Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (37 page)

After the seminar, David McNeill, one of the most charming and creative psychologists I have ever met, walked me around the campus in the sweltering heat, my tee-shirt
sticking to me. He showed me the bronze sculpture by Henry Moore that depicts nuclear energy on the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1. Here Enrico Fermi produced the first sustained controlled nuclear reaction in the Manhattan Project. This sculpture was unveiled at 3.36 p.m. on 2 December 1967, twenty-five years to the minute after the actual event. Many visitors think that the sculpture resembles a mushroom cloud, but others just see this as a (somewhat malevolent) human skull. And, of course, it is both: one moment it is a skull, the next it is a cloud. The most destructive force in the world coming from a human mind, the mind encased in its protective skull helmet. I touched the bronze sculpture and it was boiling hot in the Chicago heat in the 90s; I wanted to remember the heat that afternoon (it might just be a stimulus to action), like a foretaste perhaps of what was to come.

But that night I had a strange moment on my nightly run, as I was coming back from Harms Woods just outside Skokie (what an ominous name, I thought later). It was still too hot to run, my brain was working slowly and the road intersections were complex and unfamiliar. As I was crossing the road I looked to my left and I saw it coming round a large bend. I realised that it was not going to be able to stop, even though part of me thought that it was bound to: cars always stop (that is what my sum total of experiences had taught me so far). It was an odd moment that slowed down for ever as the grey bonnet of the car sloughed into me. I somehow managed to stay on my feet, which I suspect was just as well, otherwise the car would have gone over me. I somehow managed to bounce off the car. The driver was very concerned (as were all the other drivers who stopped). He was hesitant and stammering, saying that he wasn’t used to runners, out on that road, and he wanted to take me to the hospital for a check-up (I suspect that is the American way), but I insisted on running back to my hotel, my left leg trembling, well beyond my conscious attempts to control it, a strange unfamiliar gait to my run. I had found my flashbulb memory (and I had a black eye for a few weeks as a cue to memory, just in case I needed it).

The problem that human beings have, of course, is that
evolution has prepared us to survive in the here and now, not in a century’s time. As an individual human being, one’s life can finish at a crossroads in Skokie on a night too hot for this time of year. I am sure that, after last night’s run, every intersection I cross will be done with greater care and attention. I have a clear and unmistakeable flashbulb memory of the accident (and of Michael Jackson’s death, which I learned about the following day). My learning mechanisms are adapted to allow me to change my behaviour on one trial when it is necessary (see Seligman’s classic 1970 paper on this topic), but changing my behaviour for things that may happen in a hundred years’ time is a different issue altogether. It is quite simply not how our brains work in terms of implicit and unconscious processes. Richard Dawkins, some time ago, described human beings in terms of the concept of the selfish gene, and perhaps we are all just selfish gene machines trying to survive and trying to get our own genes into the next generation; no more, no less. For us to save the planet we will have to find ways to go beyond some of these natural biological instincts.

But I was pleased that, despite all these negatives, certain messages were getting through and that some psychological change was happening. Our unconscious attitude to the environment seemed to be relatively favourable, even now (I suspect that it would not have been quite so positive in the past, but we have no actual data on this). Our unconscious mind seems to know already that low-carbon-footprint products are good; now we need to make sure that this is translated into actual behaviour.

What will be the stimulus for behavioural change? It will almost certainly not be small essays on the side of products about the size of the carbon footprint or rational arguments with cosy, homely metaphors about global warming (where are my slippers?). We need to recognise that human beings have a conscious and an unconscious mind (Freud at least was right on that, but wrong on the role of the sexual drive and the libido in their subdivision). If we want to change unconscious non-reflective behaviour of the kind that is destroying the planet, we need to communicate more directly with the unconscious mind. It is as simple and
as complex as this. But we know that this is at least possible, because we do it every time we unconsciously gesture and other people unconsciously respond to the critical information in the gestures. Of course, recognising that there are two great subsystems in the mind might be one small step in the process of making progress in this area.

So finally, say I was asked to explain in one sentence why we aren’t saving the planet (that, after all, is what I was implying in the title – some sort of pithy and short answer), on the basis of the psychological explorations that I have carried out in this book. What would I really say was the answer from a psychological perspective? I think I would probably say something like the following: ‘We aren’t saving the planet because not enough people care deeply enough, and those who do have failed to understand the minds of those who don’t, and how these other minds (and indeed their own) are essentially divided into two great subsystems, each with its own essential instincts and logic. Until we understand more about these instincts and logic and how the two subsystems learn and adapt and direct behaviour, I feel that real cooperative action between human beings will be a major problem in the area of sustainability and climate change.’

Of course, it turned out to be two sentences in the end, and not just one. But I think that this is allowable in the present circumstances. Just think of it as one sentence from each half of my brain, and let’s leave it at that. For the moment.

• Global warming clearly requires urgent and cooperative action from us all. As Walker and King (2008) wrote, ‘We are all part of the problem, and each of us will need to be part of the solution.’ And we, as consumers, can actually do something significant through our everyday behaviours and choices. Carbon labelling can potentially empower consumers to make a significant difference and it could work well with a significant proportion of the population, perhaps with a little more thought about how the footprint is actually represented. Its efficacy depends critically, of course, on underlying attitude.

