Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (28 page)

Now we can attempt to read the minds of participants whose explicit and implicit attitudes diverge, and perhaps are even dissociated. In the two individuals below the explicit attitudes towards low-carbon-footprint products are positive but their implicit attitudes are much less positive.

Andrew has an explicit attitude towards carbon footprint that is positive but an implicit attitude that is less positive, so we can examine how this attitudinal discrepancy between the unconscious and conscious is reflected in his behaviour. One critical point of the interview is when he discusses the moment of choice between high- and low-carbon-footprint products: the example he uses is that of tomatoes. His speech, interestingly, is full of speech disturbances (things like self-interrupted utterances or false starts, e.g. ‘
and these car-
or ten’, parenthetic remarks, e.g. ‘
you know
’, repetition, e.g. ‘
the
, the lower carbon footprint’), but it is his gestural movements that are particularly revealing here. He locates the high-carbon-footprint tomatoes using his left hand in the left-hand side of his gestural space, the hand has a particular configuration, the back of his hand is outwards away from the centre of the body, the movement is a chopping movement (see gesture 27). He then starts to refer to the low-carbon-footprint tomatoes and his left hand starts to move to the right and point to the right with a different hand configuration (see gesture 28), but he self-interrupts this utterance because he remembers that he hasn’t thus far put a number to the high-carbon-footprint products so the hand
changes both direction and shape again to identify the high-carbon-footprint tomatoes (as ‘ten’ in the left-hand side of the gestural space). He then moves his hand to the right, back across the body in the way that he had done previously when referring to the low-carbon-footprint tomatoes to locate the low-carbon-footprint tomatoes in the right-hand side of the gestural space, again using a particular hand shape and hand configuration (back of the hand now pointing up at a 45° angle at this critical point). He also puts a figure to these low-carbon-footprint products, ‘six’ (see gesture 30)

And then comes the critical movement in the interview: this is the actual movement of choice. Walker and King (2008) tell us that the only way that we can save the planet is by changing our patterns of consumption and our everyday mundane choices. But will we actually do this? Andrew asserts that we will. He says that ‘people would be more inclined to go for the low carbon footprint’. You also get the impression that he is including himself in this category; he is really saying ‘people like me, people who espouse green attitudes, people who have explicit attitudes (deliberate, conscious, reflexive) that are very pro-low carbon’. But his unconscious hand gesture tells us something quite different here. The hand movement accompanying this critical part of the speech has exactly the same configuration and shape and points to exactly the same location in the gestural space as the gestural movement used earlier to refer to the high-carbon-footprint tomatoes (see gestures 27–29). In other words, we have a mismatch between what he is saying in his speech and what he is saying in his gestural movement. The unconscious movement seems to be reflecting his unconscious implicit attitude and appears to indicate (unambiguously) that his choice would not be the low-carbon-footprint tomatoes but the high-carbon-footprint tomatoes.

What is also fascinating about gesture 31 is its timing with respect to the accompanying speech. In the speech he says, ‘then I think people would be more inclined to go for the lower carbon footprint’, but notice how the gesture accompanies the words ‘then I think’. In other words, that part of the brain which generates gesture movement, working out of his unconscious, has already signified his
true thoughts at that point in time. We can read his implicit attitude clearly at this point. No matter how green Andrew says he is, his unconscious gestural movement may tell us a good deal more about his actual behaviour in supermarkets (and also how he thinks others will behave).

One major factor in determining whether attitudes lead to behaviour is our perception of how we think others will behave, and I am convinced that gesture 31 tells us not only about Andrew’s implicit attitude, but also about his perception of the subjective norm when it comes to buying low-carbon-footprint products. His gesture tells us that he thinks that very few people will bother with the low-carbon-footprint products (and one can only speculate about his possible reason for this: perhaps he thinks that such products will be significantly more expensive). This therefore lets him off the hook.

Some time ago, McNeill speculated that the kinds of metaphorical gestures that accompany talk can act as ‘a window on the human mind’, and in this short sequence of bodily movements we get a glimpse into the human mind in action: saying one thing, but beneath the surface of the talk we can see something else going on, something that might hold the clue as to why we all are not doing more to save the planet.

So : yes if-if you’ve got something you can say : y’know these – [these tomatoes and their carbon footprint is : X]
₍₂₇₎
[and : these car]
₍₂₈₎
– [or ::
[
ten
]
for example]
₍₂₉₎
[and these car-these tomatoes and their carbon footprint is six]
₍₃₀₎
: [then I think]
₍₃₁₎
people would be more inclined to go for the :: the lower carbon footprint

The next example shows something very similar. Each hand is used to represent high- and low-carbon-footprint products, and there is no ambiguity in this person’s mind about which is good and which is bad. She refers to them directly as ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ and what she says in her speech explicitly is ‘if they were next to each other and it was obvious that one was good and one was bad then you would go for the good one.’

But again, look carefully at the gestural movements that accompany what she is saying. In gesture 35, she uses the left hand opening and closing and raised slightly above and in front of the right hand to signify the good one, that is to say the low-carbon-footprint product. In the next gesture (gesture 36) she uses the right hand with a very similar configuration and hand shape to represent the bad one (i.e. the high-carbon-footprint product), but the critical gesture again is when she talks about the actual moment of choice, she says ‘then you’d go for the good one’ but the accompanying gesture is executed by the right hand in that part of the gestural space used to represent the bad high-carbon-footprint products. Again this is someone whose explicit attitude is very pro-low carbon but whose implicit attitude is at odds with this, and in gesture 37 you see striking evidence of the unconscious implicit attitude breaking through. This participant may say that she would choose the low carbon option but the unconscious gesture tells us quite a different story.

There is something else that is quite striking about the behaviour of this participant. She repeatedly makes circular movements of the hand when she has displayed her choice in the gestural space, as if some discomfort were associated with the unconscious signalling of the choice. Her intonation is also a little unusual in that it sounds incomplete, again, as if she doesn’t want to commit herself. However, in terms of her lexical choices, and the use of specific lexical items, her choice is clear. It is just her unconscious behaviour, and specifically the behaviours over which she has least control (her gestural movements and her intonation), that are sending quite a different message.