Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (33 page)

More recently, Damasio and colleagues demonstrated
the powerful role of emotions in the generation of moral judgements in that patients with bilateral damage to the same brain region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, were more likely to opt for ‘heroic’ and highly emotional personally aversive responses in a series of moral dilemmas presented to them (Koenigs et al. 2007). Haidt (2001) developed a new model of moral judgement (and evaluative judgement generally) in which
moral judgement
(or
evaluative judgement
) appears in consciousness automatically and effortlessly, but ‘Moral reasoning is an effortful process, engaged in after a moral judgment is made, in which a person searches for arguments that will support an already-made judgment’ (2001:181). In other words, we make our mind up pretty quickly and the ‘arguments’ presented to us may play little role in our judgement except in the subsequent justification of our behaviour to ourselves or others.

This research explains why some behaviour change campaigns work so well. They have targeted the non-conscious biases head-on. Storey (2008) writes that ‘Numerous studies have identified that emotional stimuli make far more effective prompts than purely rational arguments when it comes to changing opinions and provoking a response’ (2008:23). The way that the brain is hardwired suggests that this might well be the most appropriate strategy. These non-conscious biases affect behaviour long before we understand the significance of the thing that we are acting towards.

Al Gore tries to manipulate both emotions and cognitions in his film
An Inconvenient Truth
(exactly as Weber and Leiserowitz had recommended). He attempts to make the whole issue of global warming real and concrete for individuals; he attempts to work against the dismissive idea that global warming is something abstract and statistical and just the latest scientific fad, and something that really does not concern
us
. But does it actually work? We considered the effects of a series of extracts from the film on both emotional and cognitive responses. The emotional responses were measured through a mood questionnaire and the cognitive responses were measured through a series of explicit scales relating to both social attitudes and social
cognitions. We wanted to know whether extracts from the film impact on our psychological mood in a measurable and reliable way, and how any changes in mood relate to how we think about the film and what we believe that we can do about global warming and the future of our planet.

Seven clips that were identified as being particularly powerful and emotional were picked out from
An Inconvenient Truth
. These were as follows.

This clip shows that global warming is a global issue, involving every industrialised and developing nation. We see film of China’s industrial progress, its manufacturing industries feeding the world’s markets. China’s economic advantage is that it has huge coal resources to exploit, but it is still using old technologies in coal-burning power stations to accommodate its rapid economic expansion. The message here is that all countries must unite to do something about this global problem, including or maybe even especially the US and China, the two biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. (According to some reports, China now has the dubious distinction of having overtaken the US as the top emitter of greenhouse gases, but the US still heads the league table in emissions per person, 24.0 tonnes/person compared with 5.0 tonnes/person for China. As many have pointed out, the US and certain Western nations bear ‘very significant historical responsibility’ for the greenhouse gases already out there; see Walker and King 2008:209.)

Of course, a film like this cannot be all doom and gloom, and Al Gore does try to present an argument and a powerful set of emotional images (images that derive their emotional impact from the implicit message that harm can be undone, that time can be reversed, that we can indeed travel backwards in time ‘to pre-1970 levels of emissions’) that are essentially empowering for the audience in this clip. The argument is basically that every little helps, that we can all do something, that because aspects of consumerism were the root cause of the problem they therefore can be a major part of the solution, and that if we just use more efficient electrical appliances, more fuel-efficient cars, etc. then we can do something significant about climate change.

This is a particularly powerful clip that shows images taken from space of the small blue planet, ‘our only home’, grabbing our attention with both a cognitive and an emotional hook, and feels very motivating. This particular vista of our earth makes us stop to wonder, to see things differently. The point Gore makes is that the entire history of the human race is contained in this little blue dot: it is our only home.

In this clip, Al Gore attempts to explain some of the paradoxes of global warming, such as the fact that it not only creates more flooding (as evidenced by an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons across the globe) but also creates more drought. The images here are of Lake Chad on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Chad was once one of the biggest lakes in the world but it has now dried to almost nothing, causing major political and social upheaval for the region. Gore painstakingly explains that not only does global warming increase evaporation from the sea, but the higher temperatures also increase soil evaporation, taking all the moisture from the ground.