• Explicit attitudes to low-carbon-footprint products appear to be very positive. Implicit attitudes (a better predictor of actual behaviour in socially sensitive domains such as sustainability, and a better predictor of behaviour when there is any sort of mental or emotional pressure on the decision-making or when decisions are being made under time pressure) also appear to be very positive in the one sample tested in this book. This gives us some grounds for optimism.

• Nevertheless, there is a significant proportion of ‘green fakers’ out there (the exact proportion to be determined with further research), who explicitly and consciously espouse green attitudes, but whose implicit and unconscious attitude appears to be at odds with their publicly expressed attitude. They may not actually know
what their unconscious attitude actually is (after all, it is unconscious!), and they may live an interesting life in which they are puzzled by many of their everyday behaviours, which might seem perennially at odds with the attitudes that they think they hold.

• This clash between their implicit, unconscious attitude and their explicit attitude can potentially be detected through gesture–speech mismatches, where the form and meaning of their unconscious iconic gestures do not match the accompanying talk, in terms of the core ideas being represented by these two channels of communication. This could be very useful for getting below the surface of what people say in interviews or focus groups.

• Carbon labelling is sometimes just about effective communication (no more, no less), to facilitate the behavioural articulation of the underlying implicit attitude through consumer choice. But we need to think carefully about how we represent and communicate this information.

• However, we will also have to work on, and change, both the explicit and implicit attitudes of significant sections of the population.

• For carbon labelling to work, we must make the carbon label psychologically much more salient than it is at present.

• Visual attention is significantly directed to the carbon footprint only on some products. With certain other products there is very little visual attention to the carbon label in the kind of time frame necessary to make a decision in the typical supermarket shopping experience.

• Many more stages of the communicative process for carbon labelling also need to be considered. We have, so far, considered only the most basic step (visual fixation of the carbon label); we need also to consider the interpretation of the label, how it is emotionally processed, how the information is mentally represented and remembered and the impact of this representation on decision-making.

• We can change how people think and feel about global warming. Sections of Al Gore’s film
An Inconvenient
Truth
had a big effect on people both emotionally and in terms of how they thought. They felt
more motivated
to do something about climate change,
more able
to do something and
less likely
to think that they had
no control
over the climate change process after watching some sections of the film. The whole process was almost certainly directed by their strong and significant emotional response to the film. This was, I have to say, a fairly optimistic result.

• So we do now know that with careful thought we can produce a genuine (and measurable) psychological shock to both our emotional system and how we think. But how temporary or enduring this shock is, and how it impacts on implicit attitude (and therefore on many aspects of behaviour), remains to be determined.

• Psychology can provide new insights into the whole process of why (and how) we make changes in our behaviour in response to major issues such as climate change. It may also explain why we often do not.

• Psychology experiments can be painfully slow (and they often throw up as many questions as they answer: see below), but they are necessary as small yet essential building blocks in our creation of knowledge in this important area.

• We need to determine whether implicit or explicit attitudes are better predictors of green consumer behaviour in terms of the purchase of low-carbon-footprint products, and we have immediate plans to use online Implicit Association Tests (IATs) and online explicit attitude measures and relate both of these attitudinal measures to Tesco Clubcard data, as a measure of actual consumer behaviour (Tesco will be funding the research). We should be able to do this with a much larger and much more diverse sample than we have used so far (which will involve sociologists and economists as well, as we all move outside our disciplinary silos).

• It would be really useful to know more about the effects
of implicit/explicit attitudinal dissociation on actual consumer behaviour. When there is a clash between the implicit and explicit attitude within a single individual, what impact does this have on their actual consumer choice and on their processing of information about green issues?

• I want to do more research in order to develop gesture– speech mismatches as a possible reliable indicator of implicit/explicit dissociation. Potentially, we could use novel and innovative behavioural measures like this to get beneath the surface of what people say in interviews and focus groups, in order to infer what their unconscious attitude actually is.

• I also want to consider the effects of implicit/explicit dissociation on aspects of cognitive dissonance and link this to people’s responses to persuasive messages about green issues.

• We need to explore the impact of different ways of representing carbon footprint information in the packaging of products on some of the more basic processes of human visual attention (including eye fixation) and to explore the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and the direction of visual attention.

• We need to understand more fully the complex relationship between visual attention to carbon footprint information on packaging (using our eye-tracking methodology) and the extraction of the critical information about carbon footprint, and we also need to explore the impact of these processes on actual consumer choice.

• It is important to explore basic visual attentional processes to carbon footprint information when the products are viewed not in isolation (as they were in the research reported in this book) but in the context of other products (as on supermarket shelves).

• We need to explore new ways of changing implicit attitudes using advertising messages of various forms (including, if necessary, using the same kinds of psychological devices that were used to promote such negative behaviours as smoking and alcohol consumption in the decades between the fifties and the eighties!).

• It would be very interesting to learn more about what subliminal ‘primes’ could be used to alter implicit associations towards low-carbon-footprint products.

• We need urgently to move beyond samples of participants based around a university and to explore implicit and explicit attitudes in very different sections of the population (including taxi drivers if necessary!) to see how general the results we have obtained so far actually are. My guess is that there will be many large and significant groups in the population as a whole in which the implicit attitudes to low-carbon-footprint products are not nearly as positive as the ones that we have so far observed (and that is why more of a change in behaviour has, so far, not been observed).