You Go First

In my first few weeks as a tenure-track professor, I sat outside a prospective mentor’s office trying to muster the courage to say I could not see myself studying smoking. He was an addictions researcher with a strong track record of studying smoking cessation. I was a social psychologist studying self-control. But not the self-control of smoking, I would tell him. Something else. Could he teach me how to get funding in something else?

We brainstormed for a while and I trooped back up to my office, ready to chat on the phone with a friend who, like me, was in the first few weeks of her first tenure-track position. We chatted about the adjustments to our new jobs and then settled into our second aim—to see if there was a project of common interest that we could work on together. Within a few minutes, we were talking about a project of hers on, you guessed it, smokers. And I became convinced that I absolutely had to study smokers.

What changed my mind so quickly, you might ask?

A complex problem that would require re-thinking all the science we knew about self-control was the answer.

See, in her earlier work, my friend had found that within couples that smoke, the individuals themselves are almost never on the same page about quitting. The couples were all over the place—in some couples, both wanted to quit, in some couples, neither wanted to quit. But in the majority of couples, one person wanted to quit while the other didn’t. It was a total mess.

A key obstacle to quitting smoking is the problem of managing habits and cue exposure. If these couples didn’t want to quit at the same time, they would have an ever-tougher go of it.

But there was one thing that almost every dual-smoker couple has in common—they both agree that they want the other person to quit. Even among people who want to quit themselves, they want their partner to quit more. They’re both looking at each other saying, “You go first.”

If there’s a better metaphor for our current political landscape, I don’t know what it is. Few people really want to change their own behavior and everyone expects others to lead the way.

What’s even worse than the "you first" mentality we see in dual-smoker couples is that with American politics, we seem to be saying not only "you go first" but if you don’t do it my way on my terms, it doesn’t count. I don’t really know how we can win.

If you are saying, "we tried to go first for four years, now it’s their turn," you are clinging to a "you go first" mentality.

If you are praying for "our country" but not praying for a change in your own heart even more fervently, you are clinging to a "you go first" mentality.

If you think that your issue, your concerns, your state, or one particular policy is more important than someone else’s issue, concern, state, or policy, you are clinging to a "you go first" mentality.

I don’t know what to tell you. It’s hard. Most people feel like they really have been working. And not just for the last four years but for upwards of decades. All I can say here is that when married partners are surveyed, men claim to do 34% of the household chores and women claim to do 141% of the household chores. If you add that up, that’s 175% of the chores. Some people might be right but most likely, both men and women in every relationship are a little right and a little wrong. And exactly how much is almost certainly not worth the effort to figure out.

Sure, we could keep arguing about who does the dishes more. The argument will never end and bitterness will keep growing in our hearts. Or we could maybe remember that we are grown-ups. We should be past the days where such petty arguments feel worth the time. Instead, let’s have an "I’ll go first" mentality. It won’t be easy and it will almost certainly feel more difficult than it is. But is there really any other way?

PS. I am now funded by NIH to test an intervention to try to get smoking couples to quit at the same time. If I learn anything from this that I think is relevant to politics, you can be sure I’ll share it here.