Photo: Texas roadside, Cattle retreating from the sun under mesquite. © 2018 Delena Norris-Tull
Policies versus Practices: The challenges of working with human beings
AKA: Nobody’s perfect!
Commentary prepared by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull, Professor Emerita of Science Education, University of Montana Western, August, 2020.
In my 28-year career as a university professor, I have often been frustrated by the tendency of human beings to create policies and immediately abandon them, when carrying out the daily practices that were supposed to be governed by those policies. Particularly late in my career, the discrepancy between policy and practice became more and more obvious, and more and more exasperating. As an education professor, I worked closely with colleagues who would spend meeting after meeting discussing proposals for new policies and revising old ones. Then we would vote on those policies. Invariably, the votes would be almost unanimous. But within days, those policies would begin to be ignored.
Then one day in Fall 2017, I read an article in the New York Times about Richard H. Thaler, an economist who had just been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Memorial Prize announcement stated that his “contributions had built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making.” “By exploring the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control, he has shown how these human traits systematically affect individual decisions, as well as market outcomes.”
Dr. Thaler helped found a field of behavioral finance that assists economists in predicting economic patterns. His basic premise is that prior economic theory was poor at predicting these patterns because it was based on the belief that human beings are predictable, predictable in how they make decisions, and predictable in how they spend money. Thaler, on the other hand, has found that humans are unpredictable, that they often make decisions not based on the evidence, not based on their own stated priorities, and not based on rational decision making.
Dr. Thaler (professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and director of the Center for Decision Research) and Dr. Cass R. Sunstein (professor at Harvard Law School and founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy) co-authored a book titled, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. I immediately bought the book, because I suspected it would help me understand more about human nature. It might help me understand why people develop policies that are based on reason and evidence, but then ignore those policies when carrying out their work.
By this time, I was beginning to detect a similar disconnect between the policies made by local, state, and federal agencies, in regards to the management of invasive species, and what happens on the ground, when those agencies attempt to turn those policies into practice.
Indeed, as I plunged into this project, I immediately started finding inconsistencies between policies and practices, at the County, State, and Federal level, in many of the States that I examined. As Jim Pike (NRCS District Conservationist, Laramie County, Wyoming) told me, “If you scored all the agencies responsible to manage weeds, federal, state and county, we would probably all get Ds.”
What I had not considered was the possibility that human beings often make policies that are also not based on reason and evidence. And this also happens at the Federal, State, County, and local levels. Thaler and Sunstein point out that “inertia and the status quo bias” often result in human beings not making changes even when such changes are clearly beneficial (2009, page 170).
Gaining a better understanding of human nature, by studying Thaler’s work, has helped me understand, not necessarily why, but simply that these inconsistencies occur, that human beings are predictably unpredictable. With apologies to Dr. Thaler, I include a few of my insights from his work, in hopes that it will also help my readers gain some compassion for the many mistakes human beings have made in the past, and the mistakes we are still making today.
Many of these mistakes and inconsistencies were uncovered within the conversations that I had while interviewing State and Federal agents and others working in the fields of native plant management and invasive species management. Others were uncovered when I transcribed the archival minutes from the early Western Weed Conference annual meetings of the 1940s.
Policies take time to implement (and often more money than is at hand), and require a concerted, conscious effort, a strong belief that those policies are for the greater good, and a strong commitment to the greater good.
Here are a few ideas from Thaler and Sunstein’s book, Nudge.
Thaler and Sunstein (2009, p. 20-21) believe that humans think using two systems, an Automatic System, which is “rapid and feels instinctive,” and a Reflective System, which is “more deliberate and self-conscious.” The Automatic System includes what we call our gut feelings. The Reflective System is conscious thought. Knowledge that starts out as Reflective, such as learning a new language, can become Automatic with repetition. Repetitive practice takes time and effort. Athletes and musicians, after many, many hours of practice, can develop very accurate, effective Automatic Systems. Automatic Systems are much more rapid and efficient than Reflective Systems. Because it is so much easier to use the Automatic System, many choices we make in life are made using the Automatic System rather than the deliberative Reflective System. This is a powerful reason that we make errors in judgment or mistakes in our choices.
