Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (36 page)

This is a major issue that reverberates at every level from the most personal to the most political. The industrialised nations blame the emergent nations and vice versa, the Americans blame the Chinese (in particular), the Chinese blame the Americans (in particular). Brazil made the Brazilian proposal (during the 1997 Kyoto negotiations) whereby countries should share the burden of emission cuts according to how responsible they were historically for the problem, such that countries like the UK and Germany with their early industrial revolutions would have to bear a larger share of the cuts than their current levels of emissions would justify. But then you just think that this proposal would have so much more valence and weight if it had come from a country that would itself be penalised, rather than a country like Brazil that would do rather well from it. Human beings can choose to compete or cooperate in the environmental domain, and, of course, only cooperation will work,
but every time you have a treaty, a proposal or an argument that seems to be dictated by self-interest, this defines the game as essentially one of competition rather than one of cooperation. It sets up a perceptual set through which we interpret all of the incoming elements and information as essentially to do with competition rather than cooperation, and that is exactly what happens here. Human beings love to compete (although ‘love’ might not be the right word here), that is our nature and that is why we evolved; now we need to try to do something different. We cannot solve the climate problem by competing against each other, but we could solve the problem by competing against what previous generations have done. That in many senses needs to be the new competition.

So what hope do we have for the future? I think that there are many optimistic threads. In this short book I have not tried to drill into the polar ice caps to send more warnings about our changing world; rather I have tried to drill down into a comparatively small set (in the hundreds rather than the thousands) of human beings living and working and studying in the UK in 2008 and 2009. So what did I find? I found that in terms of explicit attitudes, the vast majority did say that they cared about our planet (as you would expect), but in terms of the unconscious implicit attitudes that people hold, I discovered that they seem to care even more (and this surprised me). Unconsciously, people seem to know that low carbon is good and high carbon is bad; their unconscious automatic responses tell me that.

How widespread is this phenomenon? We don’t yet know. When I first presented these findings at a conference at the University of Manchester, one very clever woman working in the retail industry said that she would be a good deal more convinced by my results if I had found a sample of a thousand taxi drivers. She was implying, of course, that taxi drivers wouldn’t care in terms of implicit attitude, and maybe not even in terms of explicit attitude (although I just wondered what taxi drivers had ever done to her). But we clearly do need to find out how general these results are. I would suggest that the answer is extremely urgent; we need to know what we are working with in terms of implicit
attitude and what the starting point for behaviour change actually is.

I also found that these implicit and explicit attitudes were not correlated across individuals and that there was a degree of dissociation between the two: an individual could be high in one and low in another. This means that there are individuals out there who espouse green attitudes but their implicit unconscious attitudes simply do not correspond to what they say. They say that they are green and that they would always choose low carbon products, and they also say that everyone else would do this as well (‘it is the obvious choice’), but from the dark recesses of their brain, deep down in their unconscious mind, they really don’t believe it.

This is an important finding because we know that implicit attitude is a much better predictor of the kinds of quick, non-reflective, everyday consumer behaviours than explicit attitude. The proportion of individuals who were significantly higher in explicit than implicit attitude in the present sample was in the region of 13%: this figure could, of course, get much higher as other populations are sampled.

The other implication of this aspect of the research is that you cannot base all your conclusions about people’s attitude to the environment on what they actually tell you. They may tell you what they believe (or they may not), but some people, through no fault of their own, have implicit unconscious attitudes that are at odds with what they say. I discovered that when these people are interviewed about their attitudes to the environment they do display behavioural manifestations of this discrepancy between their implicit and explicit attitudes. On occasion (and it is just on occasion), their unconscious attitude is revealed in their unconscious gestures, specifically in the form of gesture– speech mismatches. These mismatches are reminiscent of the slips of the tongue described in detail by Freud over a hundred years previously among the middle- and upper-class inhabitants of Vienna. He also described how the unconscious can break through into actual communicative behaviour. He assumed, at that time, that the communication of thoughts and ideas was only to do with the selection of individual words and their combinations, but we now know,
following the pioneering work of David McNeill, that underlying thoughts are realised in speech and unconscious gesture together, at the same time, and the new research described in this book shows that it is the unconscious gestural channel that really gives us a window into the unconscious part of the human mind in action.

So if the results concerning underlying attitudes are relatively optimistic, can we be as optimistic about the likely changes of consumer behaviour? I am not so convinced about this at the present time. Carbon footprint information is now appearing on a number of products and it should be dictating consumer choice, but in my opinion it is fundamentally misconceived. Our detailed analysis (perhaps too detailed from many readers’ point of view!) reveals that people do not attend to this information in the normal time frame of supermarket shopping. The carbon footprint information is a mixture of icon, numerical information and text requiring a certain time to process. But it is the unconscious implicit attitudes that drive supermarket shopping, and we must use an iconic representation that appeals to the unconscious mind, which summarises this carbon footprint information. This, in principle, can be done because we do, of course, know that iconic and metaphoric gestures communicate unconsciously but very effectively (of course they have been developed and shaped over hundreds of thousands of years through evolution). But clearly there must be a better way of getting the carbon footprint information to the unconscious mind.