Here, Al Gore explains the effects of global warming on the arctic ice caps with simple graphics, explaining that the ice caps act as mirrors reflecting 90% of the sun’s rays. However, as the temperature of the sea rises, the ice caps begin to melt. When the sun’s rays hit the ocean instead of the ice caps, 90% of the rays are absorbed, increasing the rate of melting. He tries to manipulate our emotional response with an animation of a polar bear trying to clamber onto a floating raft of ice; the ice raft isn’t thick enough to hold the weight of the bear. The message, both very concrete and highly emotional, is that polar bears are now drowning and that some bears are having to swim up to sixty miles to find ice.

This clip presents us with powerful images and metaphors to understand the nature and the extent of the problem we face. Thus, Al Gore illustrates the rise in population growth using the benchmark of his own life to show how the population has changed in one baby boomer’s lifetime, his own. After the Second World War the population passed the 2-billion mark for the first time, but by 2005 it had reached 6.5 billion. With a single graph he shows how the population would grow to 9 billion in his own lifetime. He makes the simple but powerful point that this is extremely worrying given that it took ten thousand generations for the population to reach 2 billion in the first place.

The effects of global warming are also illustrated in this clip, which shows how some coastlines would look in the future if the ice on Greenland were to break up and melt, or even half of the ice on Greenland and half of Western Antarctica, which some scientists see as plausible scenarios for the future. This scene is introduced with the comment by Al Gore that Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser has said that because of the rapid melting seen in Greenland the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. We then see what the consequences of global warming and rising sea levels would be on Florida, the San Francisco Bay, the Netherlands, the area around Beijing, the land around Shanghai, the area around Calcutta and Bangladesh and then (one suspects for many in the US) the clincher – Manhattan, including the site of the World Trade Center. The graphic that is used is maps of the regions concerned, with the green becoming blue as the land is submerged under the rising sea levels. The quantitative message here is stark in the extreme – think of environmental events in the past and their impact on tens of thousands of people; now think about a different order of magnitude altogether. We are told here that these events would involve the death or displacement of one hundred million or more human beings.

In order to measure changes in mood states after watching each clip, a mood questionnaire adapted from the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist (UMACL) constructed by Matthews, Jones and Chamberlain (1990) was used. The questionnaire was reduced from the original 48 items to 21 items, which were grouped into seven mood categories: happiness, sadness, anger, tension, calmness, energy and tiredness in order to make comparisons about changes in mood state. Responses were noted on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 to 5 where, for example, 1 = not at all cheerful and 5 = extremely cheerful.

The questionnaire was also designed to assess any changes in explicit attitude/social cognitions towards climate change after watching each clip. Thirty statements were designed that could be grouped under five broad categories of explicit attitude/social cognitions, namely: message acceptance, motivation, empowerment, shifting responsibility and fatalism (see
Table 14.1
). Participants

Table 14.1
Statements used to assess attitudes towards climate change

indicated on a 5-point scale the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement, where 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree.

Participants were asked to complete the mood questionnaire and the climate change attitudes questionnaire before watching the clips. After completing the questionnaires, participants (in small groups of three or more) were shown the first of the seven clips taken from
An Inconvenient Truth
; the clips were all shown in a random order to the groups. After watching each clip, participants were asked to fill in the mood questionnaire and the climate change attitudes questionnaire again before moving on to the next clip. This procedure was repeated after each clip. The mean responses for the mood questionnaire are shown in
Table 14.2
and are represented graphically in
Figure 14.1
.

Statistical analyses were conducted on the data to reveal whether there were significant changes to mood state after the participants had watched each of the seven clips. The data were split by the midpoint (3) into two categories – high (4/5) versus low (1/2) – for use in the test. The statistical analyses revealed significant changes in mood state changes for
happiness, sadness, calmness
and
tiredness
(but none for
anger, tension
or
energy
), as outlined below.