,
but just because people don't question them.
The areas of the brain that track cultural norms
are the same areas of the brain
that process social information in general⁠—
and a violation of a cultural norm
will trigger the exact same error signal
that your brain triggers when it is perceived
that you are going against your group.
Artists throughout history,
have played a role in purposely challenging norms.
We see them as a little weird
and a little disconnected from society,
because they're supposed to be.
And that creates a 'permission structure'
that allows them to hold a mirror up to us and say,
"Is this really you?"
"Is this what you believe?"
Sometimes, you come back and say, "Absolutely it is."
And you're offended that they even asked.
But a lot of times, it's the first crack in the norm
that eventually breaks.
And as people start to talk about the artist
and about the art, rather than the norm itself,
it reveals the opportunity
for people to reveal to each other,
what they actually value,
and the norm can disintegrate, and a new norm can emerge.
Vietnam faced an incredible challenge
with child malnutrition
that had basically been impossible to solve
through traditional top-down means.
They finally addressed the problem
and solved it through a completely different approach
called 'Positive deviance.'
Start by actually going into communities and saying,
'Let's find the examples
of people in these communities that are positive deviance.'
Meaning, whatever problem you're facing, like malnutrition,
there's some family whose kids are not malnourished,
even though they're under the same constraints
as everybody else.
They discovered that these mothers were supplementing
the meager amounts of food the kids had with shrimp.
Well, those were freely available
and widely available sources of nutrition.
But what they found out was, at some point,
a norm had emerged in that community
that said shrimp were harmful to kids.
The mothers that were doing that were doing it in private.
They didn't want anybody else to know they were
because they knew they were violating a cultural norm.
It wasn't enough to tell people to feed their kids shrimp⁠—
they had to find these mothers
and elevate their voices
and allow them to communicate to other parents,
and break that cultural norm.
But once they did,
they made dramatic gains in child nutrition for decades.
The fact that we're so hung up on top-down,
expert-driven solution to everything,
is the only reason why positive deviance seems strange to us.
But in reality, it's the only way
you can ever drive social change under collective illusions
that are rooted in cultural norms.
If you understand that fact,
and you create the enabling conditions
that allow everyday people
to reveal who they really are to each other,
these illusions can crumble in a hurry,
and social change can happen at a scale and pace
that would otherwise seem unimaginable.
- This series is brought to you
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tackling our biggest challenges.