Not sure if this is helpful, but I feel like something like this happens within me when I try to change the current thing I’m doing (get ready for work, go to bed, what have you). My elephant really doesn’t like changing gears, and it can be quite difficult to follow through.
The elephant’s response is mostly a strong wave of negative emotions. The emotions are similar to ones where you might be told about a new pile of work you have to do, not the ones you might have when encountering something repulsive. Something like “ughhhhh”, not “ewwww”. Parsing out the words is something I have to do intentionally and often skip over, plus, the words I ascribe to the emotion might be a post-facto fiction that doesn’t really map to what the elephant meant.
Your example of the students who don’t listen to you on commenting before coding sounds quite similar to what my elephant says. It feels (again, there’s a chance I’m just making this up) like disbelief. The students hear you saying “try tactic X to make things simpler”, and it’s a tactic I’ve tried on myself many times, but the elephant doesn’t believe me.
I have heard the elephant described similarly to a baby—inscrutable and seemingly on their own schedule, hard to figure out. Most critically, babies and Haidt’s elephant don’t communicate in words and logic and don’t listen to your thoughts. I think they listen to experiences—evidence, in the Bayesian sense. If I want to convince my elephant of something, I need to try it and show the elephant (how to get the elephant to try something before it has the evidence for it is an exercise left for the reader).
There are limits here—for me, my ADHD means that my elephant will always be pretty stuck in his ways, and he’ll forget evidence in my favor quite quickly. For others, for the crowd of programming students or the kid who hates hearing it’s dinner time, your leverage is sadly limited. If a person doesn’t want to cooperate with you, there’s not a whole lot you can do (but I do think Algon has some great ideas).
Not sure if this is helpful, but I feel like something like this happens within me when I try to change the current thing I’m doing (get ready for work, go to bed, what have you). My elephant really doesn’t like changing gears, and it can be quite difficult to follow through.
The elephant’s response is mostly a strong wave of negative emotions. The emotions are similar to ones where you might be told about a new pile of work you have to do, not the ones you might have when encountering something repulsive. Something like “ughhhhh”, not “ewwww”. Parsing out the words is something I have to do intentionally and often skip over, plus, the words I ascribe to the emotion might be a post-facto fiction that doesn’t really map to what the elephant meant.
Your example of the students who don’t listen to you on commenting before coding sounds quite similar to what my elephant says. It feels (again, there’s a chance I’m just making this up) like disbelief. The students hear you saying “try tactic X to make things simpler”, and it’s a tactic I’ve tried on myself many times, but the elephant doesn’t believe me.
I have heard the elephant described similarly to a baby—inscrutable and seemingly on their own schedule, hard to figure out. Most critically, babies and Haidt’s elephant don’t communicate in words and logic and don’t listen to your thoughts. I think they listen to experiences—evidence, in the Bayesian sense. If I want to convince my elephant of something, I need to try it and show the elephant (how to get the elephant to try something before it has the evidence for it is an exercise left for the reader).
There are limits here—for me, my ADHD means that my elephant will always be pretty stuck in his ways, and he’ll forget evidence in my favor quite quickly. For others, for the crowd of programming students or the kid who hates hearing it’s dinner time, your leverage is sadly limited. If a person doesn’t want to cooperate with you, there’s not a whole lot you can do (but I do think Algon has some great ideas).