Every so often, people who like to think of their reality as fact-based (most everyone, then) throw up their hands and ask what is to be done about people who "don't get it," as if there's some formula. This isn't a partisan viewpoint; it reflects biases we all have, which tend to show up in how we intuitively imagine consequences of action. But sometimes how we imagine builds those biases.
If you force "four busy lanes of traffic into two," after all, anyone can see that a congested crawl will be the result. In a feeble economy, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know you need to make substantial cuts to keep the state's deficit down. If you want to save on electricity, even a child could tell you that the best thing is to turn the heat down.
Except none of that may be true.
It's based on what is easy to visualize, rather than what isn't. In the case of a road diet, the third, bi-directional turn lane gets overlooked, but left-turning cars block traffic in a four-lane model--and it gets worse the busier the street gets. So far as deficits go, consider a liquidity trap--again, harder to visualize than simply cutting to make fit. And that electric bill? "Making retrofits, for example, saves far more energy than turning down the heat a few degrees."
All of these examples, besides pointing up how our "arguments" tend to rest on what we can visualize quickly and easily, all have to do with size effects, too. We're not good at estimating how many people turn left during rush hour, or what will happen if every state makes draconian cuts, or how much energy we waste collectively. Most of us problem solve individually--that's where our experience comes from--and so tragedies of the commons leave us stumped.
One of the signal moments of any age's education is marked by the conflict between, loosely speaking, the intuitive and counterintuitive. No one now really relates to the people who were really invested in the sun revolving around the earth. It seems pointless. But it's undeniable that people were upset to greater and lesser extents by this new thinking and its implications.
We happen to live in a time when data frequently suggest conclusions that strike the person in the street as mysterious or just counterfactual. Data on the results of group behavior is what we wrestle with, we're deluged by the preferences of hypothetical populations. For some people, there's real pleasure in turning over conventional opinion with the aid of datasets. That's the Freakonomics crowd (today's learning: students prefer instructors with tattoos).
Others will stick with their intuitions, thank you very much. Attempts to reason with them about the result will only provoke a frustrated anger. Anywhere from 17 to 25 road diets have already taken place around Seattle over the last 30 years, and they have stuck because enough people like the results. (Here's an early update on Stone Way.) But it is never an intuitive solution, so people never react with joy to the news that a lane is going away.
Sometimes people--and populations--simply want different things ("space," say, or a deep-bore tunnel). But in the event that your solution is counterintuitive, it can't hurt to tweak your argument's delivery. You have to short-circuit your listener's tendency to intuit that they're right and you're wrong.
The Freakonomics guys are masters at this; they take the pat answer ("Everybody knows this...right?") and add just enough information to turn it back into a puzzle.
The counterintuitive part--which if simply presented in the train of an argument would be rejected out of hand--can become the element that engages people. Road diets, for instance, are a magic trick: "When are three lanes better than four?" But you have to have the patience to engage people first, rather than simply inform them of the "rechannelization" or retrofitting project--and why their kneejerk response is wrong. Roads may become more efficient when rechanneled, but people tend to bristle at the experience.
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