It sounds like the author is coming from a places of intellect and might be missing more of the emotional reasons people don't follow advice.
Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons people don't do things they know they should[1] be doing. We often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this isn't true at all.
Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a bigger gap between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more distressing. It's usually much more effective to find a way to help people's emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue approaching them at all even if it's to ameliorate them.
How to do this, is another comment for another time, but it's rewarding, as it helps us understand more about what makes us tick.
Imagine a patch of ice on a busy sidewalk. You can put up a sign that says "be careful, icy path" but lots of people are still going to slip and fall. The advice (ie the sign) can only do so much as long as the hazard exists. The challenge here is the hazards are your mental models so they are a lot harder to clear than an icy patch.
Yep, and almost everyone thinks their mental models accurately reflect reality. If they didn't, surely they would change their model, right? ;) Sometimes, even, folk's mental models become so important they try to force reality to conform to them, often with disastrous results.
I've never been convinced of the idea that emotions and intellect have a gulf between them like this.
I'm more of the opinion that when something like that happens, it is usually due to misunderstanding the underlying problem, and all the intellectual reasons are simply trying to address the wrong reasons and thus are ineffective.
Very Right. I have come to the conclusion that it is mostly Emotions/Feelings over Intellect/Rationality though they are interlinked together. To suppress the former and give free reign to the latter takes a lot of self-control which can easily crumble when the right buttons (sometimes unknowingly) get pushed. One way to control this is to minimize all externalities which could trigger an emotional response eg. it is easier to have a rational conversation via simple text (various modes) vs. face-to-face where tonal/non-verbal cues can trigger unwarranted emotional responses derailing from the subject at hand; Biology, Psychology, Operant Conditioning etc. are all relevant here.
Emotions/Feelings are fundamental to existence itself i.e. they are the drivers for everything else. There is a lot of fascinating research/understanding going on in this domain which is worth studying. You might find the following two books interesting;
1) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux.
2) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons people don't do things they know they should[1] be doing. We often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this isn't true at all.
Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a bigger gap between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more distressing. It's usually much more effective to find a way to help people's emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue approaching them at all even if it's to ameliorate them.
How to do this, is another comment for another time, but it's rewarding, as it helps us understand more about what makes us tick.
1. Ostensibly. Should statements themselves have their own issues. https://www.thinkingbugs.com/should-statements