Source: Fraser Nelson used under ‘fair use’

I really had to give a knowing chuckle when I saw the comments under Times columnist Fraser Nelson’s tweet of the above graph. All summer, right wing politicians, journalists and agitators have been screaming that mass immigration is dragging the UK down into a dystopian crime-ridden pit of despair, a bit like that 80’s classic movie Escape from New York.

Nelson, who is very much of the centre-right and certainly no woke warrior, had written a column arguing that, objectively, the country is in a much better place now than it has ever been. Challenged for hard proof, he published the graph showing no correlation between immigration and crime – if anything there’s an inverse relationship (although you’d need to test that against other factors to conclude causation).

Predictably, Twitter/X went into meltdown. Scrolling down the replies, you could tick off all the classic tropes: full-on denial, cherry-picked contrary data, anecdotal ‘evidence’, ad hominems, mockery and mad conspiracy theories. Sound familiar?

This is simple psychology. You can think of our brains as split into two parts – the conscious, logical part that looks at the above graph and says “wow – I didn’t expect that!” and the deeper emotional part that either welcomes that graph as it fits our world view – or screams murder if it upsets that worldview. We all like to think the logical part makes decisions for us, but actually it’s the emotional ‘chimp brain’ that rules the roost in our heads. The logical part spends much of its time cherry-picking evidence to keep the chimp brain happy – aka confirmation bias.

So, if you have grown up in the post-War consumer boom, driven by cheap fossil fuels, evidence that the flipside of that Faustian pact is fast coming back to bite us in the form of climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion biodiversity loss, air quality problems etc, etc, then instead of “we need to do something about this”, we get “you’re a communist!” Of course that’s just the noisy minority, but a much bigger chunk of the population will think “yep, but that’s nothing to do with me.”

I’ve spent my Sustainability career trying to work out how to engage the chimp brain. Facts don’t work, graphs don’t work, reports don’t work, pictures of smiling people don’t work. You need to dig deeper into emotional issues, and get the chimp brain to embrace Sustainability. From the start of my engagements, through strategy development, to communications, I’ve developed a range of simple tactics that do work – check out Rule 4 of my 10 Rules of Corporate Sustainability as a classic example.