"No Pressure": the cognitive science behind why 10:10 got their “framing” wrong

by Matt Wootton | Sunday October 3 2010

Let me start by stating my political position: I feel real sympathy for the 10:10 team, who must be feeling pretty bad right now and deserve a break. I’m not interested in bashing them, their instantly infamous video, or the well-established facts of human-induced climate change. Least of all that. boom

But the huge furore around their schoolchild-splattering extravaganza bears investigation, at least for the benefit of the green movement as a whole, and for the speciality subject that is green communications. No pressure, but we need to learn from it.

One of the central questions people of all political persuasions keep asking about the video is “why?”. Many people don’t understand it. Specifically, they don’t understand “why is it funny”? Worse than that, some people are convinced they know it’s definitely not funny.

Well, the narrative of the video - at least on the surface - is easy for everyone to understand. The repeated theme is that one figure with some position of authority advocates action on climate change. They ask the other characters which of them will help take action, and then say there is “no pressure” if they don’t. Most of the characters show their support, those who don’t are told that it’s ok to opt out. The authority figure then takes a small red button and presses it, blowing those who didn’t care to take action into small bloody pieces.

That’s easy to understand. Nobody disagrees with the sight of what’s happening in front of them. But where the real work is done - and this is why we have a problem - is not in the script or on the screen, but in people’s minds. This is the vital contribution of cognitive science. Because people’s minds are different, people will inevitably view the video in different ways. And these ways will fall along political lines. The political lines will not however be “left” and “right” as we have been taught historically to think of them. According to Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff, the political poles are more like “caring/nurturing” versus “authoritarian”.

As Lakoff explores in his books Moral Politics and The Political Mind, these concepts are at the centre of two coherent but opposing frameworks in people’s minds, and these frameworks are the filters through which we see politics and morality. Everybody can understand all the concepts, at least on paper. And everybody has both sets of concepts in their mind, that they might apply to different areas of their life. But fundamentally everybody has one of these two frameworks that is dominant, certainly when it comes to politics, and because the frameworks physically exist in the form of intimately-connected neural networks in our brains, they are hard to shake. We cannot simply “change our minds”; our minds and our thoughts are shaped by these filters and frameworks, to a vast and unconscious extent. The frameworks are shared between people, because they are based on the metaphors and stories that we tell each other in contemporary Western society.

It is no accident therefore that the most extreme criticisms of the video form a repeated pattern. The most shrill of these is that the video is “eco-fascism” or “eco-terrorism”. YouTube users are posting or commenting on the video with tags such as “The mindset of an eco-fascist”. The same idea has already made its way across language divides: one French user introduces the video as “Propogande Ecofasciste”. People are saying things like “that’s the power these greens want to have over us”. On the Daily Mail’s website, two people called Dave argue with eachother: “It wasn't the Left that put people in gas chambers... - Dave Nicol, Portsmouth, UK, 3/10/2010 2:37".

“It was actually. At least, that's how it rose to power. The Nazis were "The National Socialist German Workers Party..... Extremism takes many forms, and comes in many guises. Zealotry is a precursor to fascism. Advocating the murdering of children because they disagree with your unproven beliefs -- and treating it like a joke -- is evil, sick, inhuman, fascist, and cannot be defended by any sane person for any reason - dave, Dystopia, UK.”

It is being laid on thick, but the criticism is a cutting one, especially since almost everybody involved in advocating action on climate change would wish to distance ourselves from the Nazis and from the right-wing in general. We also want to distance ourselves from terrorists, who similarly seek to achieve political aims through violence (but without the guise of state authority). The reason that the criticism works is that the accusation of being on the right is not the problem here; the accusation is of being *authoritarian* and of using violence to enforce authoritarian ends and one’s own ideas. The evidence pointed to is the behaviour of the authorities in the video. By failing to *frame* their video to the contrary and allowing this conclusion to be drawn, the creators have played straight into the hands of those who would call them eco-fascists. And what is a fascist after all? A fascist is somebody who uses government or corporate power (as embodied by the teacher, the manager), to control and/or oppress people against their will by means of force and violence. To somebody already with authoritarian ideas in their head, there is nothing funny about this. They take it literally.

