Don't Even Think About It (8 page)

Immoral
: We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.

Now
: Our ability to look into the future is one of our most stunning abilities, but, he says, it is “still in the early stages of R&D.”

As Gilbert sees it, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he is most inclined to emphasize the lack of Abrupt and Now, which “are things that even a rabbit understands.” But he would not underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognize that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”

Unless, I suggest, Americans already eat puppies. The taboo is socially constructed, and one could readily imagine an alternative culture in which, following the lead of the hungry pilgrim settlers, it was roast puppy that had become the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table.

Gilbert concedes the point but not the distinction. “To me,” he says, “socially constructed and evolutionary are different ways of spelling the same thing. The most interesting thing about us as a species from an evolutionary standpoint is not really our opposable thumb or our ability with language; it’s our social life.” It is this that determines the social cues, norms, enemies, and in-group, out-group dynamics that, as I have already argued, are so important in shaping our response to climate change.

Gilbert draws on a large body of research, some of it his own, in the field of evolutionary psychology. The founders of modern evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, like to say that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” which developed to address the specific threats in what they call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness.”

In this primeval environment, the main avoidable risks were in our immediate surroundings, and it was this that led us to give such a high priority to proximity and certainty in our judgment of risk. This also makes us innately conservative and defensive of our current circumstances—what cognitive psychologists call our
status quo
. After all, survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

Cosmides and Tooby describe the brain as being a “Swiss Army knife” containing specialized tools designed to deal with different tasks. Thus, they argue, we are relatively poor at dealing with large issues (like climate change) and can engage with them only by breaking them down into individual tool-oriented tasks.

Like a Swiss Army knife, the brain also contains things that you never need or don’t even know what they are for. Evolutionary psychologists call these “exaptations”: behaviors that may have been selected in the past for completely different reasons and become co-opted into their present role following a change in environmental circumstances.

Without entering into the intense debate surrounding exaptation, suffice it to say that it contains a highly relevant core concept: that we apply to climate change the psychological tools we have evolved to cope with previous challenges, and that these may turn out to be inappropriate for this new threat. The in-group loyalties and defensiveness that evolved to support small hunter-gatherer groups may be an obstacle when dealing with a universal shared threat. As I suggest later, our avoidance of the issue of climate change may be driven by still-deeper mechanisms evolved to cope with our fears of death.

But of greatest relevance to our decision making around climate change is the discovery that this long evolutionary journey has led us to develop two distinct information processing systems. One is analytical, logical, and encodes reality in abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety), images, intuition, and experience. Language operates in both processes, but in the analytic system, it is used to describe and define; in the emotional system, it is used to communicate meaning, especially in the form of stories.

Brain scanning has confirmed that these systems are built into the physical architecture of the brain—the former in the cortex and posterior parietal cortex, the latter in the amygdala at the base of the brain. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux argues in his book
The Emotional Brain
that, as our analytic systems evolved, the amygdala was allowed to maintain its dominance in decision making because of its ability to rapidly assess threats. So, while the analytic system is slow and deliberative, rationally weighing the evidence and probabilities, the emotional system is automatic, impulsive, and quick to apply mental shortcuts so that it can quickly reach conclusions.

There has been a very strong public interest in these findings in recent years and many attempts to name them. Seymour Epstein, who first identified them as two parallel systems, called them analytic processing and experiential processing. Others call them enlightenment reason and real reason, or the reflective system and the automatic system, or System 1 and System 2. I find it easier to call them the
rational brain
and the
emotional brain
. These are not ideal names but they are easy to follow.

One of reasons there have been so many different attempts to name them is that the systems are not separate and isolated but rather in constant communication. Attempting to capture this relationship, Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, hit on the image of an elephant and a rider. The rational rider does his best to steer the emotional elephant. He appears to be in control, though, in reality, a six-ton elephant is going to have the last say.

It is a nice image, and the second of many metaphorical elephants to appear in this book. However, this, too, is not entirely satisfactory because it underplays the communication between the two. The research shows that our rational rider will try to convince our emotional elephant and will deliberately shape arguments into stories and images that will appeal to the elephant. And the elephant is no dullard either. It is extremely adept at creating elaborate intellectual rationalizations for the rider to let it go on a path it had already decided to take. The image suggests the rider sitting under a little tent, pulling the reins, but the reality is more like Tarzan riding bareback and talking elephant (perhaps explaining why Hollywood thinks that the African jungle is full of Asian bananas).

Our perception of risk is dominated by our emotional brain. It favors proximity, draws on personal experience, and deals with images and stories that speak to existing values. As I will show later, threats that conjure up strong images or that are communicated in personal stories have disproportional sway over our decision making.

