#27: Three Things that got me thinking
Nora Ephron + green motivations + Lena Dunham
I’m thinking of y’all. Things have been hard lately (how long is lately?). However you’re feeling, I hope you have time and space and acceptance to feel it all.
Here’s what got me thinking about intrinsic motivation this week:
1. Thinking for ourselves
Here’s what Nora Ephron wrote1 twenty years after graduating from Wellesley, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts:
“How marvellous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument. […] What do you think? What is your opinion? No one ever asked. We all graduated from Wellesley able to describe everything we had studied—Baroque painting, Hindemith, Jacksonian democracy, Yeats—yet we were never asked what we thought of any of it. Do you like it? Do you think it is good? Do you know that even if it is good you do no have to like it?”
I feel this so much. My school system took pride in instilling in us what it called esprit critique—yet a sure way to get a top mark was to learn the standard interpretation / analysis of, say, a Baudelaire poem, and to spit it right back up.
2. Fictional motivation
I once read a quote2 about humanitarian action saying approximately: “it doesn’t matter if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” (Mmmm. Does it matter if the reason why tobacco companies gave out a lot of money to fight AIDS in the 1990s was to create a smokescreen that protected their business prospects? Yes, it freaking does.)
Does it matter if you only recycle waste to please or placate your flatmates? I guess it does if the goal is building long-term habits and feeling reasonably good when you take out the trash.
Now, behavioural scientists at the London School of Economics and Political Science say that the environmental motivations of fictional characters matter if we want them to influence readers’ attitudes and intentions.
In a study published last week, the researchers split 900 volunteers into 4 groups and asked them to read “day-in-the-life” stories featuring the following characters:
an ‘intentional’ environmentalist, who is intrinsically motivated to protect the environment;
a ‘status-seeking’ environmentalist, who adopts certain behaviours to gain social approval;
an ‘accidental’ environmentalist, e.g. someone who decides to eat less meat for health reasons rather than to protect the environment;
a ‘control’ character in a story without climate action.
The authors found that only the first kind of protagonists “induced stronger support for climate policy and climate action intentions3 among readers.” (But these seem to be modest effects, and the study participants didn’t increase the amount they said they’d donate to environmental charities compared with the control group.)
They say that stories can help “begin the process of behaviour change”, and advocacy campaigns could use “storytelling to not only narrate climate actions, but also convey the mental states and values that drive it”. I’m curious to see what that’d look like in practice.
3. Lena Dunham is back
I enjoyed this Hollywood Reporter profile of Lena Dunham, creator of the hit HBO series Girls. (Her movie Sharp Stick premiered at the Sundance film festival last weekend.) She explains how limiting outside influences (both of her own accord, and because of the pandemic) has helped her to get her creative mojo back.
“I just realized that the experience of Girls and my 20s was such an all-encompassing hurricane of both validation and derision that in order for me to keep that place of myself that loved to make art, that was what needed to happen,” she says of her self-imposed exile.
After spending time in rehab, Dunham also parted ways with her former producing partner Jenni Konner:
“Asked whether the timing was more than coincidental, Dunham responds, ‘I think my [addiction] recovery played a part in the break with Jenni insofar as it showed me that I needed to pause and clear the slate. I needed to almost start again and just hear my own voice.’ […] The disappointing experience on [2018 HBO comedy series] Camping, she continues, ‘was a reminder to me that to make things that really were truthful to me, I needed to go back to a kind of quieter place.’”
My life experiences and creations are nowhere near as intense as Dunham’s, but I can relate to that need for quiet and solitude, for rupture even, in order to get back to yourself and what moves you.
If this rings a bell and you know where that quote comes from, let me know.
These were assessed by questionnaire items measuring the participants’ support for environmental policies (like a carbon tax or a ban on short-distance domestic flights), their intention to take collective action (like signing petitions), or individual action to protect the planet. They also asked the volunteers how much of their income from the experiment (GBP1) they would be willing to donate to an environmental charity.