Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (31 page)

What is interesting about these clips is that they all have particular combinations of rational and emotional force in which sometimes there is more push on one dimension and sometimes more on the other. Furthermore, some of the clips are essentially empowering and enabling, explaining that anything any of us does will make a difference to the whole global issue, but some could potentially have the opposite effect. It might just have been me but the clip about the industrial rise of China and its proliferation of power stations left me, I think, temporarily down. Other clips seemed to lift my spirits.

Of course, most people recognise that emotion is crucial to persuasion, which is why so much of political and economic persuasion, and indeed advertising in general, is aimed at the human emotional system. But how do emotions actually connect to rational thought? And what effect do some of the core parts of Gore’s seminal film have on mood state and aspects of thinking? Can we try to be more systematic about the effects of certain parts of this film on how we feel and think, so that we can learn a little more about how a particular mental focus affects us all?

The Gore film is all about showing us what will happen to the world if we do not do something, with interweaving emotional and rational scientific arguments. It is about getting us all to recognise the risks involved in continuing with our current lifestyles. But getting people to recognise the riskiness of their own behaviour can often be a difficult process. We know more generally from endless studies that people are bad at estimating risk. People rely on inferences based on what they remember hearing or observing about the risk in question. In other words, they make a judgement, and this judgement is affected by a number of distinct biases. One type of bias is called the ‘availability heuristic’, which is that people judge an event as likely or frequent if instances of it are easy to imagine or recall.

One experimental demonstration of the relationship between imageability and risk was carried out by Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman and Combs in 1978: they gave
subjects the annual death toll of motor vehicle accidents and asked them to estimate the frequencies of forty other causes of death. They found that highly imaginable (and plausible) accidents were judged to cause as many deaths as diseases, whereas diseases actually take about fifteen times as many lives.

You could argue that the availability heuristic makes some sense because frequently occurring events are easier to imagine or recall than infrequent events, but the problem is, of course, that availability is also related to factors unrelated to mere frequency of occurrence. For example, according to some researchers the release of the film
Jaws
meant that people suddenly thought that shark attack was a much more common occurrence than it actually is, on the basis of the graphic depictions of the shark (and its large cavernous mouth) in the film. Therefore, it seems that if you want to emphasise the risks associated with any behaviour you need to make any negative images associated with it as memorable as possible. So the problem in changing behaviour is how to manipulate the availability heuristic so that people will no longer underestimate the risks associated with behaviours that give rise to diseases such as cancer, stroke, asthma or diabetes (hard to form clear images of, hidden, and therefore ‘unlikely’ to happen).

One way of doing this is to psychologically manipulate the memorability of images. We now know that the most memorable and enduring of all human memories are ‘flash-bulb memories’, which are hardwired memories designed for human survival and shaped by evolution. These are the kinds of enduring and stable memories that we have if we’ve ever been in a near-fatal car accident or any other major trauma (see Beattie 2004; Lee and Beattie 1998, 2000): emotional memories, where every single aspect of the scene is encoded apparently for all time by the joint action of two of the most primitive parts of the human brain – the reticular formation and the limbic system. If you have once driven too quickly and you have a near-fatal crash you will have a flashbulb memory of the event – a clear, rich, powerful and enduring image – and you will perhaps (for the first time) realise how dangerous fast driving actually is.

But what really affects whether we have a detailed memory of an event? Like many people I have for a long time been fascinated and depressed by the vagaries of human memory: long before I became a psychologist. Like anyone who has lost a parent early in life I have always longed for vivid memories of my loved one as I wished to relive our days together. I was close to my father and I loved his company, but my memories of those days are weak and disjointed. His voice has no tone or pitch in my memory, and he has no distinctive pattern of movement (how did he walk?), no facial tics that I can recall and his smile is the smile of photographs (that slightly forced smile that shy people do) which I have somehow managed to project back onto his everyday behaviour. But the night he died, and the moment I heard, I can recall with an aching vividness.

