Hello, hello. As you can see, I’m coming to you today from a different location. Location change! The topic I want to talk about today is something called solution aversion. This topic is very much related to cognitive dissonance and to wishful thinking, or motivated reasoning. All those topics are kind of circling around in the same area. But solution aversion focuses on solution.
And here’s the basic idea: What happens when somebody is arguing with you about something—trying to make a point—and the implied solution in what they’re trying to tell you means something you don’t like. Now you’re not at the solution yet. You’re just talking about the facts, but the implied solution is something you don’t like. Is that going to increase your motivation to argue with a point and therefore not accept their points? So, the idea is you’re, you’re trying to understand something, and there’s an implied solution. What happens if you don’t like the implied solution? And that’s exactly what a group of researchers looked at. They did it in the context of global warming, they did it in a few other contexts, on the left and right—it works everywhere.
Let’s take global warming. Imagine you come to people and say, “What do you think about global warming? Is it a real problem or not?” And you purposely take people who think it’s not a real problem. And those people say, “No, no, I don’t think it’s a real problem.” Then you take another group—that are sampled in the same way and tell them, “The solution for global warming if we agree that there’s a problem is going to be more government regulation, more taxes, more government, more rules.” Solutions they don’t like and then you say, “What do you think about global warming? Is it a problem or not a problem?”
Now in principle, liking the solution or not should not be connected to whether you agree with the problem or not. It’s supposed to be two different things but those people again say, “No, we don’t think it’s a real problem.” Without offering solutions, people say it’s not a problem. And when you tell them the solution is including more government regulation, more taxes, and so on, they say it’s not a real problem. But what happens if you say, “The solution for global warming is less government regulation, less taxes, more free enterprise, more startup, more initiatives. How big is the problem of global warming?” (Now remember, how big is the problem of global warming is not connected to whether you like the solution or not.) Well, the moment you tell them that the solution is something they are actually okay with, they don’t deny the problem to the same degree.
Now let me give you a more intuitive example. Imagine I told you that you have a health problem and because of your health problem you’ll never be able to eat chocolate again. Most likely what will you say? I don’t have this problem. You don’t like the solution (not eating chocolate) so you deny the problem. Now what they found in this research is the same thing happens with lots of things. We don’t like the implied solutions, even if they’re not mentioned explicitly, and we work harder to reject the arguments.
Now, here is an example. With global warming, you argue with somebody, let’s say you believe that global warming is real, the other person doesn’t, and you say, “Here’s another paper, here’s another paper, here’s another paper.” You think, “Don’t they read? Don’t they understand the papers?” Well, they don’t even get to reading it. They object the proposed solution, and because of that they don’t want to listen to the problem.
What this says really is that we must reverse the order by which we do things. Usually, we say let’s agree on the problem and then we’ll get to the solution. But if people don’t like the solution, we will not agree on the problem. The idea here is that perhaps we don’t need to do it in steps. (Let’s agree on the problem and then let’s figure out the solution.) But we have to deal with the implied solution that people have upfront, so that when the time comes, they are not going to be working against us and people are going to be freer to actually look at the information.
So, solution aversion is in the same bucket of motivated reasoning, but it means something very important that we should basically agree on the solution.
To all of us. And to more agreement and less solution aversion.