However, because the emotional brain is poorly suited to dealing with uncertain long-term threats of the kind that constitute climate change, the rational brain sometimes actively intervenes, using its abstract tools of planning and forward thinking. Indeed, experiments show that people deliberately enable this process by making an issue more distant in order to see it in rational perspective and then developing the short-term goals that give it emotional proximity. It is like a little dance—moving far away to admire your partner and then moving in close enough to kiss.

And this is exactly what we do with climate change, both personally and culturally. The theories, graphs, projects, and data speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognize that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action. The divide between the rational brain and the emotional brain is embedded in the historical boundaries between science, the arts, and religion, and it is a particular risk for an issue that originates strongly in just one cultural domain—as climate change does with science—that finds it hard to engage our entire cognition. The view held by every specialist I spoke to is that we have still not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brains in climate change. Even if the rider is fascinated by the article in
Scientific American
, the elephant has wandered off looking for a banana.

So, advocates for action on climate change have to do everything they can to speak to both. They need to maintain enough of the data and evidence to satisfy the rational brain that they are a credible source. They need to translate that data into a form that will engage and motivate the emotional brain using the tools of immediacy, proximity, social meaning, stories, and metaphors that draw on experience. Every piece of climate change communication from the National Academy of Sciences to a direct-action protest outside a power station is an experiment in the alchemy of turning base data into emotional gold.

Those opposing action are playing the same game but working backward. They begin with the arguments that can appeal to the emotional brain based around the values, concerns, and emotional triggers of their audiences. They then seek the data and evidence to support these arguments, because, like the advocates, they need to satisfy both the emotional
and
the rational brains of the people they want to convince. Of course, they don’t see it like this. They are convinced that they have built their emotional argument on the back of a rational evaluation of the data. And so it seems to them.

The people in between are not passive in this process either. They, too, are deliberately making a calculation about how they wish to interpret these arguments, knowing very well that if their emotional brain becomes too involved, they are likely to feel anxious and worried. As I argue later, they tend to adopt a position of wait and see: Their rational brain is sufficiently aware that they know there is a problem; their emotional brain is sufficiently engaged that it is looking out for social cues about how they should respond. And both of their brains are sufficiently detached that they do not have to deal with the problem unless actively compelled to do so.

11

Familiar Yet Unimaginable

Why Climate Change Does Not Feel Dangerous

Five years ago, when I
was living in Oxford, England, a cell phone company applied for planning permission to install a cell phone tower on the side of the local pub. The area was full of liberal professionals of the kind that congregate in university cities. When prompted, they would agree unanimously that climate change was a serious problem that someone really should do something about . . . sometime. Otherwise they really didn’t think about it.

And yet the threat of the cell phone tower galvanized them into immediate personal action. Within a week of the application, two hundred people gathered in the local school hall to express their resistance to the tower, which, they said, was going to spread microwave radiation across the school playground. Some were determined to lay their bodies down in front of the installation van, if necessary.

There are some interesting similarities between the issues of climate change and cell phone towers. Both threaten uncertain impacts that are drawn out long into the future. And in both cases we contribute, through our consumption choices, to the problem we decry. My neighbors in the audience that night all had cell phones in their pockets. In retrospect, I regret not having called them up during the meeting, just to see what would happen.

However, there is one important difference: Climate change poses a vast and unparalleled threat. Cell phone towers, though, are virtually harmless. Applying even the most cautious estimates, it would take more than seventy thousand of these towers to generate enough microwave radiation to cause any health problems. This experience found me asking why highly educated people would become so agitated about an intangible and unproven risk like cell phone radiation and yet be oblivious to the equally intangible yet far-better-proven risk of climate change.

Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, is well positioned to answer this question. Slovic is the world’s leading expert on the social amplification of risk. He is also a modest, soft-spoken man who might be shy of such accolades. It is, though, impossible to find a single research document on the topic that is not peppered with references to his work.

Slovic faced an uphill struggle to persuade scientists that our perception of risk is socially formed and to overcome their prejudice that, in his words, social science was soft and squishy. It was the issue of radiation—and in particular the question about why people were so much more concerned about nuclear power than they were about the dangers of medical X-rays—that launched his career in the 1970s.

Slovic identified two main drivers of risk perception: a sense of powerlessness in the face of involuntary and catastrophic impacts, which he called dread risk, and an anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of new and unforeseeable dangers, which he called unknown risk. Dread risk is reinforced by being intergenerational and irreversible. Unknown risk is emphasized by being invisible and unprecedented. Radiation is so feared because it involves both types.

Through social testing, Slovic mapped a wide range of threats against these criteria for dread and unknown risk. Chemicals, food additives, and microwave ovens score highly for their unknown risk. Nuclear weapons and nerve gas accidents score highly for their dread risk. The more mundane dangers of bicycle accidents, indoor smoke, alcohol, and home swimming pools have low scores by both criteria even though they are all major sources of fatalities.