Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (38 page)

• It is also crucially important to explore implicit and explicit attitudes in countries such as the USA and China. Global warming is after all a global problem, and we need to know more about how both implicit and explicit attitudes to green issues may vary in an international context, and what the impact of such attitudes might be for policy-makers in these various countries (who will have to take the electorate with them).

• I would also like to analyse politicians from different countries talking about the challenges of global warming to see if there is any evidence of dissociation in their own communicational behaviour. For example, are any gesture–speech mismatches present in their talk when they talk about these sorts of green issues? (See, for example, Beattie 2003 for slightly disturbing evidence of gesture–speech mismatches in politicians’ talk, including Tony Blair’s speeches, when they are talking about other hot political topics.) If mismatches are present when they talk about global warming, could this potentially have a big impact on how their ‘urgent’ messages are being received (or not received) by the electorate?

• There is real merit in exploring in much greater detail how emotion directs human behaviour and also how human beings manage to rationalise their actions (perhaps driven primarily by emotional concerns) in a wide
variety of domains, including the broad area of sustainability.

• I would also like to consider the role of metaphor in everyday life and the way that it can direct and shape our thinking, and to think more carefully about the development of new metaphors for communicating the concept of ‘global warming’ more effectively to the public at large.

• This should be linked to an exploration of the role of metaphor in persuading people to change their consumer habits.

• I think that we also need to look at the effects of cognitive dissonance on promoting change in this area by the usual method of getting people to espouse green issues when their underlying attitude is at odds with this.

• But also we need to see whether the use of contradictory iconic gestures generated during talk can interfere with this whole process of attitude change (driven by dissonance). This could be an important issue.

• We need to understand much more about the maintenance of everyday habits (and ways of disrupting them), and how habits to do with consumption link in to core aspects of the self and self-identity.

• We need to make people more aware of what some of the psychological obstacles might be in preventing behavioural change in the general area of global warming.

• We need to come up with a range of psychological solutions that recognise the essential complexity of human beings (and the conscious and unconscious components of their minds) but manage to have real practical value. We need answers to some of the questions that I have posed here and countless others(!) and we need solutions that will actually work. Or I am sure that it will be too late.

• In the meantime, until we have some answers, we might need to use the following slightly more direct approach shown in the graphic.

And please just note the particular laughing face of the supermarket manager in the background of the graphic (that slightly cruel, scornful laugh that you can illustrate so well

 

(
Private Eye
– August 2008)

Source:
www.CartoonStock.com

in cartoons), and the way that he’s looking down on the shoppers with their ‘Wasteful Bastard’ plastic bags. You might not have consciously noticed his expression at first – there is after all so much more going on in the faces of the shoppers in the foreground (the unconscious is a truly wonderful thing) – but my guess is that you probably processed his look unconsciously in the very first few milliseconds of looking at the cartoon, and this may have made the whole thing much funnier (it must have been the supermarket manager’s idea to heap scorn on the offenders this way; he’s certainly enjoying it).

This green faker certainly laughed until he almost cried.

Ajzen, I. (1991) The theory of planned behavior.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
50: 179–211.

Allport, G. W. (1935) Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.),
Handbook of Social Psychology
. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 798–884.

Allport, G. (1967) Gordon Allport. In E. Boring and G. Lindzey (Eds.),
A History of Psychology in Autobiography
. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Vol. 6, pp. 3–25.

Allport, G. (1968) An autobiography. In G. Allport (Ed.),
The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays
. Boston: Beacon, pp. 376–409.

Balcetis, E. and Dunning, D. (2006) See what you want to see: Motivational influences on visual perception.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
91: 612–625.

Banaji, M. R. (2001) Implicit attitudes can be measured. In H. L. Roediger, III, J. S. Nairne, I. Neath, and A. Surprenant (Eds.),
The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder
. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 117–150.

Banaji, M. R. (2006) Tribute: Anthony G. Greenwald. Harvard University. (Online).
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/ mrb_talks/tributes/greenwald.html
(Accessed: 9 April 2009).

Banaji, M. R. (2008) Edge: The Implicit Association Test: Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald. (Online).
www.edge.org/ 3rd_culture/banaji_greenwald08/banaji_greenwald08_index .html
(Accessed: 17 July 2009).

Banaji, M. R. and Hardin, C. (1996) Automatic gender stereotyping.
Psychological Science
7: 136–141.

Beattie, G. (1988)
All Talk
. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Beattie, G. (2003)
Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language
. London: Routledge.

Beattie, G. (2004)
Protestant Boy
. London: Granta.

Beattie, G. (2005)
The Body Politic
, News at Ten Thirty, ITV, UK.