Are you confused as to why I’m saying the authoritarian-minded people are opposing authoritarianism? The reason is because it’s not their kind of authoritarianism. The moral authority of greens is - to them - a false authority.

The reason why the most “caring/nurturing” minded people don’t see the video as authoritarianism is because they don’t really think in terms of authoritarianism at all. It’s literally not on their mental map. Of course they wouldn’t really want to hurt anybody, even to save the world. It just doesn’t occur to them. It’s simply a joke.

This is how the two perspectives have managed to miss eachother entirely, and why so many people don’t “get” the joke. Many people who would like to get the joke, including myself, cannot enjoy the video because we are too worried and self-conscious about what other people would think.

In order to avoid people coming to a conclusion that those characters are fascists, a different frame, George Lakoff’s “caring/nurturing” frame was needed. But it’s not clear that this is there. As one Twitterer commented, it disastrously allows the climate deniers to look like oppressed underdogs fighting a smug hierarchy. This was surely not the intent. The writers just didn’t think it through. The framing is all wrong, or, more to the point, absent.

This cautionary advice goes for all art, as well as political messaging: the more you don’t steer people in the right direction in your storytelling, the more you will force them to project their own concepts and values on to your work, whether those concepts harmonise with your original vision of the work or not.

The fable that it’s telling *seems* to be, on my literal reading of the narrative and subtext, something like this: “If you don’t agree to take action on climate change, and if you even are not convinced of the need to, then your peers and those in authority will blow you up into little tiny bloody pieces. No pressure”. It seems like a threat.

We all know what the underlying narrative should have been. It should have been something like this: “If you don’t agree to take action on climate change, and if you even are not convinced of the need to, then by the progression of natural forces the world we will be living in in 30 years time will be bloody, unpleasant and sad. You need to help us create a better world. No pressure”.

This message might be boring, and might need retelling in new and creative ways, but it cannot fundamentally be diverged from. And the reason why is not about how best to “spin” the green message or to “reframe” it in some clever, tricky or manipulative way. The reason why is because that message is the truth. And the truth is not only the most powerful motivator, it is the most fertile and faithful ally we have.

Unfortunately, 10:10’s video - through a narrative that was insufficiently founded on a concretely framed truth - created something new, different, and not relevant to the core message of action on climate change. It’s possible to have something quirky, even comic-violent, as long as the underlying “moral of the story” is well-framed. I think the 10:10 team are to be congratulated for making a bold, imaginative attempt. But the stakes are immensely high, and we need to use everything we have - including new knowledge of framing and cognitive science - to get it right. First time. In everyone’s eyes. No pressure.

Post script: here are four violent ads that I DO think work: Greenpeace's ad about Nestle's buying of palm oil (destroying orang-utan habitats)

Plane Stupid's ad showing the impact of flights on polar bears

The UN's ad conceptualising landmines on an American soccer field

The US Environmental Defence Fund's ad conceptualising global warming as an oncoming train.

I'm indebted to the Australian mainstream media for these links

In simpler terms, from my angle

Submitted by Rupert Read on October 4, 2010 - 8:58am.

hi Matt. I like a lot of what you have argued here, and the way you end the piece is wonderful. For me, though, the fundamental issues with the 10/10 ad are perhaps even simpler:

The 10.10 vid is just kinda dumb: If it were about the bloody deaths that will come from unchecked climate chaos, that would be OK (As you say: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with violent ads). But it isn't! It distracts us from the real issue.

The real message of the 10.10 debacle, I think, is: If you want to get folk thinking about how we need a concerted campaign to stop climate change from destroying our lives and killing people, then you shouldn't have designed a 'lite' and voluntaristic campaign in the first place... We will not stop climate chaos without concerted political action and serious awareness of how manmade climate change is killing. 10.10 contributes to neither of these goals.

In other words: I think, Matt, that the underlying problem is not one ad rather than another. It's that 10.10 is a wrongly-conceived campaign in the first place.

It enters a 'liberal' space where there is no room for genuine caring about the future, in which we have to be prepared to take strong co-ordinated action.

