Host Shankar Vedantam talks with psychologist Stuart Ablon about why attempts to change others' behavior often fail when we assume the problem is a lack of motivation or willpower. Ablon explains how many challenging behaviors arise from lagging cognitive, emotional, and social skills, and describes his collaborative problem solving approach that emphasizes empathy, identifying unmet concerns, and jointly generating solutions. He illustrates the method with cases from psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention, families, and workplaces, and discusses research showing it reduces challenging behavior and builds skills in both the people being helped and the helpers themselves.
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Reframing misbehavior from a will problem to a skill problem ("people do well if they can") unlocks more accurate diagnoses of what's going wrong and creates room for empathy and effective help.
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Traditional rewards-and-punishments are good at signaling expectations and boosting short-term compliance, but they are poor tools for building underlying cognitive and emotional skills or healthy relationships.
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Effective empathy is an active process of detective work-asking clarifying questions, making gentle guesses, reflecting back, and reassuring-aimed at understanding, not agreeing with, another person's perspective.
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Inviting others to propose the first solution and co-author a plan both increases their ownership and gives them practice in problem solving, which strengthens the very skills needed for long-term change.
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Using collaborative problem solving with others is also a training ground for yourself, strengthening your own skills in perspective taking, flexibility, emotion regulation, and creative problem solving.
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True accountability is not about suffering consequences but about being responsible for solving the problem so it does not recur, which requires involving the person in understanding and fixing what went wrong.
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Episode Summary - Notes by River