Examples set by leaders are often the most effective way to promote supportive social environments, argues author Robert Frank OpenFuture
“It’s the situation, not the person,” goes a mantra of social psychology. That is the idea that people are influenced as much by their surroundings as by their deliberative judgements and free will. If lots of people around us overeat and snacks are close by, we may too; if we’re in a circle that exercises, we might do likewise. Attitudes are as communicable as viruses: the environment we are in, the culture around us, matters.
When I started smoking at age fourteen in 1959, many of my friends had already been smoking for several years. My parents didn’t want me to smoke, but as smokers themselves, their objections rang hollow. In those days, more than 60 percent of American men were smokers, and almost as many women. Smoking was just something that most people did.
Given the long-standing American hostility to social engineering, each of these steps faced heavy pushback. When called on to justify them, regulators offered their time-honored response: restricting individual freedom is often the only way to prevent undue harm to innocent bystanders. By a wide margin, the example of harm to others they have most often cited has been that secondhand smoke causes injuries that bystanders cannot easily avoid.
The narrow focus on secondhand smoke and fiscal effects greatly understates the harm that smokers impose on others. By far the greatest injury caused by someone’s decision to become a smoker is the harm caused by making others more likely to smoke. I applaud the sentiment that motivates this objection. People faced with the decision of whether to smoke do indeed have greater agency than those who are damaged by secondhand smoke. And all else equal, the regulators’ burden of proof clearly should be heavier in the first case than in the second.
Yet since each individual’s influence is so small, we tend to ignore this second pathway. Because the social environment influences us so strongly—sometimes for good, but often for ill—we have compelling reasons to shape it to our advantage. People who want to play the liberty card in this debate need to show why the particular liberty they favor should trump the competing freedoms that would have to be sacrificed to defend it.
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