There are several human tendencies that make it easier to get through our busy day, but that can sometimes cause problems for us, for those we interact with, and for the world we live in.
Thaler and Sunstein’s book explained some of the reasons why human beings do not carry out their own stated priorities or adhere to their own values. But, with apologies to them both, I list below, my own analyses, based on many years of personal observations of human beings in educational settings, of what causes human beings to make irrational decisions, or violate their own policies, values, or priorities. Here are my thoughts and my own classification systems for the human motives that all too often lead to failure.
My thoughts on what motivates human beings to ignore policies or best practices:
I suspect that all of the above motives come into play within agencies responsible for protecting the environment and managing the damages related to invasive species. Identifying which motives prevail in your agency may assist you in improving management policies and practices. But it may be important to recognize that sometimes it’s not possible to overcome the inertia present within the agency, an inertia that may be impossible to overcome within the timeframe of your specific role in the agency. One of my bosses in higher education once pointed out that sometimes the only way to improve intolerable conditions in the workplace is to outlast the narcissists in charge. Sometimes, it’s not possible to last that long in the job.
Throughout the course of my research into policies and practices related to management of invasive species, I came across a number of instances in which well-reasoned policies were developed within an agency but were never fully implemented. I also came across instances wherein best practices were in violation of official policies. In both cases, the individuals charged with carrying out the policies often felt unable to correct the disconnect. These examples are dispersed throughout these chapters, but here are a few key examples:
In my interview with NRCS agents in the Cheyenne, Wyoming Field Office, Jim Cochran pointed out that “cheatgrass, a winter annual grass, is one of the most palatable forages from April to June. But the federal agencies don’t allow grazing until June through September. If not grazed in the spring, cheatgrass flourishes in the summer, when it becomes unpalatable. It becomes palatable again in October, but by then the grazing leases are finished for the year. Thus this out-moded federal grazing policy has been instrumental in causing the spread of cheatgrass.”
In my examination of several State Department of Agriculture and State Department of Transportation policies regarding management of invasive plants, sometimes there is an emphasis placed on the importance of planting native species immediately upon removal of invasive plants. But in many cases, funds are inadequate, native seed availability is too limited, native seed is too expensive, and/or landowners are reluctant to adopt this best practice. And as a result, most of the funds are put into short-term solutions, AKA, removal using herbicides, with little funding put into the long-term solution of re-seeding with natives.
In my review of Federal policies, I also found an emphasis on the importance of weed management and of re-seeding with native plants. But, again, funding is inadequate. Often it is the responsibility of the landowners to carry out policies that they had no hand in developing, landowners who have little effective education to help them understand the importance of longer-term solutions.
I wonder if we humans tend to think this way: “OK, we’ll do Step 1, apply herbicides and mechanically remove weeds, because that’s what we have to do first and we’ll get a rapid response.” But Step 2 (which might include the use of biocontrol agents and/or revegetation efforts) never is implemented. And if implemented, these secondary treatments are not monitored for negative impacts (particularly in regards to biocontrols) or effectiveness. Stopping our efforts after Step 1 ignores the reality that herbicides are more costly than some other treatments, and that we’ll have to repeat the herbicide treatment next year, likely with new herbicides as the weeds develop herbicide resistance. And then we never get around to implementing more potentially effective strategies, such as planting the more expensive native seed, a treatment which take years longer for a positive result.
In my interview with John Samson, at the Wyoming Department of Transportation, I learned that in the 1990s, Federal budget cuts during the Clinton administration resulted in a mass exodus from a number of Federal agencies. John retired from the USDA at that time. He stated that these retirements caused the agency to lose many individuals with in-depth knowledge of best agricultural practices, knowledge that helped the United States to recover from the Dust Bowl years. Loss of institutional memory often results in the remaining and newer employees having to reinvent the wheel. A similar mass exodus from many Federal agencies occurred in 2016-2020, during the Trump administration. In particular, many scientists within those agencies were forced out or chose to leave Federal service. We do not yet know how much this will set back the effectiveness of these agencies in carrying out Federal policies and educating the public regarding best practices.