Beattie, G. (2008) What we know about how the human brain works. In J. Lannon (Ed.),
How Public Service Advertising Works
. Henley on Thames, UK: World Advertising Research Centre.

Beattie, G., McGuire, L. and Sale, L. (in press) Do we actually look at the carbon footprint of a product in the initial few seconds? An experimental analysis of unconscious eye movements.
International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability
.

Beattie, G. and Sale, L. (2009) Explicit and implicit attitudes to low and high carbon footprint products.
International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability
5: 191–206.

——(under review) How discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes on green issues are reflected in gesture–speech mismatches as the unconscious attitude breaks through.
Semiotica
.

Beattie, G., Sale, L. and McGuire, L. (in press) An Inconvenient Truth? Can extracts of a film really affect our psychological mood and our motivation to act against climate change?
Semiotica
.

Beattie, G. and Shovelton, H. (1999a) Do iconic hand gestures really contribute anything to the semantic information conveyed by speech? An experimental investigation.
Semiotica
123: 1–30.

——(1999b) Mapping the range of information contained in the iconic hand gestures that accompany spontaneous speech.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
18: 438–462.

——(2000) Iconic hand gestures and the predictability of words in context in spontaneous speech.
British Journal of Psychology
91: 473–492.

——(2001) An experimental investigation of the role of different types of iconic gesture in communication: A semantic feature approach.
Gesture
1(2): 129–149.

——(2002a) An experimental investigation of some properties of individual iconic gestures that affect their communicative power.
British Journal of Psychology
93: 179–192.

——(2002b) What properties of talk are associated with the generation of spontaneous iconic hand gestures?
British Journal of Social Psychology
41: 403–417.

——(2005) Why the spontaneous images created by the hands during talk can help make TV advertisements more effective.
British Journal of Psychology
96: 21–37.

——(2006) When size really matters: How a single semantic feature is represented in the speech and gesture modalities.
Gesture
6(1): 63–84.

——(2009) An exploration of the other side of semantic communication. How the spontaneous movements of the human hand add crucial meaning to narrative.
Semiotica
176.

Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. and Damasio, A. R. (1997) Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy.
Science
275: 1293–1295.

Berry, T., Crossley, D. and Jewell, J. (2008) Check-out carbon: The role of carbon labelling in delivering a low-carbon shopping basket. (Online).
www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/files/Check-out carbon FINAL_300608.pdf
(Accessed: 1 January 2010).

Blair, I. V. and Banaji, M. R. (1996) Automatic and controlled processes in stereotype priming.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
70: 1142–1163.

Bosson, J. K., Swann, W. B. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2000) Stalking the perfect measure of implicit self-esteem: The blind men and the elephant revisited?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
79: 631–643.

Bowman, H., Su, L., Wyble, B. and Barnard, P. (2009) Salience sensitive control, temporal attention and stimulus-rich reactive interfaces. In C. Roda (Ed.),
Human Attention in Digital Environments
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, R. and Kulik, J. (1977) Flashbulb memories.
Cognition
5: 73–99.

Brunel, F. F., Tietje, B. C. and Greenwald, A. G. (2004) Is the Implicit Association Test a valid and valuable measure of implicit consumer social cognition?
Journal of Consumer Psychology
14: 385–404.

Bruner, J. S. (1957) On perceptual readiness.
Psychological Review
64: 123–152.

Bruner, J. S. and Goodman, C. C. (1947) Value and need as organizing factors in perception.
Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology
42: 33–44.

Chaiken, S. and Trope, Y. (Eds.) (1999)
Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology
. New York: Guilford.

Church, R. B. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (1986) The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge.
Cognition
23: 43–71.

Cienki, A. and Müller, C. (Eds.) (2008)
Metaphor and Gesture
. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Clarke, H. M. (1911) Conscious attitudes.
American Journal of Psychology
32: 214–249.

Cummins, J. (2008)
Great Rivals in History: When Politics Gets Personal
. New York: Metro Books.

Damasio, A. R. (1994)
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
. New York: Putnam.

Danesi, M. (1999)
Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction to Semiotics
. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Dasgupta, N. and Greenwald, A. G. (2001) On the malleability of automatic attitudes: Combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
81: 800–814.

Devine, P. G. (1989) Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
56: 5–18.

Dollard, J. and Miller, N. E. (1950)
Personality and Psychotherapy
. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Doob, L. (1947) The behavior of attitudes.
Psychological Review
54: 135–156.

Dostoevsky, F. (1864/1972)
Notes from the Underground
. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Downing, P. and Ballantyne, J. (2007) Tipping point or turning point? Social marketing and climate change. (Online). Ipsos MORI.
www.lowcvp.org.uk/assets/reports/IPSOS_MORI_ turning-point-or-tipping-point.pdf
(Accessed: 5 January 2009).