Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (25 page)

From the IAT and the explicit attitude measures, we were able to identify two distinct sets of participants – one set had very positive attitudes to low carbon products on both the explicit and implicit measures (
n
= 10); the other had the greatest explicit and implicit attitudinal clash (
n
= 10). This sample of just twenty people was then contacted and asked to take part in an interview. Each person was filmed as they responded to a series of general questions regarding environmental issues and their own particular lifestyles. This included questions about what environmental behaviour they engaged in, what they knew about carbon labelling, whether they thought that carbon labelling could make a difference to global warming and whether they felt they themselves could make any difference to climate change. The aim of the interview was to get the interviewee to talk openly about environmental topics in an informal situation where they were hopefully relaxed enough to feel comfortable (and gesture freely). Afterwards the iconic and
metaphoric gestures were identified and the accompanying speech was transcribed in detail.

The transcripts of gestures and speech use the following symbols.

Figures 12.2
to 12.4 show the average number of gestures produced by the participants whose explicit and implicit attitudes either converge or diverge, the average time each

 

Figure 12.2
How gesture frequency is affected by convergent/divergent attitudes.

 

Figure 12.3
How time spent talking is affected by convergent/divergent attitudes.

 

Figure 12.4
How gesture rate is affected by convergent/divergent attitudes.

Table 12.1
Comparisons of the average number of gestures produced, average time spent talking and average number of gestures per minute for the convergent and divergent groups

group spent talking and the average number of gestures produced per minute.
Table 12.1
compares the data in these figures.

It would seem that those people whose attitudes converge, on average, gesture more than those whose attitudes diverge; they talk for longer about green issues and produce a greater number of gestures per minute compared to the divergent group (although there does seem to be considerable individual variation in this overall pattern). In other words, when people have unconscious implicit attitudes that do not match their consciously expressed attitudes, generally speaking they talk less and gesture less (in other words, there is a degree of inhibition in their behaviour). Of course, following Freud, evidence of this attitudinal dissonance within individuals may well be more visible in the detail of
actual examples
of gesture and speech and it is to these we turn.

Bryony is an example of a young consumer who displays a high degree of
convergence
between implicit and explicit attitudes. In this example, she is discussing her own and her family’s attitude to recycling. One of the accompanying gestures (gesture 2) in this example is interesting for two reasons: first of all, the gesture adds to the information conveyed in speech by providing additional information about the position of these recycling bins relative to the house (see also Beattie and Shovelton, 1999a, 1999b, who demonstrated that relative position of objects is particularly well encoded by iconic gesture); the gesture seems to indicate that the bins are located to the left of the house (which they were, as it turned out, as we subsequently visited the house). The position of the bins relative to the house is not mentioned in the speech itself, so this is an example of a complementary gesture. This iconic gesture (gesture 2) thus shows her visual thinking about the physical layout of her environment and how that impacts on the process of recycling at her home. The gesture, unconsciously generated, acts as a ‘window on the mind’ (McNeill 1992), accurately displaying information that is not verbalised in the speech. Gesture 2, as well as displaying relative position, displays the distance of the recycling bins from the house. While Bryony says that the recycling bins are ‘just outside’, the gesture is a little discrepant to this. It is a gesture that has a relatively long trajectory, suggesting that the bins may be physically further away than she is indicating verbally (again it turns out that in reality they are some distance from the front door, and not ‘just outside’). Bryony is someone who says that she is very ‘green’ in her attitudes; the IAT reveals that her implicit attitudes are also very ‘green’. She does recycle, and places things in the recycling bins, and downplays their distance from the front door in her speech, but the distance is not a serious obstacle to this process. Her gesture tells us this.

Erm yeah : er : yeah we-we recycle most things in our house like glass :: plastic : paper and [we’ve got like recycling bins]
₍₁₎
[just outside]
₍₂₎
so ::: it’s quite easy

Here is another young consumer with convergent explicit and implicit attitudes. In this first gestural sequence she is wrestling with Walker and King’s (2008) dilemma about personal responsibility and the importance of individual action to do something about climate change. She says that she should get more actively involved (and of course her explicit and implicit attitudes converging would prime her to actually do something in this regard), rather than leaving it all to others, ‘to fight my corner’. She locates these ‘others’ in her gestural space using a deictic or pointing gesture (gesture 4). Note the late timing of gesture 5. The deictic gesture accompanying ‘corner’ seems slow in its execution; perhaps it should be coordinated with ‘my’. Gestures 6 and 7 indicate that she is aware that she needs to do more in terms of actual behaviour, to ‘be the one that gets involved’. Her deictic gesture (gesture 7) completes the utterance. It points back to the same position in the gestural space as gesture 4, and means ‘like the others who are currently fighting my corner’.

No that’s [true because you think :: that-tha-sh-that’s so lazy of me]
₍₃₎
to think that [some other people are gonna fight my]
₍₄₎
[corner]
₍₅₎
::: [you-you should also be the one that]
₍₆₎
[gets : you know : that gets involved]
₍₇₎