True to our roots, whenever a problem is identified, we often rush to solve it, long before we have enough evidence to support the policies and practices we implement, and never when we have enough money.
References for this section
Next Sections:
Policies versus Practices: The challenges of working with human beings
AKA: Nobody’s perfect!
Commentary prepared by Dr. Delena Norris-Tull, Professor Emerita of Science Education, University of Montana Western, August, 2020.
In my 28-year career as a university professor, I have often been frustrated by the tendency of human beings to create policies and immediately abandon them, when carrying out the daily practices that were supposed to be governed by those policies. Particularly late in my career, the discrepancy between policy and practice became more and more obvious, and more and more exasperating. As an education professor, I worked closely with colleagues who would spend meeting after meeting discussing proposals for new policies and revising old ones. Then we would vote on those policies. Invariably, the votes would be almost unanimous. But within days, those policies would begin to be ignored.
Then one day in Fall 2017, I read an article in the New York Times about Richard H. Thaler, an economist who had just been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Memorial Prize announcement stated that his “contributions had built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making.” “By exploring the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control, he has shown how these human traits systematically affect individual decisions, as well as market outcomes.”
Dr. Thaler helped found a field of behavioral finance that assists economists in predicting economic patterns. His basic premise is that prior economic theory was poor at predicting these patterns because it was based on the belief that human beings are predictable, predictable in how they make decisions, and predictable in how they spend money. Thaler, on the other hand, has found that humans are unpredictable, that they often make decisions not based on the evidence, not based on their own stated priorities, and not based on rational decision making.
Dr. Thaler (professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and director of the Center for Decision Research) and Dr. Cass R. Sunstein (professor at Harvard Law School and founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy) co-authored a book titled, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. I immediately bought the book, because I suspected it would help me understand more about human nature. It might help me understand why people develop policies that are based on reason and evidence, but then ignore those policies when carrying out their work.
By this time, I was beginning to detect a similar disconnect between the policies made by local, state, and federal agencies, in regards to the management of invasive species, and what happens on the ground, when those agencies attempt to turn those policies into practice.
Indeed, as I plunged into this project, I immediately started finding inconsistencies between policies and practices, at the County, State, and Federal level, in many of the States that I examined. As Jim Pike (NRCS District Conservationist, Laramie County, Wyoming) told me, “If you scored all the agencies responsible to manage weeds, federal, state and county, we would probably all get Ds.”
What I had not considered was the possibility that human beings often make policies that are also not based on reason and evidence. And this also happens at the Federal, State, County, and local levels. Thaler and Sunstein point out that “inertia and the status quo bias” often result in human beings not making changes even when such changes are clearly beneficial (2009, page 170).
Gaining a better understanding of human nature, by studying Thaler’s work, has helped me understand, not necessarily why, but simply that these inconsistencies occur, that human beings are predictably unpredictable. With apologies to Dr. Thaler, I include a few of my insights from his work, in hopes that it will also help my readers gain some compassion for the many mistakes human beings have made in the past, and the mistakes we are still making today.
Many of these mistakes and inconsistencies were uncovered within the conversations that I had while interviewing State and Federal agents and others working in the fields of native plant management and invasive species management. Others were uncovered when I transcribed the archival minutes from the early Western Weed Conference annual meetings of the 1940s.
Policies take time to implement (and often more money than is at hand), and require a concerted, conscious effort, a strong belief that those policies are for the greater good, and a strong commitment to the greater good.
Here are a few ideas from Thaler and Sunstein’s book, Nudge.
Thaler and Sunstein (2009, p. 20-21) believe that humans think using two systems, an Automatic System, which is “rapid and feels instinctive,” and a Reflective System, which is “more deliberate and self-conscious.” The Automatic System includes what we call our gut feelings. The Reflective System is conscious thought. Knowledge that starts out as Reflective, such as learning a new language, can become Automatic with repetition. Repetitive practice takes time and effort. Athletes and musicians, after many, many hours of practice, can develop very accurate, effective Automatic Systems. Automatic Systems are much more rapid and efficient than Reflective Systems. Because it is so much easier to use the Automatic System, many choices we make in life are made using the Automatic System rather than the deliberative Reflective System. This is a powerful reason that we make errors in judgment or mistakes in our choices.