We have used our eye-tracking methodology to test possible alternative formats of the iconic representation, and we found that when colours were used to display a carbon footprint as high or low, our participants attended to this information significantly more (and significantly more quickly) than when the carbon footprint used grams of carbon to represent the size of the footprint.
Table 15.1
shows the different formats used on the labels, the total viewing time in seconds and the rank order and position of each label (there were ten participants, each of whom studied for 10 seconds, so the totals in the table represent the time spent fixating the label out of 100 seconds and are effective percentages).

Table 15.1
Number of seconds for which each label was attended to

This simple experiment clearly showed that when you are attempting to connect to the minds of individuals, red (and orange) would seem to be good colours for representing carbon footprints, because, at least, they are noticed. And there is another reason why red labels could prove particularly effective here. According to Andrew Elliot and his colleagues from the University of Rochester, if you want to do well in any sort of test you should avoid a red pencil because red impairs task performance, even with brief exposures, as it leads to avoidance. In one experiment he had participants solve anagrams (e.g. anagram: NIDRK; solution: DRINK). What the experimenters varied in this study was the colour of the participant number on the test. What they found was that when the participants were left to solve anagrams for five minutes when the participant number was written in red they solved less than 4½, whereas when the participant number was written in green or black they solved more than 5½. The researchers then looked at the effects of colour on the subsection of an IQ test (analogy subtest) and at the effects of colour of the cover of the test on performance, and again they found that participants in the red condition performed significantly less well than participants in the green condition or white condition; this was also demonstrated with maths performance. Subsequent EEG measures of brain activity revealed that participants in
the red condition showed relatively more right frontal activation than those in the green condition or grey condition. Previous research had demonstrated that right frontal activation is associated with avoidance behaviour, and the researchers linked this to another task they used in which participants had to choose either easy or difficult analogy tests. Those who had been exposed to the colour red were more likely to choose the easy task rather than the difficult task.

The conclusion of these researchers was that the perception of the colour red prior to an achievement task has a negative impact on performance, and that ‘The findings suggest that care must be taken in how red is used in achievement contexts and illustrate how color can act as a subtle environmental cue that has important influences on behavior’ (Elliot, Maier, Moller, Freidman and Meinhardt 2007:154). This all happens well below the level of conscious awareness; red unconsciously reminds people of the danger of failure and impacts on performance. But that is also why red could work on products with high carbon footprints – it not only elicits attention, but could well lead to consumers avoiding high carbon brands because of the effects on right-sided frontal cortical activity and on avoidance.

So, we can change how products are designed and labelled to provide information about carbon footprint (and provide an unconscious nudge in the right direction), but what else can we do? How can we get them to show the correct emotional response every time they buy a gas-guzzling car, or a high-carbon-footprint light bulb? How can we stop people taking long-haul flights to Mauritius or Chicago? Sometimes giving the basic information that an economy flight to Mauritius for one person uses 1.7 tonnes of CO
₂
(calculated on my carbon calculator) might be the wrong information too late. When I discovered this, I felt as if I had just eaten a hamburger in my nearest hamburger joint in Skokie and that it contained 1400 calories (which it probably did). I had the brownie and ice cream to follow because I was now in binge mode, trying to eat my way out of guilt. I had already sullied my body. What difference could some more make?

Al Gore had tried to change our emotional and cognitive
thinking about the planet through his film
An Inconvenient Truth
, and in my new research I found that part of this film did produce significant emotional effects and it also affected what people thought they could do. This was a clear demonstration that our emotions and cognitions are linked inextricably. People need to understand the risks involved with their current behaviours, and many of the images in the Gore film are oddly indelible. I can close my eyes now and still see the power stations in China and the odd-looking maps of our planet sinking into the sea; how long these images will persist in my mind and how long they will impact on any aspect of my behaviour remains to be determined (they clearly weren’t flashbulb memories because details of the circumstances in which I viewed the film have already gone). We clearly do need to do more research to determine what kinds of message provoke the biggest emotional and cognitive changes, and we need this research urgently.

This was my first venture into this area: I have no real idea why deep down inside I commenced this particular journey. It might have been because of Laura Sale; it might not have been. Who knows which way my unconscious mind was directing me? The research was throwing up many more questions than I was answering, that was clear, but questions that I felt deserved an answer.

I had stood the day before in McNeill’s lab, talking about my research to a group of young, optimistic and very sharp postgraduate students. I had been a postgraduate at Cambridge, and there I had been socialised into a culture where seminars could be interrupted at any point, during the title if necessary(!), and it was that kind of afternoon that I had at the University of Chicago. It was stimulating and demanding and fun (full of interruptions and heated exchanges), and I realised that there is a lot of talent out there that could see the potential in examining the conscious and unconscious mind at work and how both parts of the human mind might think and feel about the environment.