6.3 The Elephant-Rider-Path model

In their 2010 book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, brothers Chip and Dan Heath identify three key variables that are necessary to get people to change their behavior: emotion, rationality, and circumstance. The visual image they use to represent this is a human riding an elephant along a path: the elephant represents our emotional drive, the rider represents our intellect, and the circumstance is represented by the path. These three factors do not always work in harmony with each other: in fact, the head (rider) and the heart (elephant) are often in direct conflict. And even when they are working together, stumbling blocks in the path might make progress difficult. But if they are all working in harmony, great progress can be made. If you think about it, it’s astonishing that elephants let a puny human guide them, and I’m sure that the two creatures don’t always get along, but this relationship has been working for thousands of years.

The rider is your rational side, the part that thinks things through, wants arguments to make sense, and formulates long-term plans. The strength of this rational side is that it can be persuaded by logic and facts (see Chapter 7 for more discussion of logic), and carries with it all the positive connotations that come with the word “rational.” The weakness of this side, however, is that it can get caught up in overanalyzing, overthinking, and decision paralysis. You can spend forever spinning your wheels, because as soon as you think of one course of action, you think of an opposing view that makes you question what the smartest choice is.

Another big problem is obvious: if rider and elephant disagree, the elephant is much more powerful. Many people’s carefully considered plans and resolutions have been derailed by emotional desires and drives. Yes, you know you ought to eat raw vegetables for your snack, but you feel like having ice cream instead, and guess who wins?

In the speed limit example that began this chapter, the four arguments (save you money, help the economy, reduce emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil) all fit solidly within the rider component of the model: they make logical sense, and reflect long-term thinking. Although you could conceivably have emotional reactions to these arguments, they are primarily intellectual.

The elephant in this model is what actually moves you down the path: your motivation and drive. Brain researchers have noted that human beings are not thinking creatures who feel, but rather feeling creatures who think (see the opening quote in Chapter 8): the emotional parts of our brain are much older than the cognitive parts. Even rational processes often end with making a decision based on “what feels right,” and gut-level instincts should not be ignored.

The strength of the elephant side of us is that it stirs us to action and motivates us to keep going. The weakness is that it can cave in to unhelpful desires, is often focused on short-term gratification instead of long-term planning, and can be inconsistent and driven by whims (e.g., you’re just “not in the mood.”) (See Chapter 8 for more about emotions and how they work).

One elephant factor the Heath brothers discuss is the ineffectiveness of the message “You’re doing everything wrong”; nobody likes hearing that, and it easily creates discouragement and resignation (an elephant that is smacked hard may just stop dead in its tracks). Instead of scolding people and telling them they need to completely change everything, the Heath brothers promote the value of a “do more of that” approach: identify things that people are doing right, and encourage them to take those steps further.

The elephant component reveals what’s wrong with the speed limit argument: it goes against common emotions. Driving fast is more exciting than driving slowly, drivers are often in a state of anxiety because they’re worried they’ll be late for something, and if other drivers honk at them for driving too slowly, they feel embarrassment or anger. It would be difficult to come up with motivations strong enough to overcome those feelings, so in this case the elephant side of things works against the idea, not for it, which is why I’m afraid my bright idea is dead in the water.

The path in this model refers to “changes to the environment that make the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.” It’s about little things like not keeping snacks right next to your computer, so you don’t mindlessly keep eating. When the COVID vaccines became available in 2021, some people didn’t get vaccinated not because they didn’t believe in it (rider) or were afraid of it (elephant), but because they didn’t have transportation or the time to go to a vaccination site. And in another example, many nonprofits have discovered that if they put a “DONATE NOW” link on their home page, they get more donations than if a visitor has to click six times to get to the donation page.

Put together, the elephant-rider-path model says that you can successfully persuade people to change when:

1. You provide reasons for the change that make logical sense to them (Chapter. 7);
2. You motivate them by appealing to the right emotions (Chapter 8); and
3. You clear obstacles from the path, making the change easy, and give them a little nudge.

Nudging

The path component in this model overlaps with the main principle of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness: that the way a choice is presented affects the way people respond to it. Thaler and Sunstein’s view is that people resist forced efforts to promote dramatic change, but are open to small nudges that subtly encourage certain behaviors without restricting their freedom. This builds on other established principles from social psychology, such as Brehm’s concept of “reactance”: the idea that blatant persuasion attempts threaten people’s feeling of freedom, so people resist in order to preserve their feeling of being able to make their own choices. It also confirms Sherif’s model of Social Judgement Theory, which looks at persuasion as a process in which a persuader tries to move a listener’s “anchor” beliefs by means of a persuasive message. How successful the persuader will be, the model says, depends on how far apart the persuasive message is from the anchor belief — a gap Sherif calls the “message discrepancy”. The wider the message discrepancy, the less likely that any attitude change occurs — you’ll never talk your diehard liberal friend into registering as a Republican, so it’s futile to try. This is another way of saying that successful persuasion occurs in small increments; it’s about inches, not miles. All of these models reinforce the idea that gentle nudges work better than heavy-handed coercion.