10:10 Turkey

Submitted by hengistmcstone on October 4, 2010 - 9:21am.

Come on. Its a turkey . The case for cutting carbon emissions is broad, logical and reasonable, this video suggests that case is self righteous and tyrannical. For the first time I find myself actually agreeing with Anthony Watts. 4 minutes and not a jot of science. This video hardly appeals to the middle ground does it.

Your point about what the narrative should have been is interesting though because it exposes a fault line in the entire idea. The second half of your argument is very powerful : the world we will be living in 30 years time will be bloody, unpleasant and sad. In which case why is there a campaign of persuasion at all? It occurs to me that Government campaigns persuading us to do the right thing on climate change achieve nothing because such campaigns use a moral argument , which in the minds of many, replaces the moral imperative. Another fault line here is that the advertising industry simply cannot be trusted with the 'green message '. Their first love is consumerism. Would they have screwed up so bad if this was work for a favoured client that paid their wages?

On Authority

Submitted by Stu on October 4, 2010 - 2:15pm.

Hi. Thanks for this piece. I would disagree that it is only authoritarian types who do not see the funny side of this. In fact I'm quite wondering how you've gotten this so flipped around. It's exactly the caring/nurturing side of humanity which would have the greatest problems with this video. This film is hardly about climate change and more about the primacy of a belief structure over everything else. Of course, it's not to be intended to be taken literally, but nevertheless, that's the message. That's unavoidable. For me, that the lessons of the 20th Century- the poison of ideology and the immense and needless suffering and death that people endured throughout due to it, are completely absent in the consciousness of this film, is gross stupidity and recklessness on a grand scale. It's like the whole 20th C, the whole of history, never existed. That we're somehow starting over, enthusiastically about to make the same mistakes all over again. Ideas over people. Beliefs over people. You don't need to be an authoritarian to have a problem with that. In fact, this is a pure authoritarian vision. Notice that everyone in this ad is wearing some kind of uniform? There's so much wrong with this, on so many levels. So no, it doesn't make 'deniers' look like underdogs, it makes people look like dogs. It reduces them to binary bits, where 1's are good, and the 0's are zero, red entrails on a desk. Invisible. Religions have more tolerence for other religions than what's on display here. And that's saying something. I would just like to leave this discussion with this video- it's short, so please watch. It ties in very well with these issues. It's by a Dr Bronowski in the BBC series, Ascent of Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Umbn6ZBuE PS, I in no way associate the green movement, or green campaigners with this film. This film seems to speak to no-one, or it exists only as a warning to everyone. The green movement is not tarred by this film because it's not about the green movement. It's about something else entirely. But I might recommend watching those laughing at this, because I cannot understand for the life of me how anyone could. PSS, some people here might recognise or label me as a skeptic, or even 'a concern troll'. But I am not so much a skeptic (and even less a concern troll) as I am an anarchist (and I guess, thus my problem with the film here). I respect science, but I do not automatically assign any kind of special authority to any science. I believe in good science. I agree with the statement 'trust, but verify'. To the degree that this makes me a skeptic, well, then I am. I agree more than anything that human beings are fallible, which includes our science. We can never know anything with absolute certainty. We can only do our best. :) Cheers,

minor point

Submitted by hapamoku on October 4, 2010 - 5:55pm.

it doesn't look like you exploded at the end of the article. did you?

Excusez-moi

Submitted by Stu on October 4, 2010 - 6:33pm.

Was the comment below mine meant for me? If it was, i'll just offer something like... 'films don't kill people. People kill people'. This doesn't mean that the film isn't a problem. Americans kill Americans with guns all the time because of all the guns. You probably know the statistics on that already. This film is like a big gun, which someone carelessly left lying around the loungeroom for their 4 year old to pick up and inspect. It is an exceedingly careless move.

10:10

Submitted by Fran Barlow on October 5, 2010 - 4:36am.

I largely agree with what you say, but it seems to me that we ought not to tolerate the term ecofascist.

