Presentations by Jess Berentson-Shaw from The Workshop were a highlight of this and previous year’s PHINZ conferences. She offers science-based advice on how the Passive House community can most effectively influence the adoption of a building standard that creates warm healthy buildings and solves a lot of social problems.
In 2019, when she first delivered a keynote address, I’d just published my first book and there were copies sitting in front of every attendee. One of key points Jess made that day was to refrain from myth-busting. My look of dismay was mirrored on my editor’s face, for the book included a series of sidebars where we explicitly identified misinformation that was widespread at the time and logically explained why this was not true: 100% Passive House myth-busting.
I was reminded again of Jess’ advice when I read a recent report about Australian research in The Guardian, run under the headline, “Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible, Australian-led study finds“.
It’s hard to not get sucked into the whirlpool of argument when someone makes clearly wrong dumb statements about stuff you know and care about. But Jess convinced me I need to stop and re-frame the conversation or I’ll likely make things worse not better, despite having a good motivation.
Here’s how Jess explained the issues with myth-busting in a 2019 toolkit she prepared for Oxfam to encourage collective action on climate change:
Repetition of a message, even to negate it, helps spread that information to new persuadable audiences. Our brains respond to and remember information better upon repetition. We are also notoriously bad at remembering the source of information. So we may attribute negated (and incorrect) information to a trusted source. If you negate bad information (i.e. spend time explaining why an idea is wrong), you risk spreading it further. One of the short-cuts of our “fast-thinking” brain systems is to protect what we already believe. So negating bad information may inadvertently help people develop a stronger adherence to unproductive beliefs.
In her PHINZ keynote last month, Jess pointed out how the current government is talking about building housing: it costs too much, people need homes they can afford. There’s been off-the-cuff talk by ministers about reversing positive improvements to the Building Code. It’s a great example of a scarcity mindset. If we stay in that framework and try to counter with facts, we’ll lose.
Consider “consumer” versus “citizen”. Both are ways of describing people but they carry very different associations and promote different mindsets. I found this a very powerful illustration.
Here’s a post Jess wrote recently about the scarcity mindset and how to move out of it.
Introducing the post on LinkedIn, she recommended the following:
- Avoid myth busting or negating the frames and claims made within a scarcity story – it only strengthens the neural pathways making it seem more “normal” as an idea.
- Recognise what words, terms and metaphors that scarcity framing includes – for example ‘tax relief’ is a common metaphor used in such framing- so don’t use it.
- Shift to an abundance frame instead – we can have nice things for the collective, here is how….
I hope PHINZ can post Jess’ conference presentation online. As for me, I have a new book at the concept stage. My editor and I will be taking Jess’ advice about how to make the most compelling arguments to advance the cause for housing (and other buildings) that keep people comfortable and healthy and reduce our collective carbon footprint. And as hard as it is, we’ll refrain from Passive House myth-busting.