Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (5 page)

In the days before Harvard, Allport had been a shy, studious boy, often teased by his school friends for having just eight toes as a result of a birth defect. He had a veneer now of Harvard sophistication, of the new international academic in the making, but silences like this made him more uncomfortable. It reminded him of who he had been; maybe of who he was. He knew better than most that personality never really changes. He needed to say something, so he thought that he would make an observation, a psychological observation of something that he had just witnessed. He described how he had watched a small boy of about four on the tram car on the way to Freud’s office who was terrified of coming into contact with any dirt. The boy refused to allow a particular man on the tram to sit beside him because he thought that the man was dirty, despite his mother’s cajoling and reassurance. Allport studied the woman in question and noted how neat and tidy she was, and how domineering in her approach to her son. Allport hypothesised that the dirt phobia of the young boy had been picked up from his mother, someone who needed everything neat and tidy and in its correct place. ‘To him [the boy] everything was
schmutzig
. His mother was a well-starched
Hausfrau
, so dominant and purposive looking that I thought the cause and effect apparent.’

Freud looked at Allport carefully for the first time, with his ‘kindly therapeutic eyes’, and then asked, ‘And was that little boy you?’ Allport blinked uncomfortably and said nothing, appalled by Freud’s attempt to psychoanalyse him on the spot. Allport himself
knew
that his observation was driven by the desire to fill the silence, his desire to display to Freud that as a psychologist he, the young man from Harvard, never stopped observing, and his desire to connect with the great man, maybe even his need for belonging through this essential connection. These were all manifest and clear motives, maybe at different levels but all open to the conscious mind, which should be obvious to all. What it was not was any unconscious desire to reveal his own
deep-seated uncertainties and anxieties resulting from problems in potty training back in Montezuma, Indiana. Allport tried to change the subject but the damage had been done. ‘I realized that he was accustomed to neurotic defenses and that my manifest motivation (a sort of rude curiosity and youthful ambition) escaped him. For therapeutic progress he would have to cut through my defenses, but it so happened that therapeutic progress was not here an issue’ (Allport 1967:7–8).

Allport later wrote that the ‘experience taught me that depth psychology, for all its merits, may plunge too deep, and that psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious’. This was a clear example, in his mind, of the ‘psychoanalytic excess’ that he liked to detail, although needless to say psychoanalysts ever since have not necessarily been convinced by his argument. Faber, writing in 1970, suggested that Freud got it exactly right, that Allport had ‘practiced a kind of deception in order to work his way into Freud’s office. The deception lay in his implied claim that (1) he genuinely wanted to meet Freud as a human being and as an intellectual rather than as an object, and (2) that he (Allport) himself was worth meeting as a human being and as an “intellectual” ’ (Faber 1970:62). Faber believes that Freud saw through this deception quickly and that by asking Allport whether he was the little boy in the story he was in fact indicating to Allport that he knew that he was a ‘dirty little boy’ and that by putting this question to him, Freud was merely trying to restart the conversation in an honest and straightforward way. Elms (1993) attributed even greater analytic power and clarity of thinking to Freud in this meeting. Allport’s childhood was characterised by ‘plain Protestant piety’ (Allport 1968), with an emphasis on clear religious answers to difficult theological and personal questions and an upbringing in an environment that doubled as a home and as a hospital and that was run by Allport’s physician father. According to Elms, the question had such a marked effect on Allport because he ‘was still carrying within him the super-clean little boy’ brought up in that literal and metaphorical sterile Protestant environment
where patients were to be avoided as sources of infection and possible danger.

But Allport was convinced of his own explanation for the event and was determined to do something about this psychoanalytic excess. This meeting encouraged Allport to develop something different, a different sort of approach to the human mind, an approach that stayed with us for some sixty years before anyone really dared challenge it in a systematic way. An approach based around conscious reflection and the power of language to uncover and articulate underlying attitudes, to bring attitudes into the open where they could be studied and analysed objectively and scientifically. This was to characterise the new social psychology that held sway for the next half-century or more and gave us our core methods and techniques in social psychology. This is the armoury that most psychologists who are interested in doing something about climate change necessarily draw on.

Allport made genuine advances in many areas of psychology. In order to develop his science of personality, He began by going through the dictionary and identifying every single lexical item that could be used to describe a person. His trawl pulled in 4500 trait-like words. In these lexical descriptors, the words used in everyday life, he saw the start of a new scientific theory of personality, rooted in the stuff of everyday life, in the words that we use consciously and deliberately to describe other people. It was four years later, in 1924 at Harvard, that Allport began what was in all likelihood the very first course on personality in the United States – ‘Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspect’. It was the kind of course that could well fit into the modern psychology curriculum. He went on to develop theories and write books on prejudice, the psychology of rumour and the concept of the self, developing the careers of many outstanding social psychologists including Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram, Leo Postman, Thomas Pettigrew and M. Brewster Smith. Another of his students was Anthony Greenwald, whom we shall be encountering in a subsequent chapter. Given Allport’s stance on Freud’s fixed attentional gaze on the unconscious, it is highly ironic that Greenwald is best known for taking one of Allport’s core concepts, the attitude, and detailing the unconscious or implicit aspects of it; indeed, he challenged the whole basis for identifying and measuring it, but more of this later.

