Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (9 page)

But my one compulsion runs deeper than mere misplaced vanity, more rooted I am sure in my unconscious mind. This compulsion started when I was at school. I would run every day and twice on a Tuesday and a Thursday. I started when I was thirteen. A lot happened that year – I broke my arm doing judo, which meant that many sports were for a long while out of bounds, and my father died unexpectedly of some heart-related condition. I never understood what he died of, it was never properly explained to me as a child, and I am not sure that my mother properly understood what had happened anyway, except that it happened during an operation. I suppose that this made the fear more intense, the fear of life being interrupted in a sudden and unexpected way. I might have a similar congenital weakness, so I decided to get fit, and run and run to make my heart stronger and stronger. I never stopped. Running, we all know, can be very addictive.

But I have another image from that one life-changing year as well. An image that has never faded or been diminished by time, an image that has been silent and never discussed until now. An image, nevertheless, that has haunted me. On the night of my father’s funeral, after we had laid him to rest in Roselawn Cemetery with the wind lifting the dirty green carpet used to cover the wet clay grave, we were in my aunt’s house for the sandwiches and tea because our own house (a two-up, two-down in North Belfast) wasn’t big enough. Everyone was there, drinking quietly, the quiet, subdued sobbing made worse by the image of the coffin juddering down into its final position: everyone except my cousin Myrna, that is, who inexplicably had gone to work that day. Nobody had explained why. Life at the time seemed to be full of things that were never properly explained, at least to a thirteen-year-old boy. My cousin walked in right in the middle of the wake. She seemed to cling to the doorframe,
not entering, just standing there, staring at us all; and I can picture her now, an image etched on my mind for ever, an emaciated grey ghost, already dead in the eyes and the mouth. I had heard, overheard, that she had got some kind of eating disorder, anorexia nervosa – ‘slimmer’s disease’, my mother called it – but I hadn’t seen her for months, as the slimmer’s disease took hold. She avoided seeing relatives. But there she stood in the silence and the sadness, and everyone looked at her and nobody said a thing, as if she looked normal and healthy and was just late for the funeral. I think she walked slowly past us all into the kitchen to stand alone, the place where food is prepared and eaten, but not for her.

She died a couple of weeks later of pneumonia and was buried in the row opposite my father, which is handy from the point of view of people bringing flowers to either grave. Her mother, my Aunt May, a sweet, lovely woman with a giggly, girly voice, always said that what triggered the anorexia was a chance remark from a doctor at work during a routine medical examination, a remark that she was a little overweight. From that day on, my aunt always said, she never ate properly again. It sounds almost ridiculous that such a life-threatening disorder could be triggered in this way, but years later I supervised a postgraduate student who analysed the social construction of anorexia in the families of sufferers and the number of interviewees who pointed to a similar ‘chance remark’ as the cause of the whole thing was extraordinary.

Anorexia is a complex disorder with cultural, personality and biological factors all implicated in its ontogenesis, but human beings like to identify a single cause that they can pick out and say ‘if only that hadn’t happened …’. This single cause is usually something fairly random (so that any random family could potentially be affected) and external to the family (so that no blame could be attached to the family). The PE teacher who commented that Tracy was too fat to be any good at games, the boyfriend who said that Jane’s bum was too big for her skinny jeans, the doctor who quipped that his patient could do with losing a little weight. It was always things like that. It reminded me of what Friedrich Nietzsche
wrote: ‘To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and gives us moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown, and the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none’ (1871/1962:62).

My family, and many other families, had found an explanation, one that stressed the power of the word, of the chance remark (and I suppose, by implication, the dangerous power of the carelessness of those in authority). Nobody ever disputed my aunt’s account, and it became the true version of what had become of my beautiful cousin, and in that awful year of my life I sometimes think that my weight prejudices were probably laid down for ever.

