Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (32 page)

But back to Gore’s film. There is clearly something of a paradox about public attitudes to global warming and the public’s beliefs about the potential risks entailed. While there seems to be an extraordinary level of agreement and consensus among climate scientists about the seriousness of the risks posed by global warming, the public seem somehow less concerned. In the words of Weber (2006):

Some [climate scientists] hold this belief so passionately that they go to great lengths to alert the public and politicians to the magnitude of the risks, stepping outside of their typical scientific venues to provide congressional testimony or popular press accounts to trigger action (e.g., Hansen 2004). With some notable exceptions, the concern shown by citizens and governmental officials is smaller and less emphatic than that of climate scientists. (Weber 2006:1)

Weber’s analysis of the possible reasons for this apparent lack of concern on the part of the public is that ‘The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions’, and he continues: ‘The absence of a visceral response on part of the public to the risks posed by global warming may be responsible for the arguably less than optimal allocation of personal and collective resources to deal with this issue’ (Weber 2006:1). In other words, until we can produce a strong emotional response in the public to global warming
we may not be able to get people to perceive the real risks involved in climate change. His conclusion is that ‘These results suggest that we should find ways to evoke visceral reactions towards the risk of global warming, perhaps by simulations of its concrete future consequences for people’s home or other regions they visit or value’ (Weber 2006:1).

In a study published in 2006, Leiserowitz found that, while many Americans believe that climate change is ‘real’, they consider it ‘a low priority relative to other national and environmental issues. These results demonstrate that most of the American public considers climate change a moderate risk that is more likely to impact people and places far distant in time and place’ (Leiserowitz 2006:64). His conclusions, and his call to action, are in many ways similar to those of Weber – ‘efforts to describe the potential national, regional and local impacts of climate change and communicate these potential impacts to the public are critical’ (Leiserowitz 2006:64). Like Weber, he believes that the targeting of people’s emotional responses is critical in this context because, following Zajonc (1980), he argues that ‘affective reactions to stimuli are evoked automatically and subsequently guide rational information processing and judgment. Affect and feelings are not mere epiphenomena, but often arise prior to cognition and play a crucial role in subsequent rational thought’ (Leiserowitz 2006:47).

Thus, there does appear to be an argument that the very nature of the phenomenon of global warming (which is somewhat abstract, statistical and ‘scientific’) inhibits our emotional response to climate change and constrains our thinking. After all, it is argued, the effects of global warming become visible only over a relatively long time frame. In addition, global warming really does require climate scientists to explain to us what we are witnessing, and they have to persuade us that this is different from some abstract statistical norm, or from what we should be witnessing. And all of this requires us to understand and believe the arguments of scientists (‘all with an axe to grind’, ‘just the latest scientific fad’). For these reasons, we may need global warming to be made much more concrete, much more
personal and much more emotionally charged in order to make it a top priority for us all.

It was as if several important people in Hollywood had been listening to some of these arguments, because a number of major films were made at about this time that did specifically attempt to make global warming more real, to add emotional valence to its depiction, and to change how we both thought and felt about the phenomenon. They ranged from the award-winning film by Al Gore released in 2006,
An Inconvenient Truth
, to
Ice Age: The Meltdown
(also released in 2006, and aimed at a slightly younger audience). The goal of Gore’s film was to teach us all a valuable and urgent lesson, using something like a lecture mode to accomplish this. But did it work?

One underlying assumption behind movies like this is that, in the words of Kellstedt, Zahran and Vedlitz (2008):

providing information about global warming – in effect, taking the scientific consensus and popularizing it – will lead to increased public concern about the risks of global warming. The lack of public outcry about global warming, then, is not because the public does not care enough about global warming; it is because they don’t know enough about it. The more people know about global warming, the thinking seems to go, the more they will feel personally responsible for it, and also be concerned about it. (Kellstedt et al. 2008:114)

But this, of course, is a very big assumption, especially in the case of something like global warming. There is always the dangerous possibility that the more you know about something as potentially catastrophic as climate change, the less you will feel
personally
responsible for it and the more you may rely on defensive attributions that will shift blame and responsibility elsewhere (see Ross 1977 and Lee and Beattie 1998, 2000 for an analysis of defensive attributions in a somewhat different domain). There is even the strong possibility that you will feel more concerned and worried (primarily an emotional response), but that will not be tied in any way to the intended attributions of responsibility
(primarily a cognitive response) or any change in behaviour (personal, political or social) that might actually do something about the impending catastrophe.

Prima facie evidence for this possibility comes from the study by Kellstedt et al. (2008), who carried out a large telephone survey of randomly selected adults in the US in the summer of 2004, questioning them about climate change risk perception (specifically measuring the risks of climate change to personal health, finance, environmental welfare, public health, the economy and environmental integrity), their perceived efficacy to have an effect on climate change and the information they had about climate change (measured simply as a response to the question ‘how informed do you consider yourself to be?’ on an 11-point scale). Extraordinarily, their results revealed a negative correlation between perceived level of knowledge and concern about global warming, such that ‘respondents with higher levels of information about global warming show less concern about global warming’ (Kellstedt et al. 2008:120). In addition, ‘as the level of self-reported knowledge increases, the perceived ability to affect global warming outcomes decreases’ (Kellstedt et al. 2008:120). These are very pessimistic results in many ways, because at first sight they would seem to be saying that films like
An Inconvenient Truth
, as brilliant and as informative as they might seem, could easily have the opposite effect on audiences to that expected, leaving people feeling less concerned and less empowered after viewing, which is hardly the intention of the film, or Al Gore! (See also Durant and Legge 2005; Evans and Durant 1995 for some comparable evidence from related domains).

