Status and Respect

[This post was inspired by requests – please do leave any other suggested topics in the comments!]

Some very good friends of mine have been through quite a tough time with one of their teenage children. I had previously known him to be a lovely and rather quiet pre-teen; thoughtful and interested in ideas, and so I was a little surprised to hear he’d been very difficult at school; somewhat aggressive with peers, not listening to any instructions, disruptive in class and really in quite a lot of bother. The parents were worried that they had been too liberal with him, and in the previous academic year had tried a more firm, directive approach – but to no avail. If anything it caused more conflict, and things had gotten even worse. They had taken a different approach since August, and I was delighted to hear that he’d turned a corner – he’d become engaged, was succeeding even in subjects he’d never previously liked, and was wanting to spend time in school in several activities.

This is not an uncommon story – many kids go through difficult times and emerge. But there are other, less happy stories where things do not go so well; where conflict turns into genuine disaffection, rebellion and in some thankfully rare cases, students do not ever live up to their potential. In the very worst cases students even refuse to attend school, or we occasionally even need to ask them to leave.

The difference in these trajectories is so stark that as parents and educators, we all need to think hard about the ways we can push towards the happier outcomes. The question is: How can we hold conversations with our kids so that they stop doing some things, and start doing others? In the happy story above, the parents adopted an intentionally different approach that worked for their child; the question is, what generalises? Is there a general type of approach that is worth knowing about, or does it all come down to specific context and individual character?

In his latest book (10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People) Professor David Yaeger explores exactly this question. Yeager’s interest is how to use psychological processes to improve developmental and educational trajectories, and in this (strongly recommended) book he brings together a huge range of experimental evidence, social observation and most interestingly, lots of examples of how not to do it; so much so that I winced a number of times reading it, reminded as I was of the mistakes I made as I tried to figure things out. This book provides a good shortcut; I wish I had had it all years ago.

It turns out that many of the common sense ideas of how to approach things are so well embedded that we take them for granted; indeed they are built into our ways of thinking. But they just do not work. 

We tend to think that the direct approach is necessary. The US Just Say No campaign is a great example – it urged young people to, well, just say no to cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol. Of course, we do want them to say no; so it seems sensible to ask them to do that. However, studies have shown that this campaign failed to reduce substance abuse among teenagers and actually increased the allure of smoking and other drugs! Subsequently, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program was introduced whereby uniformed police officers visited classrooms to tell students about a zero-tolerance policy toward all illicit substances. DARE provided lectures, stickers, and various giveaways like neon pens, bumper stickers, and t-shirts. Again, this seems like a great idea – let students know the rules, have officers stress the seriousness of the issues, and use the freebies to entice – and 75% of US school districts implemented it. But it simply didn’t work. Studies revealed that DARE was ineffective and even made students more likely to use drugs. In 2007, the Association for Psychological Science listed DARE among youth programs with potential harm; despite this warning, its usage tragically persists.

The same story applies to the ‘Think. Don’t smoke’ and ‘Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen’ campaigns – (which were, interestingly, run by tobacco companies, as mandated by US legislation). Everyone expected that the more teens saw these ads, the less likely they would be to smoke, but when a rigorous independent study evaluated the tobacco companies’ campaigns, they found that the young people who saw these campaigns actually became more likely to think that smoking was cool, to think more favorably of the tobacco companies, to trust the companies more to look after their health and, critically, also made teens more likely to try smoking. Talk about an own-goal!

The refusal to follow explicit instructions also extends to medicine, where you would think the consequences of poor choices would be so immediate as to make an immediate difference. But no! Yaeger notes that 35 to 45 percent of all adolescents and young adults who receive transplants – kidneys, livers, hearts, stem cells – don’t take their pills as prescribed. It is not for lack of instruction – hospitals are very, very clear about exactly what drugs to take when; but young people simply don’t follow the instructions, despite the dire consequences. One doctor writes: We appear to be no closer to solving the problem of non-adherence than we were forty years ago. … It remains a critical and often unsurmountable detriment to transplant survival. 

I have rather laboured this point because I am often asked to just take “the common-sense approach”. But the issue is that when it comes to changing the behavior of young people, common-sense solutions are not delivering results. One conclusion – popularly recently – is that teenagers brains are not yet wired well enough to make good decisions; and in particular they cannot make long-term plans. Yaeger describes this as the neural-incompetence argument – the idea that teenagers are too filled with hormones that make them impulsive and ready to jump on any short-term pleasure or avoid any short-term pain regardless of the long-term consequences. But he claims this idea is simply wrong, and can’t be the whole story – because while it is true that some teenagers made bad decisions from time to time, many or most also make good decisions – suggesting that there must be more to it than simply capacity. As I think about the students I know, and my own children, this has the ring of truth to it. Bad mistakes remain exceptions, not the norm. Daily life is usually full of good decisions, and we should never forget it. I can think of one young man who very much struggles in school generally, but who is fully capable of organising a complex year long athletic training schedule – involving diet, strength work, aerobic work – because he wants to get on the basketball team. And I know plenty of others who have long-term plans. So it’s not that a young frontal cortex cannot work – just that sometimes it does not. So the quesiot is why? With this in mind, Yeager argues that we need to move away from the incompetence model, and instead ask what profoundly influences children from 10 years onwards, and continues shaping their motivation into adulthood?