There are several human tendencies that make it easier to get through our busy day, but that can sometimes cause problems for us, for those we interact with, and for the world we live in.
- Rules of Thumb: We often make decisions based on some everyday assumptions we have about how the world works. These assumptions can sometimes cause systematic biases in our thinking. Three heuristics have been identified by Thaler and Sunstein (p. 22-28) that contribute to these biases:
- Anchoring: Making a judgment based on something familiar. We tend to over- or under-estimate the value of something, based on what we are familiar with. One example in the book, Nudge, is that when asked the population of Milwaukee, people who live in the much larger Chicago, tend to over-estimate the population, while those who live in the much smaller Madison, Wisconsin, tend to under-estimate Milwaukee’s population. Here is an example of how that may apply to human estimates of the health of our environment: people who live in Beijing, which has one of the highest rates of air pollution in the world, may be more concerned about protecting air quality, than those of us who live in Montana, where air quality seems to be in fantastic shape, at least until the smoke from a forest fire suddenly endangers our health.
- Availability: Humans tend to “assess the likelihood of risks by asking how readily examples come to mind.” It can be challenging to convince people to support funding alternative energy sources when the price of a gallon of gas is below $3 per gallon. But as soon as a gas shortage or energy crisis causes the price to creep up close to $4, suddenly a lot more Americans become interested in alternative energies. Policy makers can influence people’s perception of risk by reminding them of dangerous or expensive situations that have occurred in the past. All anyone my age has to say is “Three-mile Island” or “Chernobyl” to call to mind the potential horrors of nuclear power plants gone wild. (By the way, gasoline at $4 per gallon is a level that Europeans, who in 2018 were paying between $5 to $7 per gallon, have likely never experienced). (Note: historical data on European gasoline prices before 1980 are not readily available, but when I traveled throughout Europe in 1971, gasoline cost about $3 per liter, or $11.34 per gallon).
- Representativeness: This is the “similarity heuristic.” Humans tend to make assumptions based on past experiences. This is how stereotypes are formed. This heuristic “can cause serious misconceptions of patterns in everyday life.” Many events that occur by chance, or are random, appear to have a non-random cause. Simply put, humans can draw conclusions based on too little evidence. I have often accused my husband of making an inference based on an N of one. And my husband often comments on how easily I will jump to a conclusion, when I don’t have any evidence of what has caused a certain event. A simple example described in the book, Nudge, is that, if you ask someone how likely it is that you could toss a coin and get three heads in a row, they will say that it would only happen rarely, when in fact it happens fairly frequently. The book also gave the example of so-called cancer clusters. If we know of a few people in an area that have cancer, it’s hard to see that as random, when in fact it almost always is random. Humans often assume a pattern when there is none, but it takes a major commitment to rigorous thought to examine the actual evidence. It is simply faster and easier to draw conclusions from too small a sample.
Thaler and Sunstein’s book explained some of the reasons why human beings do not carry out their own stated priorities or adhere to their own values. But, with apologies to them both, I list below, my own analyses, based on many years of personal observations of human beings in educational settings, of what causes human beings to make irrational decisions, or violate their own policies, values, or priorities. Here are my thoughts and my own classification systems for the human motives that all too often lead to failure.
