Counter the Experience Bias…With New Experiences
(Source: Flickr/Phil Roeder.)
When I first moved to Manhattan for college, I remember staring at the subway map in a panic. With its zig-zagging collection of lines, colors, and letters, I was terrified. I couldn’t see myself riding it and briefly resolved that I never would.
Looking back, it’s obvious that this was a silly, even amusing attitude, but it was natural. Up until then, the automobile was the only framework I knew for getting around. Although I had ridden a bus to attend community college for a year and walked to my first two jobs after high school, public transit and walking still felt to me like special exceptions to the rule, not like entirely new paradigms for mobility.
Of course, my avoidance of the subway was short lived. It’s simply impractical to live in New York City without using it. One ride at a time, I learned the ropes and as I grew in knowledge, I grew in confidence. As the saying goes, I could eventually ride the subway in my sleep…literally. I don’t recommend this, but I had my fair share of accidental late night dozes, during which I refined the strange city skill of dozing off a little, but not enough to miss your stop.
My present-day fascination with transit is undoubtedly rooted in my almost 10 years of car-free living in New York City. Every single bike trip to Brighton Beach, ride on the Q line across the river to Manhattan, and walk through Prospect Park on quiet snowy evenings shifted me from seeing non-car transit as an exotic option for extreme situations to seeing it as its own paradigm for getting around, with perhaps even more benefits than the car-oriented paradigm I grew up in.
Now that I live in a non-urban city that’s only navigable by car, my preference for the car-free way of life has become even stronger. I try not to get on my soap box too often, but whenever the opportunity comes up, I’m happy to talk about it with anyone who will listen. In the course of those conversations, it’s easy for me to feel frustrated by people who don’t feel bothered by the domination of the car over the city. They seem curious, sometimes amused, but mostly resigned to the status quo.
Initially, I felt frustrated. But then I remember that this used to be my attitude, too, not because I had had any serious intellectual experiences that cemented in me a belief in the supremacy of the car, but simply because it was all I had ever known. This is true for most people living in North America and it explains why part of changing people’s mind about cars is so challenging: it’s hard to get people excited about something they’ve never experienced.
I call this the “experience factor” or the “exposure bias.” It’s a simple concept: our openness (or lack thereof) to certain ideas will be heavily shaped by what we’ve been exposed to through our real life experiences. When it comes to advocating for non-conventional ideas like closing highways, adding bike lanes, or redeveloping parking lots into housing… It can help to take into account the exposure bias when trying to convince people who seem resistant. They might have never experienced anything like it before and that lack of exposure makes it hard to imagine things being any other kind of way.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep advocating using stories, data, and basic reasoning, but it might imply a need for new tactics, especially when it comes to on-the-ground public engagement. Appealing to reason and presenting the facts is valuable, but what if we also found ways to convince people simply by giving them new experiences?
For instance, look at what’s happening with the Bike Bus movement. By making it possible for children to bike to school safely, countless parents, volunteers, and teachers around the world are advancing the idea that bikes are a valid way to get around town. Temporarily closed pedestrian zones function similarly by giving people an opportunity to experience a section of their downtown or neighborhood without having to worry about motored traffic. Critical mass rides are another “experience” that introduces people to biking around their city without asking them to immediately endorse massive changes.
In Paris, the development of school streets wins over residents who have to surrender parking by taking an incremental approach: setting up the plaza with temporary gates and letting people see how it transforms the experience for children and their parents.
None of these are new or particularly novel ideas, but they are valuable because they solve for the experience factor. By giving people a chance to experience car-free mobility, walkability and human-centric public space, we’re allowing them to build up a reservoir of memories and experiences that might make it easier for them to envision the car-free, people-centric world we advocate for.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.