Fascism was a quite specific social movement, focused on national pride, theories of race and blood, and most importantly, composed of armed and violent (and typically uniformed) gangs of thugs whose aim was to target those they saw as deviant with violent coercion. Ultimately, fascism underpinned a genocidal push to wipe out those seen as subhuman (Untermenschen). Making a portmanteau word by combining it with "eco" strips the word of its context in race-based demagoguery and actual violence and murder to make a claim about the political logic of a rival cultural group -- in this case environmentalists. It also trivalises survivors of the holocaust.

One might add too that even if it were lexically permissible to move from the privileging of ecology over civilisation as do some in the "Deep Ecology" to assertions of misanthropy and to reduce "fascism" to being aggressively insistent and impatient with rights based arguments about individual liberty -- as do rightists -- the usage of the word to tar all environmentalists by association would seriously mark the term as politically loaded.

Clearly it is as much a slogan as a word, and should only be used with scare quotes by those not themselves campaigning against environmental policies.

As to the film 10:10 itself ... I think the 10:10 video fits the not a crime but a blunder tag.

We all know that the delusionals opposed to CO2 mitigation want the discussion to be about anything but the scientific case for robust policy action. That is why they attach the4 suffix "-gate" to everything they can associated with figures in the respectable scientific community, say Al Gore is fat repeatedly and talk about his carbon footprint or invite us all to "stop breathing" (oh the irony!).The "let's turn the biosphere into an industrial sewer" crowd and their backers in the upper levels of the filth-merchant community are utterly unscrupulous.

This is an own goal not because it is confronting but because it hands these well-resourced and well connected harpies a new "-gate" with which to drive the scientific arguments away from policy making and plays to their lie that we rather than they are incipiently misanthropic and coercive.

It would have been entirely possible for such a clip to have taken an entirely different approach -- perhaps using the set-up from that film Sliding Doors, tweaked to permit those who want to live in the CO2-constrained world live to walk through a door to a world that is a cornucopia of life, whereas those who take the "let the filth fall where it may" approach go to a world that looks like a post-Armageddon industrial wasteland. I recall that famous image from Cobb, in which the lonely man stands atop a pile of rubbish wondering where to plug in his TV.

One might have linked small positive actions to markers of biospheric recovery -- trees popping up and crops growing, while those subverting the biosphere cause them to disappear and the seas advance on inhabited land. Simplistic to be sure but at least it would have been about key concerns.

The point is that we who want early, robust, ubiquitous action to mitigate GHG emissions need to avoid playing to the delusionist/filth merchant shibboleths. We need people to understand what is at stake here and the significance for us of the legacy we will leave to those who will follow us. If the generations who follow are moved to curse us for our reckless indifference to their claims for a life no worse than ours, then our lives are already diminished and to that extent irrational.

That is the point here.

not a crime but a blunder tag.

Submitted by hengistmcstone on October 9, 2010 - 3:03pm.

I disagree with you, Fran. I don't see enough facts to draw the same conclusion. As an occasional direct activist I need to put distance between this film and myself. The connotations in the film are very dangerous. I wholly disown this film and the message it puts across. I think it's pretty shameful the 10:10 people haven't mustered the courage to make a similar statement . We've had a couple of 'sorrys' but nothing that amounts to a mea culpa. In the first 10:10 suggested this was a sense of humour failure on behalf of their audience, in the second, the writer bizarrely brought up her four week old child. We have heard nothing from this organization that accounts for how they managed to get it so very wrong. This film was a failure on several levels. It gifted the ecoterrorist/ecofascist trope to our adversaries, it was way off message, and it squandered precious goodwill and resources . It's more than just misguided creativity, there is clearly a management failure at 10:10. These people are supposed to be professionals within the environmental/climate movement, yet their work is worse than useless. Most of us give our time to this thing for free because we think it really matters, now we have to wonder can we really trust the people who apply their 'professional' expertise. Could the people at 10:10 justify the wages they get and explain why whatever it is they are doing deserves support. To me it's a crime rather than a blunder.

Common Cause

Submitted by Dark Optimism on October 5, 2010 - 1:30pm.

Hi Matt,

Good article. The video made me wish that the outstanding Common Cause report had come out a few months earlier!

