Psychology and Climate Change

The Journal Current Opinion in Psychology had for the theme of its December 2021 issue the Psychology of Climate Change. Papers included in the issue addressed questions such as why, while most people care about environmental quality, they continue with practices that worsen climate change; which of our values are most relevant to climate change; why have so few countries prioritised climate change mitigation despite warnings from scientists over several decades; whether our social needs are key to behaviour concerning climate change; and how do ancestral psychological motivations shape our environmental decisions.

Bouman, Steg and Perlaviciute (2021) argue that “to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change, and to promote society-wide climate action, it is important to know what motivates individuals to support and take climate action”. They identify biospheric, altruistic, egoistic and hedonic values as those most relevant in the context of climate action. Biospheric values reflect “goals to care for nature and the environment”, altruistic values “reflect goals to care about others, social welfare and society”, egoistic values “reflect goals to care about possessions, money and status” and “hedonic values make people focus on pleasure and comfort.”

Strong biospheric values promote support for and engagement in climate action, and strong altruistic values also often encourage people “to support and take climate action, as many climate actions benefit the wider society”. Strong egoistic and hedonic values are likely to discourage climate action since such actions typically (though not always) involve a cost of some kind. “Specific climate actions typically have mixed implications for different values”; an example is the conflict between biospheric and hedonic values implied by the choice of flying or travelling by train. Similar considerations apply to the acceptability of climate policies. Strong biospheric values seem relatively common, prompting the question why “there still not enough action to combat climate change?” One answer may lie in the degree to which other values are threatened: if this is the case, policy changes such as subsidies and regulations may be able to lower barriers to change. Another may be that there is a lack of awareness concerning possible climate-friendly action. Climate action can also be promoted through non-biospheric values: where there are cost savings egoistic values can be recruited, and hedonic values through the possibility of increased comfort.

Public participation in decision-making about policies offers a way of engaging with “the diverse values that are prioritised by the public” and “may be critical to finding compromises”. This approach is contrasted with the “common decide-announce-defend approaches” which may “fuel polarisation and public resistance”. There is a tendency to believe that “others generally have weaker biospheric values than oneself” and this can lower the motivation of an individual to take climate action by “lowering individuals’ beliefs that their actions will be effective in mitigating climate change.” In conclusion the authors note that increasing awareness about “the extent to which others – in particular ingroup members - endorse biospheric values may therefore be critical to promote society-wide climate action.”

According to Brick, Bosshard and Whitmarsh (2021) “actions on climate change are explainable through social motives”. It is important to understand core motives since harnessing them “could help avoid the worst outcomes of climate change.”  While people value their health, relationships, and environments, they act in ways that harm them: an explanation for this gap between values and actions is that “evolution shaped human minds to respond to problems faced by our distant ancestors” and climate change is “an abstract, slow, and distant problem” unlike any which they faced, and which we are consequently poorly equipped to solve. The core social motivations on which the authors focus are belonging, understanding, controlling, self-enhancing, and trusting others.

Belonging: “people dramatically underestimate” how much others influence their behaviour. Motives to affiliate are “powerful, fundamental, and underappreciated” and for this reason they offer “a major potential lever for interventions”.

Understanding:  people wish to feel “that they understand what is real and why things happen” but this feeling “does not require that knowledge is accurate” or that it is internally consistent.

Controlling: we are motivated to control our environments and to feel competent. In order to change our behaviour we need to feel able “to mobilize resources and take action”. Faced by the “global, long-term, and uncertain” problem of climate change we can feel a low level of control and motivation. Producing effective environmental action may therefore require “making green actions easier than more polluting actions” or increasing the perception of such actions as effective and controllable.

Self-enhancing is one of the motivations that influence self-identity: we wish to see ourselves as consistent and having moral integrity. While for those with strong environmental values, taking green actions can be satisfying, others, perhaps with a political affiliation associated with a valued social identity, may feel threatened by environmental information and inclined to ignore or denigrate it. “Reframing environmental action in line with audience values” could remove identity threats and so motivate attitude and behaviour change.

Trusting: “people are motivated to trust others and believe that others are benevolent” and trust in scientists and institutions is clearly a key to implementing action on climate; perceived benevolence motivated individuals towards climate action. In their conclusions the authors note that “Social motives may be a uniquely effective target for interventions since they are ubiquitous and afford many roads to action”.

Bolderdijk and Jans (2021) ask whether humans can be expected to collectively change by themselves, and explore the role of minorities – “individuals who challenge the status quo.” They see the current situation as one in which most people “are aware of the environmental costs of their current actions”, value environmental quality and accept that it is their moral duty to protect it, yet “keep engaging in practices that exacerbate climate change”.