Yaeger’s answer is that young people’s behaviour is heavily shaped by evolutionary pressures; if you were a young person wandering the savannah, the single greatest threat to your daily survival and potential to ever have children was to be disrespected and excluded from the group. And so it’s natural and even healthy that during puberty, the brain becomes highly sensitive to social status and respect – and that these two factors are therefore central in our approach to the world, and hence should be central in adults’ approach to young people. In particular, if we motivate young people by conveying social status and respect we’ll find that they are not inherently incompetent but actually highly capable.

We can revisit all the examples at the start of this post in light of this status and respect hypothesis, and see how things might look from that lens, and how an acute awareness of status might allow for unintentioned interpretations of honor or disrespect. 

The Just Say No and zero-tolerance DARE campaigns simply instruct; and within the ‘do as you are told’ message there is an immediate implication of low status and of lack of respect which may work for children under 10, but no older. Similarly, the ‘Think. Don’t smoke’ and ‘Tobacco is whacko’ anti-smoking campaigns paint young people as needing to be told what to think and do by wiser and smarter adults. The unintended message is that young people aren’t currently thinking and it’s their job to listen and obey. In the transplant case, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists held three separate conversations with young patients and their parents, describing the consequences of not taking the immunosuppressant pills and made the young person repeat everything back to them, like a comprehension quiz. This paints the young person a flawed and deficient thinker who can’t comprehend the future consequences of their actions.

Note here that the claim is not that the adult does not know better (often we do); but that the message is conveyed in what is perceived as insulting, and so alienates the recipient. So the focus here is to find ways to talk with young people that best allows them to hear the well-intended message, and not block it out as demeaning. If this is right, there is a deep irony here that we adults sometimes portray teenagers as irrational, when we also seem to be adopting strategies that are wholly misaligned with our longer-term intentions!

So what does work? The cigarette example is instructive here. When studies have looked at the reason that teenagers smoke, it’s not because they’re not aware of the cancer risks. So firstly, we shouldn’t assume an information deficit and simply resort to a lot of facts. Not only is it unnecessary but it’s perceived as patronising. We also need to recognise and respect the agency and intelligence of young people – not just out of some idealistic hope, but because it works. The sophisticated anti-smoking Truth campaign did just that, respecting teenagers’ intelligence by flipping the narrative and as the New York Times reported, shifting a perception of cigarettes as a symbol of rebellion to one of the tobacco industry as the real enemy to rebel against. The ads re-framed tobacco as an addictive drug promoted by an adult establishment, and tobacco control as a hip, rebellious, youth-led movement. By positioning not smoking the act of rebellion and independence, the campaign drew a wide appeal that framed leaders as high status agents of social change. And studies suggest that 450,000 teenagers decide not to smoke as a result.

(It’s also very interesting that the tobacco companies were prepared to fund anti-smoking campaigns only if the campaigns had a traditional focus on telling kids not to smoke. My sense is that the tobacco companies were more sophisticated than the legislators and realised they could convert the legislation into effective marketing).

This has been a long post, because I wanted to give examples of how common approaches do not give the results we are looking for before looking at what this might mean for parents and teachers. Now that we see the evidence that kids ignore adults when we breach their need for status and respect, we can be more sensitive to the way we communicate with them. Yaeger offers many practical tips, and I’ll share just two hugely influential and very simple ones that anyone can implement immediately.

Firstly, when you’re giving feedback, combine it with an explicit statement explaining your belief in the recipient’s ability to meet high standards with proper support. This approach resonates with young people who resist impossible expectations and condescension. The impact is significant; one study showed it more than doubled student improvements following critical feedback. Here’s an example from a classroom context, and it’s not hard to generalise further:

Secondly, when you are giving instruction, ensure you indicate respect, confer status and validate the young person’s agency. Yaeger gives this example – it’s from an experiment where a medical student is asking teenagers to eat some foul-tasting medicine. Two groups were asked using two scripts that conveyed the same information but differed in the amount of respect they conveyed. When asked respectfully, 40% more teenagers followed instruction than when asked disrespectfully. That’s a huge return on some slightly different words, with the two conversations shown in the two columns below, with the principles added on the left.

The principles here should not be surprising. Ask don’t tell. Honor their status, don’t invoke yours. Validate and explain, don’t diminish. Presume agency. There is so much wisdom in these ideas. I would hope these are the staples of our adult-adult conversations and it should not be hard to transfer them to younger people.

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