Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (35 page)

So now we know something about the effects of these clips on mood state, but what about their effects on our explicit attitudes to climate change and on our social cognitions and attributions about what is to be done about it? The results here were generally extremely positive. There were significant changes in
motivation
to do something to help reduce climate change after watching four of the seven clips. Participants also felt more
empowered
in their fight against climate change after watching each of the seven clips and levels of
fatalism
(‘I have no control over climate change’/‘Climate change is too difficult to overcome’) decreased significantly after watching four of the seven clips.

The only negative effect produced by any of the seven clips was on the dimension of
shifting responsibility
produced by the
China
clip. This clip shows that global warming is indeed a global issue, involving every industrialised and developing nation. It focuses on China’s developing progress, its manufacturing industries feeding the world’s markets. The clip emphasises that China has huge coal resources to exploit but that it is still using old technology in coal-burning power stations to accommodate its rapid economic expansion. After watching this clip our participants felt a shift of responsibility to other places and to other times (‘It is the responsibility of other countries, not the UK, to reduce climate change’/‘Climate change is a problem to be solved by future generations’). The mean response on this scale was 3.23 (compared to a pre-viewing baseline of 2.69). The implication of this finding is that it points to the
psychological dangers of political scapegoating – when the developed countries highlight the inefficiency of developing countries like China in their manufacturing and in the production of greenhouse gas emissions the message gets through, and even a relatively short clip affects both mood state and what we think can be done about the problem of global warming generally. This should be a lesson to us all.

Compared to the results of Kellsted et al. (2008), whose study seemed to suggest that the more participants knew about global warming, the less concerned they felt about it and the less they felt personally responsible for the problem, this study produced a very different pattern of results. Short informative clips from Al Gore’s film
An Inconvenient Truth
clearly provided our participants with a lot of new information about global warming, but instead of disempowering our respondents it had exactly the opposite effect. They felt more motivated to do something about climate change, more able to do something and less likely to think that they had no control over the whole climate change process. The whole process may have been partially directed by their strong emotional response to the clips. These are much more optimistic conclusions, and remind us of the power of strong informative (and emotional) messages on explicit attitude and social cognition generally. There was, however, just one fly in the ointment which reminds us of what to avoid when we seek to communicate about climate change. If we berate China too much for not doing what we currently expect in the West, then we can have a big negative effect on Westerners’ own sense of responsibility in the fight against climate change. This could prove to be a terrible own goal if we are not careful.

Of course our new research only attempted to measure and analyse momentary changes in mood state and explicit measures of social attitudes and attributions after watching extracts of a particular film, and an important follow-up study would be to consider how films like that of Al Gore impact on longer-term changes in emotional response when we think about global warming. Would the emotional responses be sustained over longer periods of time? Are those individuals who have watched the film less happy
generally about climate change, and how does this impact on their social attitudes to climate change and their social cognitions about global warming in this longer time frame? And what about the significant changes in the ‘tiredness’ ratings that we observed? Would individuals still feel more ‘energised’ days and weeks after seeing the film, and how might this translate into any changes in their own behaviour relevant to global warming and climate change? Further, how might this impact on their broader political decision-making processes (and endorsement of ‘green’ issues in the political domain)? Would they still feel more motivated and more empowered and less fatalistic in this longer time frame, and what would the consequences of this actually be? Can films like this produce such a strong emotional and cognitive response that they make a real difference to how we live our lives? These are important questions with potentially very significant implications for the future of the planet and for us all.

What we do now know is that films like
An Inconvenient Truth
can produce a genuine (and measurable) psychological shock: a shock to both our emotional system and to our cognitive (or attributional) system. But how temporary or enduring this shock really is remains to be seen (and properly investigated in due course).

I was lounging by a pool in Skokie, a northern suburb of Chicago, writing the final chapters of this book on a chlorine-stained notebook. I had just been to the University of Chicago to present my findings at a seminar in the psychology department on the possible dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes towards the environment and how this might be reflected in unconscious gestures. I had presented at David McNeill’s lab, the very epicentre of gestural research, and the talk had been received very well. ‘Spectacular,’ said David, ‘absolutely spectacular.’ I was basking in that warm glow of praise that academics so love, and the very warm glow of the Chicago sun. It was 92 degrees, ‘a very warm late spring, abnormally warm’, the locals were telling me (but without any real concern in their voice), and the weathermen and women, all beautifully turned out with the same small regular features that looked almost artificial, were reminding us that there were, after all, precedents for this sort of weather, fifty or maybe sixty years ago, maybe longer. No reason to be alarmed, they said, and everyone seemed to believe them.

The mood by the pool side was happy and contented; the laughter of children rang out in sharp, shrill bursts. The parents slumped on the sunbeds, the bliss of going nowhere and doing nothing, dozing as the sun heated up towards midday. The parents were occasionally startled by the shrillness of the noise of the children, but eventually they even got used to this noise as the day wore on. It is amazing the
way that human beings seem to habituate to almost any situation.

So why aren’t we saving the planet? That was the question I posed in the title and I promised to give a psychological perspective on this, to provide some sort of psychological analysis. Well, the single, definitive answer is that there isn’t one, but there is a long list of possible reasons.