But it is important to consider the possible limitations of the design used in the Kellstedt et al. study and the implications of these for any interpretations of the findings. The design of the study was essentially cross-sectional and correlational. Thus, it offers just a snapshot of a particular point in time (in a popular culture where there is a flux in terms of which climate change issues are currently being discussed and how they are reported and represented). In addition, the correlations of self-reported knowledge and concern about global warming do, by their very nature, allow
for multiple interpretations, and do not demonstrate a clear causal connection. Thus, there is always the possibility that respondents who are not very concerned about global warming rate themselves as being very informed about the issues, perhaps because of the pressures of social desirability. The internal implicit reasoning might go something like this (if it were to be made explicit for a moment):

I am not concerned about global warming: other people (including Al Gore and other famous politicians) clearly think that I should be; they must think that I am particularly ill-informed on these issues and therefore do not hold me in high regard. They might even think of me as ‘stupid’. But they are wrong. ‘How informed do you consider yourself to be?’ That is what the survey asks. I consider myself very informed, thank you.

This hypothetical interpretation would essentially reverse the dynamic of the correlation, with ‘lack of concern’ directing ‘self-rated knowledge’ (rather than vice versa), and in many ways this allows for a more benign and comfortable interpretation of the empirical findings.

The other major correlation reported in the Kellstedt et al. study, that ‘as the level of self-reported knowledge increases, the perceived ability to affect global warming outcomes decreases’, is in Kellstedt’s terms ‘a reasonable finding. Global warming is an extreme collective action dilemma, with the actions of one person having a negligible effect in the aggregate. Informed persons appear to realize this objective fact’ (Kellstedt et al. 2008:120). But their own conclusion here is pessimistic (and biased) in the extreme. Collective action is the joint behaviour of individuals, and without individual behaviour change there will be no collective action. It is not satisfactory to say that informing the public about global warming may reduce self-efficacy, but that is okay, because that is the objective reality. Empowering individuals is the best way of instigating collective behaviour change.

But the effects of information presented in the media on major issues, such as climate change, on public response are
clearly a very significant issue in societal terms, and for this reason we decided to employ an experimental design to consider this issue in an attempt to allow more direct interpretations of directionality and ultimately causality. We focused on the Gore film
An Inconvenient Truth
partly because of the brilliance of sections of the film, and partly because of its assumed effect on audiences worldwide. The Gore film has many classic scenes that attempt to manipulate both emotions and social attitudes to achieve their desired ends. It is important to attempt to evaluate the effects of sections of the film on both emotions and cognitions because we now know not only that both are important in terms of behaviour change, but we also know a little more about how these two systems work.

What we know more generally from research in neuroscience on emotion and thinking is that one system (the emotional system) often precedes and directs the other, and that, according to some psychologists, much of so-called rational thought is little more than a post-hoc justification for our behaviour. Some psychologists have even suggested that when we specifically target thinking in which people are apparently making up their mind about certain things, we may be targeting not thinking itself, with implications for subsequent behaviour, but no more than a store of rationalisations for behaviour that is already primed and ready to go as a result of our immediate unconscious emotional reaction (see Beattie 2008).

Antonio Damasio (see Damasio 1994) has been at the centre of much of this new research in neuroscience into how emotion and conscious rational thought connect. His research shows that emotion focuses attention, has a major effect on what we remember and is more closely linked to behaviour than are cognitions (see Walsh and Gentile 2007). But we also now know that in normal people, activation of the emotional system precedes activation of any conceptual or reasoning system (at least in certain domains) and, perhaps as importantly, that the two systems are quite separate. Damasio and colleagues famously showed all of this with a very simple gambling experiment. In front of the participant are four decks of cards; in their hands they have $2000 to
gamble with. The task is to turn over one card at a time to win the maximum amount of money: with each card you either win some money or lose some money. In the case of two of the decks the rewards are great ($100) but so too are the penalties. If you play either of these two decks for any period of time you end up losing money. If you concentrate on selecting cards from the other two decks you get smaller rewards ($50) but also smaller penalties, and you end up winning money in the course of the game.

What Damasio found with people playing this game was that after encountering a few losses, normal participants generated skin conductance responses (a sign of autonomic arousal) before selecting a card from the ‘bad deck’ and they also started to avoid the decks associated with bad losses. In other words, they showed a distinct emotional response to the bad decks even before they had a conceptual understanding of the nature of the decks and long before they could explain what was going on. They started to avoid the bad decks on the basis of their emotional response. Damasio also found that patients with damage to a particular area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex failed to generate a skin conductance response before selecting cards from the bad deck, and did not avoid the decks with large losses. Patients with damage to this part of the brain could not generate the anticipatory skin conductance response and could not avoid the bad decks even though they conceptually understood the difference in the nature of the decks before them. In the words of the authors, ‘The patients failed to act according to their correct conceptual knowledge’ (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio 1997:1294). In other words, Damasio and his colleagues demonstrated that ‘in normal individuals, non-conscious biases guide behaviour before conscious knowledge does. Without the help of such biases, overt knowledge may be insufficient to ensure advantageous behavior.’ In normal people activation of the emotional system precedes activation of the conceptual system, and we now know that the neural connection between these two systems is located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.