My memory of that fateful night is just such a ‘flashbulb memory’. This phenomenon was first investigated by two psychologists from Harvard called Roger Brown and James Kulik over thirty years ago. They argued that these memories are hardwired in the human brain because they have a high selection value in evolutionary terms. These memories are triggered by events characterised by a high level of surprise (eliciting a response from the reticular formation) and a high level of ‘consequentiality’ (eliciting a response from the limbic system). When you have this joint action from two of the most primitive parts of the human brain, this indelible memory is laid down. According to Brown and Kulik the innate basis for this type of memory works as follows.

To survive and leave progeny, the individual human had to keep his expectations of significant events up to date and close to reality. A marked departure from the ordinary in a consequential domain would leave him unprepared to respond adequately and endanger his survival. The ‘Now print!’ mechanism must have evolved because of the selection value of permanently retaining biologically crucial, but unexpected events.

The extraordinary thing about flashbulb memories, however, is that it is not necessarily the details of the event itself
(or the message) that are recorded for all time, but the circumstances in which you hear the news (you remember who told you, the time, the place, the ongoing activity, etc.). Brown and Kulik argue that for evolutionary survival it is the circumstances that are the crucial thing. You must remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when these surprising and consequential events occurred because, as Brown and Kulik say, ‘Nothing is always to be feared or always to be welcomed. It depends. In part, on place.’ (1977:98)

The big psychological question is: can we produce flash-bulb memories for events that are not life-threatening and that do not affect personal survival? The answer would appear to be ‘yes’ because many of us have flashbulb memories for major cultural events such as where we were and who we were with the day we learned of Diana Princess of Wales’s death, ten years or more after the event. So flash-bulb memories can be elicited by events that are not life-threatening for the individual.

Recently, I wanted to explore how vivid different types of memories are. Are these flashbulb memories more vivid than our happiest personal memories which we reminisce about endlessly? Do we have flashbulb memories about highly surprising and consequential events that do not involve us personally, for example 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana (Brown and Kulik’s research would suggest that the answer to this is a very clear ‘yes’)? My new study was commissioned to mark the launch of UKTV’s new history channel ‘Yesterday’. I sampled a large number of participants, ranging in age from 18 to 84, using a questionnaire with 32 items: eight asking for information about positive historical memories (e.g. Charles and Diana’s wedding), eight investigating negative historical events (e.g. 9/11), eight investigating positive personal events (e.g. your own wedding day) and eight investigating negative personal events (e.g. the death of a loved one), all randomly ordered on the questionnaire.

The results revealed that surprising negative events, as predicted, produced some of the most vivid memories, but interestingly 9/11 produced more vivid memories than
even the death of a loved one. 80% of the participants recalled who told them about 9/11, 84% recalled what time it was when they heard, 92% recalled where they were, and 71% recalled their ongoing activity. This represents an extraordinary level of recall nearly eight years after the event. Even more extraordinary was that 71% of our participants (who were old enough) recalled where they were forty-six years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Flashbulb memories tell us something very interesting about how the human brain stores vivid, indelible images and we now know a lot more about the neural mechanisms involved in this process. It also tells us something interesting about ourselves. Why do I, who expressed very little interest in Princess Diana when she was alive, have a flashbulb memory of the moment when I heard about her death? Why did my brain respond to this event as ‘consequential’ in the way that it did?

Could we ever aim to elicit flashbulb memories carefully and deliberately in order to change behaviour? Could we create flashbulb memories for certain key events involving risky behaviour, so that we affect the availability heuristic and lead people to reappraise the risks associated with their behaviour? For example, could we manipulate the nature of the images that we present to an audience (in public-service advertising or in film) beyond mere shock value to something more meaningful, more personal, more emotional, and more consequential for that individual? This would be a considerable challenge but one that could pay dividends with respect to effecting change in risky behaviour. How can we generate flashbulb memories regarding the effects of smoking on coronary heart disease, for example? How can we generate flashbulb memories for climate change? Did Al Gore, using presumably little more than his own psychological intuition, manage to produce flashbulb memories for what the world will be like if we do not change our behaviour immediately? In other words, has he managed to convince us of the risks associated with global warming, and has he somehow managed to produce indelible images of the effects of climate change?