First there is the feeling of learned helplessness. Everyone agrees that, no matter what we do at the present time, the planet will heat up. It is all now just a matter of degree (although every single degree has huge and severe consequences for the ecology of our planet). In their book, Walker and King (2008) use the analogy of the warming of the oceans. It takes an ocean quite a while to heat up and they say that exactly the same principle holds for global warming, but with a much longer time frame. So, they tell us, the full effects of global warming won’t be felt for decades or centuries to come. And here we have the second reason all neatly packaged together with the first. No matter what we do, the earth is going to get hotter and we cannot fine-tune our behaviour to minimise the effects of this because the effects will not be known until after we are long gone. This time lag inhibits behavioural change. One lesson that we did learn from the decades when behaviourism dominated psychology was that for behavioural change to occur the consequences (the rewards or the punishments) must follow the critical behaviours immediately, but in the case of global warming we have a delay of centuries to contend with. So how can we expect behaviour change in the present, in the here and now, today?

Presumably, we will only get this if we have a strong anticipatory negative response each time we engage in certain behaviours. Perhaps the most effective mechanism to promote change here will be the most basic of all – Pavlovian or classical conditioning, through the processes and everyday routines of socialisation. Every time a high-carbon choice is made by a child, the parents will say ‘bad’ (in a controlled and conscious way, and maybe even in a contrived way) or their facial expression will knit effortlessly and
quickly into a frown (and maybe the fast and unconscious frown is the best response falling immediately onto the behaviour in question), and this negative contingency unconsciously processed and stored will drive the behaviour down. In my very first study in psychology (it was my final-year project as an undergraduate), I demonstrated that human verbal conditioning without conscious awareness was indeed possible. Every time that a participant in my experiment paused for 600 milliseconds or more in a storytelling task a light came on which the experimental participant thought was a response from a computer informing them that their story-telling was poor at that point. But the light was contingent only on silent pauses of a certain duration: nothing more, nothing less. And it was odd watching the participants attempt consciously to adapt their story-telling, to make it better in order to keep this small red light off, but at the same time they started repeating words and syllables and using ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ to fill the silent gaps. I had managed to condition them to use fewer 600-milli-second pauses without their conscious awareness, but in order to find time to plan what they were going to say in their speech, they used more and more filled hesitations, almost stammering to keep that light off. Of course, a number of the participants did notice that the light ‘sometimes’ came on when they weren’t saying anything, but incredibly they assumed that the onset of the light reflected the computer’s judgement of the clause, or sentence, or the idea before the gap. They did not realise that there was no computer evaluating anything, just a light box activated by periods of silence.

Classical conditioning at times might seem like an odd sort of force, but it is a mechanism that can lay down habits and predispositions to act. It just needs a person or a thing, in the case of my light box (plus a plausible story!), to generate the rewards and punishments. So, as we become more aware of climate change the emotional response of the parents to certain consumer choices could easily be passed on to the next generation. Of course, there is probably something of a generational effect working on this already (although in my research the fact that chronological age did
not correlate with implicit attitude, but only with explicit attitude, might give you pause to reflect on this). When I was growing up in Belfast nobody had heard of global warming, and that is why, right at the beginning of this book, Laura gave such an emotional response to all of the lights in my office being on, whereas I had shown no emotional response at all. I had been socialised in earlier decades into a different culture: a culture of materialism if not wealth, a culture where the realisation and expression of personal identity and relationships came often and most easily through the possession and exchange of consumer goods and material objects (and not necessarily grand material objects, as I hope I showed with the story of the fort made by my father). This will have to change, somehow.

The third reason is also bound up with the first two and is connected with the language that Walker and King use in the development of their analogy. They had used the metaphor of the oceans’ warming. This may be scientifically appropriate, but in terms of the human psyche it is a dangerous way of thinking. The human mind clings to metaphors to understand the many complexities of the world (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Beattie 1988). So it will cling to the oceans’ warming as a way of understanding global warming, but a warm luxuriant ocean to bathe in takes all of the sting out of global warming. It almost sounds idyllic; it reminds me of the Seychelles, Belize, Mauritius (an island that I now know). I have an unconscious desire to be in that ocean off Mauritius right now (but ideally not during a cyclone).

So why aren’t we saving the planet? We are using the wrong images and metaphors to explain to others what is going on, and we are underestimating the power of the mind to retreat into the metaphor and not see beyond it. Why else aren’t we saving the planet? Surely, there are other reasons. We aren’t saving the planet because we are essentially optimists who fundamentally believe in the concept of evolution and deep down believe that human beings can adapt to almost any circumstances. Just look at the huge cultural variation across the world in terms of the environments people can live in, I hear people say, from the Inuit of Alaska to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Surely human
beings can learn to adapt to whatever global warming throws at us. It may not prove that life-threatening; after all, Keatinge et al. (2000) found that in Finland temperatures between 14.3 and 17.3°C minimised the number of heat-related deaths, while in Athens the range was between 22.7 and 25.7°C. In other words, in terms of human mortality we cope best with the temperatures we are used to.

Walker and King warned us in their book that global warming is a truly global problem and, they wrote, ‘there is a clue in the name’, but there are two significant words in that name: ‘global’, which they commented on, and ‘warming’, which they didn’t. Warming sounds good to me; it sounds pleasant, it sounds gradual, it sounds slow enough to allow human adaptation: you warm soup, you warm up someone you love, and you warm your slippers. Warming sounds cosy and homely, it provokes unconscious images that are far removed from the reality that Walker and King are warning us of, it elicits positive images that provoke our sense of optimism. We need something different: words and metaphors that will shock us, as individuals, and others out of our complacency. And, of course, here lies another major problem: is it up to us or up to those mystical hypothetical others to actually do something?