Of course, this story may tell you why weight is an important issue for me, but why have I ended up with an anti-fat prejudice, why not an anti-thin prejudice? After all, it was not the fact that Myrna was a few pounds overweight (maybe more, maybe less) that killed her. Well, maybe it was the implicit message in the story, the implicit message being that if you are overweight then you can be killed by a chance remark, the unconscious message being that being fat makes you too sensitive to others’ insensitivity, the unconscious theme being that being fat means that others can control your life, and even your death. My compulsive running may just reflect my unconscious desire to escape from my father’s destiny, but it may also reflect this deep-seated desire to put myself out of harm’s way from chance remarks (and thereby make myself less vulnerable in life). It may be core to my psychological make-up and mean that I have an implicit and unconscious bias against fat people, who have not made the effort to shield themselves in this way. Of course the fact that my implicit attitude actually does connect to some core behaviours in my everyday life, namely my determination to run, is very encouraging from the point of view of my current academic concerns. It is also, of course, more than a little depressing for me.

But for the psychologist wanting to save the planet, the big question is whether the IAT gives us more insight than the measures of explicit attitudes. The beauty of the IAT is
that because it measures automatically activated associations, it is resistant (some have argued ‘immune’) to faking (see Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji 2009). Would it, therefore, help us to understand and predict actual behaviour more effectively? The explicit tests that we had carried out had revealed that explicit attitudes are very pro-environment, so why wasn’t people’s behaviour falling in line with this? Would the IAT reveal something quite different here? Would this help explain what was going on? The focus on behavioural prediction was, of course, inevitable from the inception of the IAT and ‘plagued’ the IAT very early on (in the eyes and words of some of the core researchers). Banaji (2001) commented that ‘tolerance’ was needed if this question was to be answered: ‘Pushing fast and furiously to “show me what predicts” may be counterproductive. One first needs to understand the construct before asking what it may or may not predict’ (2001:132).

Greenwald et al. (2009) conducted a meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the IAT and concluded that, in general, when the IAT and explicit attitude measures are combined, they are better predictors of behaviour than either measure alone. However, when attitudes are ‘socially sensitive’, and where social desirability concerns are inevitably present (as in attitudes to race, age, gender or the environment), explicit measures are very poor predictors of behaviour and in these situations the IAT would appear to be a much better predictor of behaviour than explicit measures.

Recently, Greenwald along with other researchers has started to apply the IAT to consumer research since it has become increasingly apparent that consumer behaviour does not necessarily involve conscious and rational decision-making, but can also be influenced by all sorts of unconscious factors. You can often see people in the supermarket picking up products without even properly looking at them, let alone making complex decisions based on price or nutritional value or fat content. There is something at work here that is not based on conscious, reflexive, rational thought and slow decision-making. And, of course, the IAT could be particularly useful in the domain of green consumerism given the evident attitude–behaviour gap in the
purchasing of green goods. If implicit attitudes were measured in this particular domain, then a less optimistic view of environmental thinking may well be revealed, which reflects all the other concerns that consumers have about things like price and convenience, as well as potentially their concerns regarding their lack of knowledge about carbon footprint, and their general anxiety as to whether one person’s individual shopping behaviour can actually make a difference.

From the meta-analysis conducted by Greenwald et al. (2009), the overall conclusion would seem to be that the IAT does significantly predict behaviour (although the actual level of prediction can be modest at times). But as Gregg (2008) has commented, ‘the behaviours documented are often quite specific, so it is striking that general implicit associations predict them at all. Moreover, the IAT outstrips self-report in forecasting instances of discrimination and prejudice. Hence, it offers some genuine diagnostic advantages’ (2008:765). There appear to be something like fifteen published studies that have used the IAT in the consumer domain, as shown in
Table 5.2
. This table has been adapted from the Greenwald et al. (2009) paper, but I have tried to make the conclusions as specific and as accurate as possible by quoting directly from the original studies.

The trend in these results appears to be fairly positive with respect to the predictive power of the IAT and particularly under certain types of conditions. When people are under any kind of time pressure (like shopping in a supermarket, particularly just before closing time), or when they are having to control their emotional state (like shopping in a supermarket after a hard, stressful day at work), or when they are focusing on the kinds of enjoyment that they might get from their food choices (like shopping in a supermarket after a hard day at work and looking forward to dinner), or when they are under the influence of alcohol, the IAT is a very good predictor of behaviour. Measures of implicit attitude seem to predict behaviour best when the person concerned is under any kind of mental or emotional or time pressure: when there is a lot going on, in other words. Explicit measures, on the other hand, are usually better

Table 5.2
The IAT as a predictor of consumer behaviour