It's from Tom Crompton (author of the Signposts & Weathercocks report you link to above - although the link is broken), and to my mind it brilliantly examines the battle of values underlying mass communications, and how we can most effectively get our message across with integrity.

I was so impressed with it that I did a blog post on it last week, and am now trying to make sure everyone hears about it! Given your interests, I highly recommend downloading a copy.

ps Not everyone was so impressed by Plane Stupid's effort either: http://is.gd/fM2iA

My, what great comments, thank you all

Submitted by Matt Wootton on October 5, 2010 - 10:59pm.

Thanks Shaun for the link about the Plane Stupid video; great discussion. And yes, Tom Crompton's report is exactly what we're talking about.

Fran, thank you, you make a strikingly simple point about ecofascism: it's not a real word! Maybe the book that Rupert and I will writing will help make it clear just how far away ecology and fascism are (hint: as far as possible, you'll be pleased to know: and NOT on the traditional left-right scale..).

You're right that the video could have been like Sliding Doors, or, I thought, that people were really being killed because of the fate their attitudes would produce, being projected into the future.

Thanks Stu, your post made me question for a while whether I maybe had got the wrong end of the stick. And my only partial explanation of Lakoff might have contributed to misunderstanding. It's hard to summarise the guy's work in a few paragraphs; I'm trying to practice! But the more I think about it, it is not necessarily an authoritarian mindset but a rules-based, judgement-based, authority-based frame that is being activated, and here's why I say that: almost everybody is being incredibly judgemental about this advert. The Right are judgemental about it because it serves them to be so, because it's another "-gate" as Fran quite astutely says and because they (because of their authoritarian mindsets) read alot into it and see us as actually violent and would-be-murderous. Many of us greenies are also falling over ourselves to judge and condemn it, mainly because we're afraid of what the right and the right-influenced mainstream will say. When I first watched it, it literally left a bitter taste in my mouth. Literally. I felt my lip curl. This is the physiological response of "disgust". Lakoff details how the physical sensation of disgust and the intellectual judgement of MORAL disgust are actually physically connected in the human brain. One triggers the other, and so when we think people have done something wrong, or we disapprove of something, we may actually feel disgust.

But what happened on the screen is comic violence. It's actually ridiculous. It's the stuff of Comic Relief or Benny Hill. Children see worse things from behind their sofa watching Doctor Who. It's pretend, mock violence. But it's an incredibly serious subject, and that's why, I submit, we're all getting het up about it. Because we know that death really is involved (and some people have suggested that that is why they think it's a good video). I've read comments from a few people who were perfectly relaxed about it, including a German woman who felt that it was simply dark British humour, and that we are all having a humour failure about it. We are. But not because the video is the most disgusting visual spectacle of carnage we've ever seen. Come on. It's because we're (quite understandably) judging and critiquing the video's performance as a campaign for the mainstream. I'm not particularly defending the video, because I wouldn't have done it that way, but we're all framing our discussion with it judgementally, critically, is it "right" or "good", or is it "wrong" or "bad". One of the things Rupert and I are teasing out of Lakoff's work is that "good and evil" are essentially judgemental concepts that fit in with the authoritarian mindset, but that become anathema the more you think about people's needs and how to nurture them. Like, indeed, Bronowski says as he kneals in the human ash liquor at Birkenau (that's Stu for the link to a memorable, moving video): the more you think you're absolutely right, the less connected you are to the human. But this is advanced Lakoff. Wait til the book comes out!

I've worked in the arts sector, and I've seen plenty of art works that made me more annoyed, more disgusted or more confused than that video. But that's my reaction, to judge it as something a bit off-the-wall, a bit risky, a bit far out. Yes, the more you get me to focus on it as a climate change awareness campaign the more I will be obliged to judge it on those terms, and as being problematic. But to almost everybody else, it's just some whacky random video on YouTube, another cultural artefact, that people will take or leave as they please. Most won't get so excited about it.

Hi Matt

Submitted by Stu on October 6, 2010 - 12:37am.