These are some of the questions that I wanted to answer. I wanted to measure people’s responses to the crucial clips in the Gore film in a more systematic way. I wanted to determine how each of these clips affected people emotionally in terms of mood state and also how each of the clips affected rational thinking. I wanted to start to think about the relationship between emotion and thinking in this highly charged area.

More generally, if you want people to think about changing their behaviour, what should you do? Should you frighten them, depress them or elevate their spirits? Should you show them cuddly polar bears trying to clamber onto a raft of ice or the power stations of China belching dark, polluting smoke into the atmosphere? I wanted to begin to understand some of this. This was one set of motivations. The second was to see how good a psychologist Al Gore actually was. He was clearly trying to change our behaviour with his film, by appealing to both our thinking and emotional systems. He wanted to make us aware of the huge risks involved if we did not start to change our behaviour immediately. He wanted to stimulate some of the most primitive parts of the human brain in evolutionary terms to lay down indelible traces. But had he pulled it off?

And what about any other films that have attempted to provide us with shocking detail about the consequences of climate change? I made a point of getting
The Day After Tomorrow
from the local video shop to see how much more likely I thought that an impending climate-change disaster was in my lifetime after watching some graphic scenes of climate-change hell.
The Day After Tomorrow
was the 2004 climate-change disaster movie straight from Hollywood, the opening of which is based loosely on what happened to a group of scientists researching depth of ice on a huge floating ice shelf in Antarctica, called Larsen B. In February 2002 the ice shelf shattered violently, but luckily the Hollywood hero Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quaid, escaped in the nick of time to save (in no particular order) his son trapped in a library in New York (swallowed up by a tsunami generated by climate change that has drowned the city,
despite the fact that tidal waves like this cannot be caused by rising temperatures; see Walker and King 2008:72), his relationship with his son (he was always late picking him up as child because of his busy job as a leading scientist), his relationship with his long-suffering research assistants (loyal to the end, literally in the case of one of them), his relationship with his estranged wife (who cures cancer in children for a living), and the whole of what remains of America itself (although Los Angeles is completely lost, with too much expressed emotion in the film to a series of twisters that have somehow managed to form over land in the film, in contrast to forming over water, which is what science teaches us). As Walker and King comment caustically, ‘many of the movie’s subsequent events managed to be both exciting and scientifically ludicrous’ (2008:72). The film produces many apparently powerful visual images – the tsunami hitting New York, for example; the Statue of Liberty barely visible out of the flood water; the big freeze – but probably none that affect our estimation of the likelihood of any of this happening.

So what was different from
Jaws
and that huge cavernous reddened mouth that seems to come to mind every time I’m swimming out of my depth in the sea? Perhaps it is the fact that we all feel that some of
The Day After Tomorrow
is implausible and therefore we reject the whole thing. Perhaps it is the scale of the trauma and the human tragedy; perhaps we, as human beings, shut down in situations like this both emotionally and cognitively, and deal with them that way. Perhaps it’s just not a very good film. If Los Angeles were to be devastated in the way depicted, then I would normally expect to see a little bit more desperation and helplessness written on the faces of the survivors. Perhaps the film doesn’t make us connect with the emotional journey of Jack Hall on his ludicrous physical journey, mainly by foot on snow shoes, through miles and miles back to New York to save his son. So in the case of a film like this we have vivid (but presumably temporary) images that appear not to connect to any perception of risk.
The Day After Tomorrow
certainly produced many surprising images, but perhaps our brains did not see them as consequential in the slightest,
because the film was not sufficiently emotionally involving and perhaps even because some of the film was clearly ludicrous (although this would imply that rational thought could influence the formation of these kinds of memories, which remains to be seen).