If all you do is bail, you’ll almost certainly drown; it is one of the immutable laws of the universe that the leaks eventually exhaust you.

But our tendency to confuse solutions with causes often traps us; when it comes to plugging leaks, it can’t just be a form of bailing faster.

Take racism. We know that empathetic listening, coupled with strong challenges, can convert hardliners. And we have plenty of examples: Ann Atwater and C. P. Ellis. Matthew Stevenson and Derek Black. Radical kindness does seem to be one potential solution to abject hatred.

At the same time, plenty of well-meaning people have taken that solution and suggested the false corollary that a lack of kindness is what radicalizes young men in the first place. They spin tales of how young White men experience hardship that causes them to start down the road to racism and it feels intuitively true: if kindness is the solution, then a lack of kindness must be the cause.

But C.P. Ellis didn’t become a Ku Klux Klan leader because Black people were unkind to him; he lived in extreme poverty and parroted the beliefs of his KKK-leading father. Derek Black had almost no interaction with Black people and yet hated them intensely, encouraged by his Stormfront-founding father (I’m noticing a theme). Americans did not enslave Africans because they were wronged by them. The boat is not leaking for lack of bailing.

This is particularly relevant to those of us in tech right now. In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg calling for an increase in toxic masculinity in the workplace, there has been a fair amount of online handwringing about what can be done to combat the pervasive sexist behavior of men in tech. And far too many of the suggestions sound like “Well, if women were just nicer to men in the first place…”

No. No no no.

It isn’t just the -isms of the world; it is any behavior change. The crusade to reduce smoking before it killed us all started with anti-smoking ads; in 1967, the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine ruled that for every smoking ad on TV, there had to be a corollary anti-smoking ad. But of course smoking continued: you can’t bail faster than the leaks.

It took us 30 years to figure out that instead of just running matched anti-cigarette ads, we should just ban cigarette advertising to begin with; the Master Settlement Agreement didn’t happen until 1998.

So how can you prevent these false syllogisms when you’re designing interventions?

I often talk about the five behavioral archetypes: Always, Never, Sometimes, Started, Stopped. The false syllogisms above are really a conflation of Never and Stopped; if radical kindness and anti-smoking ads can cause someone to Stop, they can also cause them to Never. 

But that isn’t always true. Be deliberate and systematic in your approach to gathering insights, remember that Never and Sopped are not equivalents, and investigate the two behavioral states as clearly different to reveal where the pressures themselves diverge.