Hi Matt. It's nice to be able to discuss this with you- a different experience for sure from some of the other blogs which only seem interested in 'condemning' or 'defending' the film, and condemning and defending those who are condemning and defending! :) I will think a bit about what you're saying on this, and maybe get back to you with a more detailed reply (maybe not though as I'm almost through with looking at this video for now). BTW, like you, I'm also in the Arts- am just about to finish a computer graphics degree (have also done fine arts in the past)- one thing; it's funny how this 10:10 film actually relates to an assignment I had last year- which was to design an ad for a charity of our choice. Our group chose Friends of the Earth, and it was interesting the kinds of discussions which came up on just what we should focus on and how to communicate, what tone to set... You must know designers, they naturally have quite good imaginations and like to riff off a theme and build things up to extremes. After much fuss and disagreement, we finally decided to go with this idea of portraying the natural environment as being taken over by technology, and we focused that imagery onto a the image of a wombat, which starts off in a very natural forest setting and by the end of the ad, has all its skin and fur stripped away revealing a 'robo-wombat' underneath built out of different collaged parts that I sourced from Google images. The background environment also changes through a series of shots, finally settling on a desert like world. It was again a pretty grizzly kind of idea but we were of course going for the emotions. So... yeah I can understand this from the design angle. No worries there. I sent this film (10:10) to a few close family members btw. They all thought it was nuts. The response I felt was predictable and this is what I was trying to express over at the Deltoid site. I'm not sure if that site is always like that BTW, but people were very keen to jump on me for expressing my concerns with the film. I acknowledge it was perhaps a very 'sensitive' moment, and emotions were running high across the board. Anyway, I was unimpressed. But that is unimportant. Here's what my mum had to say (and to get of an idea of my mum, she only listens to the Australian ABC and reads the Age, which are very pro AGW sources. Her opinion on AGW is that 'the experts should know what they're talking about'). "Re the video about climate change. Good on Stu for saying exactly what he thought about the stupid thing. It is still available in Aus from various sites but I wouldn't bother chasing it as it's really revolting. I am not in favour of censorship as it is only by a free media one can hope to understand what weirdos are out there." I would consider this to be a fairly mainstream reaction.

Further thoughts - the limits of liberalism

Submitted by Rupert Read on October 8, 2010 - 1:03pm.

Fascinating discussion - great comments.

Here's my latest thought on this: This film was made by clever people who have previously done great stuff. But I wonder if they have in this case been caught up in the dangerous logic of the 10.10 concept to begin with - with its fantasy that individual action can solve the problem of anthropogenic climate change.

In the film, what I think we see is an unconscious recognition on the part of 10.10 liberals that liberalism will not be enough to save us from dangerous climate change. So they lurch wildly over to a fantasy of violent compulsion instead. They leave out the middle ground, where they ought to be: where the Green Party is, for example. The middle ground of massive reform, led by the state and by global governance, enabling other actors (such as the Transition Movement etc) to do what is necessary.

Without collective action, we are finished. This film shows the impotence of individual action, except when accompanied by wish-fulfillment (the hope that one is 'not pressuring' others into doing the same; the knowledge that, without some kind of pressure, nothing significant will be achieved).

Thoughts of conspiracy

Submitted by richardbelldc on October 11, 2010 - 1:20am.

I don't find the Lakoff categories to be at all helpful. I am much more interested in seeing that the principals of 10:10 UK make a full public accounting of how they made such a bad choice. Anyone who has ever worked with persuasion communications, whether for sales or consciousness changing, knows that before one launches a video like this one, one should show the ad to a statistically meaningful sample of people to assess their reactions. I find it difficult to believe that this ad was reviewed by more than a handful of insiders before its release. If we are going to learn anything useful from this disaster, the UK 10:10 group should agree to a completely transparent investigation of how they came to make and release this ad. The principals of 10:10 should explain on the record the entire dismal history of this ad, producing all of the emails, minutes of meetings, etc. that led up to the release of the ad. Such a report would allow the rest of us whose cause has been so badly wounded by the ad to analyze what happened, and discuss how every organization can take steps to protect itself from ever making such a terrible mistake.

Green Words Workshop