Allport himself viewed the concept of the attitude as the central plank of the new psychology. He defined it as ‘a
mental and neural state of readiness organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related’ (1935:810). In other words, an attitude is an internal state of mind affected by what we do which affects our behaviour towards the world around us. In 1935 Allport announced proudly that this concept of the attitude was social psychology’s ‘most distinctive and indispensable concept’ (1935:798). Its importance should be clear – it should have a major impact on our behaviour (but of course it’s not the only factor and, in 1991, Azjen argued that the subjective norm, or how you think others will behave, and the level of perceived behavioural control, in other words the control you have over the particular behaviour, are also crucial).

Of course, there is nothing in Allport’s formal definition that formally excludes a possible unconscious component to the attitude (see also Greenwald and Banaji 1995:7). Indeed, Doob, another great scholar of attitude, working in the years shortly after Allport, had defined an attitude as ‘An implicit, drive-producing response considered socially significant in the individual’s society’ (1947:136) and in 1992 in an article in which he looked back at the early development of social psychology, he wrote that in the 1940s and earlier the notion of attitudes operating unconsciously was quite acceptable to many researchers.

But when you read this early work of Allport with fresh eyes, I think that you could go much further than this. I think that in Allport’s classic (1935) chapter, and despite what happened to him in Freud’s office, he initially displays considerable awareness of the unconscious dimensions of an attitude and great sensitivity to this unconscious aspect. When he talks about the early German experimentalists from the Würzburg school, he points out that they believed that attitudes were

neither sensation, nor imagery, nor affection, nor any combination of these states. Time and again they were studied by the method of introspection, always with meagre results. Often an attitude seemed to have no
representation in consciousness other than a vague sense of need, or some indefinite or unanalyzable feeling of doubt, assent, conviction, effort, or familiarity. (Allport 1935:800)

Some psychologists (like Clarke 1911) clearly thought that attitudes were represented in consciousness through ‘imagery, sensation and affection’, but Allport himself seemed to hold quite a different view. Thus he wrote that

The meagreness with which attitudes are represented in consciousness resulted in a tendency to regard them as manifestations of brain activity or of the unconscious mind. The persistence of attitudes which are totally unconscious was demonstrated by Müller and Pilzecker (1900), who called the phenomenon ‘perseveration’. (Allport 1935:801)

So in this classic chapter, Allport not only displays explicit recognition of the significance of the unconscious dimensions of an attitude; he also praises Freud’s contribution to this concept, and specifically applauds him for endowing attitudes with ‘vitality, identifying them with longing, hatred and love, with passion and prejudice, in short, with the onrushing stream of unconscious life’ (Allport 1935:801). This all came from a man who had been personally put off by Freud’s attempt to psychoanalyse him in his office some fifteen years previously.

But his chapter has a historical time line underpinning it: as we get towards the middle and end of the chapter the unconscious is mentioned less and less, and by the final section the focus has moved entirely from the unconscious to the conscious – in effect, to what can be measured with the greatest ease. He seems impressed by Likert’s research which looked at white people’s attitudes to ‘Negros’ and the fact that scales could be used to determine ‘the amount of favor or disfavor toward the rights of the Negro’. The ‘Likert scales’ were measurement devices that pick up on conscious thoughts: sometimes thoughts that maybe we are not that happy with, but conscious thoughts nonetheless. Allport
seems in awe of the work that had been done on intelligence testing, despite the fact that there was still huge disagreement about what ‘intelligence’ actually was. He wrote admiringly about the domain of intelligence, ‘where practicable tests are an established fact although the nature of intelligence is still in dispute’ (and, of course, he is alluding here to the huge debate then raging about how to define the concept of ‘attitude’).

These intelligence tests yielded vast amounts of quantitative data which in his view were clearly of practical value to an emergent nation. He saw the same practical application for attitude measurement and he concluded with some pride that ‘The success achieved in the past ten years in the field of the measurement of attitudes may be regarded as one of the major accomplishments of social psychology in America. The rate of progress is so great that further achievements in the near future are inevitable’ (Allport 1935:832). As soon as he found himself in the domain of intelligence testing and Likert, the unconscious dimensions of the attitude seem to have been forgotten and remained forgotten for a significant period of time. Allport wanted to measure attitudes with precision and reliability, so he went for introspective paper and pencil-type tests. He clearly had his own objection to hypothesising scientifically about unknown and unknowable forces affecting our lives through the unconscious and, given Allport’s influence on the developing field of social psychology, the focus turned away from the unconscious to the conscious, and therefore to self-report-type measures. It stayed there for the next half-century and more.

So, perhaps not surprisingly, I decided to begin my research programme proper by measuring attitudes towards carbon footprint in the tradition of Gordon Allport and the great experimentalist social psychologists who have documented our attitudes for decades, using Likert scales to reveal consciously held attitudes. It was a safe and obvious bet.

What did we already know about environmental attitudes from the available sources? The picture in the published literature is very positive (indeed, almost too positive): generally speaking people say they are extremely
concerned about the environment and really do want to make a difference (although some are more than a little confused about what carbon labelling actually means). Consider the short summary of previous research in
Table 3.1
, which seems quite typical:

Table 3.1
Explicit attitudes towards climate change and environmental behaviour