Read Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective Online

Authors: Geoffrey Beattie

Tags: #Behavioral Sciences

Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (38 page)

• It is also crucially important to explore implicit and explicit attitudes in countries such as the USA and China. Global warming is after all a global problem, and we need to know more about how both implicit and explicit attitudes to green issues may vary in an international context, and what the impact of such attitudes might be for policy-makers in these various countries (who will have to take the electorate with them).

• I would also like to analyse politicians from different countries talking about the challenges of global warming to see if there is any evidence of dissociation in their own communicational behaviour. For example, are any gesture–speech mismatches present in their talk when they talk about these sorts of green issues? (See, for example, Beattie 2003 for slightly disturbing evidence of gesture–speech mismatches in politicians’ talk, including Tony Blair’s speeches, when they are talking about other hot political topics.) If mismatches are present when they talk about global warming, could this potentially have a big impact on how their ‘urgent’ messages are being received (or not received) by the electorate?

• There is real merit in exploring in much greater detail how emotion directs human behaviour and also how human beings manage to rationalise their actions (perhaps driven primarily by emotional concerns) in a wide
variety of domains, including the broad area of sustainability.

• I would also like to consider the role of metaphor in everyday life and the way that it can direct and shape our thinking, and to think more carefully about the development of new metaphors for communicating the concept of ‘global warming’ more effectively to the public at large.

• This should be linked to an exploration of the role of metaphor in persuading people to change their consumer habits.

• I think that we also need to look at the effects of cognitive dissonance on promoting change in this area by the usual method of getting people to espouse green issues when their underlying attitude is at odds with this.

• But also we need to see whether the use of contradictory iconic gestures generated during talk can interfere with this whole process of attitude change (driven by dissonance). This could be an important issue.

• We need to understand much more about the maintenance of everyday habits (and ways of disrupting them), and how habits to do with consumption link in to core aspects of the self and self-identity.

• We need to make people more aware of what some of the psychological obstacles might be in preventing behavioural change in the general area of global warming.

• We need to come up with a range of psychological solutions that recognise the essential complexity of human beings (and the conscious and unconscious components of their minds) but manage to have real practical value. We need answers to some of the questions that I have posed here and countless others(!) and we need solutions that will actually work. Or I am sure that it will be too late.

• In the meantime, until we have some answers, we might need to use the following slightly more direct approach shown in the graphic.

And please just note the particular laughing face of the supermarket manager in the background of the graphic (that slightly cruel, scornful laugh that you can illustrate so well

 
 

(
Private Eye
– August 2008)

Source:
www.CartoonStock.com

 

in cartoons), and the way that he’s looking down on the shoppers with their ‘Wasteful Bastard’ plastic bags. You might not have consciously noticed his expression at first – there is after all so much more going on in the faces of the shoppers in the foreground (the unconscious is a truly wonderful thing) – but my guess is that you probably processed his look unconsciously in the very first few milliseconds of looking at the cartoon, and this may have made the whole thing much funnier (it must have been the supermarket manager’s idea to heap scorn on the offenders this way; he’s certainly enjoying it).

This green faker certainly laughed until he almost cried.

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