My thoughts on what motivates human beings to ignore policies or best practices:
- If the individuals with the responsibility to enforce those policies/best practices perceive that the policies would cause those individuals to lose some of their power (narcissistic motive)
- If individuals perceive that those policies/best practices may prevent them from gaining power (narcissistic motive)
- If the individuals with the responsibility to enforce those policies/best practices were not involved in their development (disenfranchisement motive)
- If the individuals with the responsibility to enforce those policies/best practices don’t bother to understand the policies (the laziness motive)
- If individuals believe their ideas are always the best (the holier-than-thou/superiority motive)
- If the policies/practices do not match the immediate desires of the individuals in charge (the impulsive motive)
- If the policies are too expensive (either take too much time to enforce, or cost too much money) (the laziness motive or the poverty motive)
- If the institution has recently had significant employment turnover, resulting in the loss of key employees with the institutional memory to understand the purpose of the policies (the reinventing-the-wheel motive)
I suspect that all of the above motives come into play within agencies responsible for protecting the environment and managing the damages related to invasive species. Identifying which motives prevail in your agency may assist you in improving management policies and practices. But it may be important to recognize that sometimes it’s not possible to overcome the inertia present within the agency, an inertia that may be impossible to overcome within the timeframe of your specific role in the agency. One of my bosses in higher education once pointed out that sometimes the only way to improve intolerable conditions in the workplace is to outlast the narcissists in charge. Sometimes, it’s not possible to last that long in the job.
Throughout the course of my research into policies and practices related to management of invasive species, I came across a number of instances in which well-reasoned policies were developed within an agency but were never fully implemented. I also came across instances wherein best practices were in violation of official policies. In both cases, the individuals charged with carrying out the policies often felt unable to correct the disconnect. These examples are dispersed throughout these chapters, but here are a few key examples:
In my interview with NRCS agents in the Cheyenne, Wyoming Field Office, Jim Cochran pointed out that “cheatgrass, a winter annual grass, is one of the most palatable forages from April to June. But the federal agencies don’t allow grazing until June through September. If not grazed in the spring, cheatgrass flourishes in the summer, when it becomes unpalatable. It becomes palatable again in October, but by then the grazing leases are finished for the year. Thus this out-moded federal grazing policy has been instrumental in causing the spread of cheatgrass.”
In my examination of several State Department of Agriculture and State Department of Transportation policies regarding management of invasive plants, sometimes there is an emphasis placed on the importance of planting native species immediately upon removal of invasive plants. But in many cases, funds are inadequate, native seed availability is too limited, native seed is too expensive, and/or landowners are reluctant to adopt this best practice. And as a result, most of the funds are put into short-term solutions, AKA, removal using herbicides, with little funding put into the long-term solution of re-seeding with natives.
In my review of Federal policies, I also found an emphasis on the importance of weed management and of re-seeding with native plants. But, again, funding is inadequate. Often it is the responsibility of the landowners to carry out policies that they had no hand in developing, landowners who have little effective education to help them understand the importance of longer-term solutions.
I wonder if we humans tend to think this way: “OK, we’ll do Step 1, apply herbicides and mechanically remove weeds, because that’s what we have to do first and we’ll get a rapid response.” But Step 2 (which might include the use of biocontrol agents and/or revegetation efforts) never is implemented. And if implemented, these secondary treatments are not monitored for negative impacts (particularly in regards to biocontrols) or effectiveness. Stopping our efforts after Step 1 ignores the reality that herbicides are more costly than some other treatments, and that we’ll have to repeat the herbicide treatment next year, likely with new herbicides as the weeds develop herbicide resistance. And then we never get around to implementing more potentially effective strategies, such as planting the more expensive native seed, a treatment which take years longer for a positive result.
In my interview with John Samson, at the Wyoming Department of Transportation, I learned that in the 1990s, Federal budget cuts during the Clinton administration resulted in a mass exodus from a number of Federal agencies. John retired from the USDA at that time. He stated that these retirements caused the agency to lose many individuals with in-depth knowledge of best agricultural practices, knowledge that helped the United States to recover from the Dust Bowl years. Loss of institutional memory often results in the remaining and newer employees having to reinvent the wheel. A similar mass exodus from many Federal agencies occurred in 2016-2020, during the Trump administration. In particular, many scientists within those agencies were forced out or chose to leave Federal service. We do not yet know how much this will set back the effectiveness of these agencies in carrying out Federal policies and educating the public regarding best practices.
True to our roots, whenever a problem is identified, we often rush to solve it, long before we have enough evidence to support the policies and practices we implement, and never when we have enough money.
References for this section
- Thaler, R.H., & Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Next Sections: