Yes Means Yes

Stop the War! End Racism! Solid sentiments and memorable slogans. But there’s a big problem with ideas and messages like this.

Let me explain it this way. If you’ve ever been a parent or the babysitter for a toddler, you know there are many days the kid won’t stop talking. They’ve just discovered the gift of speech and they’re getting their money’s worth. So how do you get them to take a break so you can get a moment of peace?

You could straight up tell them or ask them to stop talking. And it might work. But as parents can attest, it won’t work for long. Within a minute, the kid is back to using all their words all the time. That’s when most parents employ the “quiet game.” You challenge the kid to see if they can be silent for five minutes. And as kids love games, it works a lot of the time — certainly more often than telling or asking them to stop talking.

Here’s why: Human beings, even young human beings, are better at action than inaction. In psychologist-speak, framing goals in terms of positive action leads to greater motivation and persistence. We respond better and for longer when we’re asked to do things than when we’re asked to stop.

This is an important lesson for all sorts of organizations. One is genocide memorials — you know, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. They’re designed on a central idea: If we show and tell people how horrible these atrocities are, it’s less likely these atrocities will happen again. In fact, if we make the memorial or museum compelling enough, people will join the movement to stop future genocides. And that makes lots of sense.

Except it doesn’t work. These memorials and museums get millions of visitors each year and many of the institutions are amazing, with great storytelling and the latest technologies. And yet, very few visitors emerge ready to join the movement.

This is what my colleagues and I discovered when we did some work with the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Walking through that place, built atop a mass grave for 250,000 victims, is an indescribably moving experience. But it’s not the right experience. And that’s because the central message — there and at all other institutions like it — is “Stop genocide.” That’s the equivalent of telling your toddler to stop talking.

We discovered that a better approach was to give visitors to the museum something new to do instead. We incorporated stories about Rwandan heroes, people who risked their lives to save their neighbors. We gave visitors a glimpse of positive action, which you’ll recall leads to greater motivation and persistence. Now people had someone to emulate and something to do. This is the equivalent of the quiet game.

If you’re a climate change activist, you really need to learn this lesson. You’re bombarding us with messages about what we’re supposed to stop doing — driving gas guzzlers, using plastic straws, eating meat, etc. But where’s the image of the beautiful, sustainable world we’ll be building when we do?