Why People Aren't Joining Your Cause

Someone comes up to you on the street and hands you a flier.

“Hey, this is a really serious problem. You need to place your attention on it now.”

“Um, sorry, I’m headed to an appointment right now…”

“No, this is way more important than that. People are dying!”

“Look, you’re just some guy. I have no idea if what you’re telling me is actually true. You could be confused. Or lying even.”

“Just glance at the pamphlet,” he says, and indeed it lists some scary statistics.

“Okay, that looks bad. But I don’t know if it’s correct or not. I’ve seen a lot of really bad statistics. Particularly in support of social cause. The most dramatic statistics are usually wrong.”

“Well, yeah, but there are references!” Indeed, there are asterisks referencing authoritative sources. Published research, government statistics, CDC and FBI documents and reports.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the flashy statistic means what your pamphlet says it means. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but I would have to sift through a lot of stuff to figure it out.”

“But for something this important, you have a duty to figure it out! You have a duty to put in the effort and fight this fight with me.”

“Actually, there are a thousand fights like that. In fact there’s a guy down the street who says you’re full of shit and that I should be fighting the opposite fight. I’m busy. I work a job 9 hours a day, and in my home life I spend my hours caring for my children and doing a few chores. What little free time I have I spend watching some TV and doing various hobbies. I could possibly sacrifice those indulgences and dedicate time to something more socially valuable. But even if I did, the odds are pretty small that I would pick your thing out of all the problems in the world. I’m not telling you I don’t care, or wouldn’t care if I looked into it more. It’s just that I’m already swamped. Sorry.” And he runs off to get on with his life.

Human attention is a scarce resource. That’s the basic problem here. The thing you’re worried about could be the worthiest cause in the world. But you aren’t just asking someone to care about a worthy cause. Everyone is willing to do that. You’re asking someone to read thousand-word articles, then fifty-page publications and white papers, then 300+ page books, then do a few statistical calculations and math problems, and then care about your thing. It’s not as obvious as you think. The problem could be much smaller than you think it is, or the solution you proposed might be the wrong one, or you could be absolutely backwards-wrong about the problem. You can't just shove a flier in someone's face or try to shame them into compliance on social media. It's not a simple matter of getting someone to glance at a few statistics. Rather you're asking someone to sit down with you and read a few chapters out of your calculus textbook and do some of the practice problems. Policy analysis is hard work. Quantifying social problems is hard work! Don't be fooled. Your raging sense of moral rectitude is lying to you.

I remember realizing that something was very terribly wrong with the world. It was some time in 2009. I had just finished reading Radley Balko’s Cato paper “Overkill.” (Do read the whole thing.) Here was a huge problem that I didn’t even realize existed. Fifty-thousand commando-style police raids every single year, most of which didn’t turn up enough evidence to even make an arrest (let alone convict the target of the raid). How could I have missed this? And how can people go on with their lives like this isn’t even happening? And how can American cops take part in such Gestapo tactics? How could so many of them betray the citizens they are sworn to protect? This is something right out of Nazi Germany taking place in present day America. I would post things on social media about this now and then. A few people seemed to care. Bless them. But most people didn’t seem to give a shit. It’s not that they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. If it happened to them or to a loved one, they would instantly understand that a problem exists. But expecting someone to care is like shoving a pamphlet in their face and saying, “Not convinced? Well, here’s thousands of pages of literature to read…” Most people don’t have time to even figure out if the cause is a worthy one.

By the way, recently people have been using the term “woke” to describe awareness of the social injustice faced by African Americans. I think I viscerally understand what this means, even if I don’t exactly buy the standard social justice narrative on race issues. After reading about police militarization, wrongful raids, and the brutal treatment of drug crime suspects, I was in a very different mood for several months. I read “Overkill” one day, start to finish, and was shaking with indignation. It was like taking the red pill. I definitely woke up to a problem that I hadn’t realized existed. It was the sudden realization that I was living in a different world than the one I was used to. 

I don't regret shining a spotlight on what I considered an enormous problem. And honestly I don't regret most of the fights I got into over it. Having re-read some of those old threads, which I remember as being heated, I find I was mostly polite and patient with people who espoused a despicable ideology. Good riddance to any "friends" I lost over it. (Paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens, "I don't know that they were ever really 'friends', insofar as I lost them over a disagreement.") But I might have naively expected more converts than I got. I just want to caution any moral crusaders out there that it's harder than you think to get someone's attention focused on your pet cause. There are thousands of causes competing for the same scarce resource. Don't expect yours to trump all the others.