Minorities who challenge the status quo in areas such as technological innovation may be celebrated when their ideas are widely adopted, but “the same reputational benefits” may not reward those who “challenge an unsustainable status quo” on topics such as ethical consumption and environmental disregard. Indeed, they may be described as ‘do-gooders’ and face ridicule or exclusion. Such responses are well known, but the authors concentrate instead on more positive reactions to minorities. Deviant views, consistently expressed, can cause members of the majority to “consciously reconsider their private opinion about the status quo”. This process takes place at an individual level before affecting public behaviour. Many have now privately “adopted the notion that climate change is an urgent problem and that drastic change is needed”, but public action lags behind: in this situation the effect of minorities tends to be underestimated. Minorities who deviate from the status quo “show that an alternative path is possible”: veganism is an example, and the public pro-environmental initiatives of community energy groups can make the majority “re-appraise their shared identity”. Dissenters can help “majority members who are privately uncomfortable with existing environmentally harmful norms” and who fear social sanctions; visible minority members can help others to publicly challenge environmentally damaging practice. Minorities seem most influential when their words are supported by their actions, helping “the magnetic force of the new norm” to increases to the point where ‘critical mass’ is reached and its chances of “spreading throughout the entire social network” increases dramatically. The authors suggest that this ‘critical mass’ may be in the region of 25% of the population. They conclude that minority influence, though it may be subtle, is crucial: “once majority members notice that norms are shifting, sudden tipping points can ensue.” Policymakers may speed the process by encouraging minority members “to publicly challenge unsustainable norms” and by supporting environmental initiatives financially and logistically.

Van Lange and Huckelba (2021) describe social dilemmas as “conflicts between short-term self- interest and long-term collective interest”. They give the examples of tax evasion, maintaining distance during COVID-19, and preparing well for meetings, but regard climate change as “the largest social dilemma imaginable”. Individuals who continue to ignore climate change can do so “because the concept and consequences of climate change are difficult to grasp fully.” It is distant in time, but also distant from the self, involving abstract concepts, uncertainty, the actions of many agents, and consequences which “include a collective as large as a country or even a planet”. How, the authors ask “can we make the collective interest and future consequences psychologically more concrete and urgent?” Children can be a means to “reach individuals who would otherwise continue to ignore climate change”; whether or not related, they can help to reduce “the psychological distance of climate change.” Acknowledging the uncertainties attached to climate predictions “may actually increase their trustworthiness and credibility” and sharing the positive experiences of engaging in sustainable behaviours can inspire others to share in them. Similarly concrete feedback on positive results “is essential to promote recognition of the seriousness and urgency of climate change.” The use of enjoyable and entertaining social events help to “transform the notions of collective action and community into something more concrete and tangible.”

At government level, imposing environmental laws has been found to influence “individuals’ moral perceptions” and increase environmental behaviours. The effect of such motivation can extend farther than expected, for example “instituting a smoking ban in public places significantly reduced smoking in private homes as well.” Competitive altruism can encourage national leaders “towards reducing climate change in order to gain status or prestige over other nations.” Awards for attainments such as ‘cleanest city’ can reinforce such behaviour. Individual action may be inhibited by low self-efficacy: those who “do not believe that they can succeed in resolving a particular problem are less likely to remain motivated and engaged”: breaking it down into concrete feasible steps can help to overcome this difficulty and “reduce the psychological distance of climate change.”

The question of how our environmental decisions are shaped by ancestral psychological motivations is discussed by Palomo-Vélez and van Vugt (2021). They suggest that five core psychological motivations which have evolved via natural selection guide our environmental choices. They are self-interest, since humans are no exception to the adaptation of organisms to prioritise themselves over others; status, which in most species is linked to evolutionary benefits; sensing, which has evolved to prioritise immediate environmental cues to danger over slow and global changes; temporal myopia, the preference for immediate rewards over those that are distant and uncertain; and social imitation, which provided advantages for our ancestors through copying, following and learning from others. If these motivations are indeed central to our behaviour, we may be inclined to agree with the authors that “getting people to act in proenvironmental ways is not an easy task.”

Examples of the influence of the five core motivations noted in research studies are given.  Self-interest (or the interests of those related to us) has been used effectively in appeals to decrease vehicle pollution from idling engines in stationary vehicles: these can be based on economics, the health of the driver or the welfare of children. The importance of status appears to explain why “donations to environmental charities are higher when made publicly”.  Sensing seems to be at work in reducing the intention to eat meet when “persuasive messages about the meat industry” evoke disgust, and energy research has shown “that visualization of thermal energy increases householders’ willingness to engage in energy-saving” behaviour. Temporal myopia or temporal discounting, the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over distant, uncertain ones “might interfere with environmental policies requesting people to behave sustainably to prevent potentially adverse environmental outcomes of climate change” but the degree of discounting depends on environmental factors such as regular exposure to nature. The authors conclude that in “designing effective interventions based on these ancestral motivations” it is necessary to reflect on whom they will target, the context, and the kind of behaviours they aim to tackle: failure to do this “might diminish the interventions’ impact, or even be counterproductive.”

 

References

 

Bolderdijk, J. and Jans, L., 2021, Minority influence in climate change mitigation, Current Opinion in Psychology 2021, 42: 25-30, online, accessed 3 April 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000154

Bouman, T., Steg, L.  and Perlaviciute, G., 2021, From values to climate action,

Current Opinion in Psychology 2021, 42: 102-107, online, accessed 3 April 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000579

Brick, C., Bosshard, A. and Whitmarsh, L., 2021, Motivation and climate change: A review, Current Opinion in Psychology 2021, 42: 82-88, online, accessed 3 April 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000415

Palomo-Vélez, G.  and van Vugt, M., 2021, The evolutionary psychology of climate change behaviors: Insights and applications, Current Opinion in Psychology 2021, 42:54–59, online, accessed 3 April 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000324

Van Lange, P., Huckelba, A., 2021 Psychological distance: How to make climate change less abstract and closer to the self, Current Opinion in Psychology, 2021, 42: 49-53, online, accessed 3 April 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000373