The 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change

[applegrove]

The 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change

By Chris Mooney at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/11/the-7-psychological-reasons-that-are-stopping-us-from-acting-on-climate-change/

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Psychological Distance. "People have a hard time thinking about -- or acting on -- things and events that are perceived as far in the future, physically distant, happening to other people, or involving uncertainty," notes the new report from ecoAmerica and CRED. Climate change has all four of these attributes -- to our minds, anyway. We think it's something that'll affect our grandchildren, not us (even though it's already upon us). We think of it as physically distant -- involving polar bears, or small island nations we've never visited. We see it as happening to others (Arctic peoples, islanders), and we definitely see it as shot through with uncertainty (or at least, the "skeptics" among us do).

Finite Pool of Worry. People, adds the new report, "are able to worry about only so much at any given point." For the most part, daily concerns swamp us and leave little remaining bandwidth for stressing about something like climate change. So instead, we tune it out. What this means is that media messages that tell people to worry -- because, you know, West Antarctica looks very vulnerable and it contains nearly 11 feet of sea level rise -- can backfire. The new report suggests it's better to present hope by talking about solutions, and also to make climate change personally relevant to people (like all the things they actually worry about are).

Emotional Numbing. On a related note, we simply can get overloaded emotionally, especially by people constantly trying to make us feel fear and alarm. "If communication efforts repeatedly expose people to to emotionally draining messages and images, audiences may eventually stop responding emotionally altogether," says the ecoAmerica/CRED report. Again, this argues for the personalization of the climate issue and a focus on solutions, not on disastrous impacts.

Confirmation Bias and Motivated Reasoning. People also have a tendency to "seek out or absorb only the information that matches their mental model, confirming what they already believe to be true," notes the report. And, it adds, they also argue in such a way as to reach the conclusion they already deeply believe in. You see this every day on Twitter: Climate "skeptics" automatically dismiss new climate change information, even as climate advocates share every new study, and constantly look trumpet new temperature records, links between climate change and present-moment disasters, and so on.




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[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick.....

[KT2000]

2. how about misinformation

served up to the less intelligent. One RWer told me there can't be global warming because the sun is the only thing that produces heat. I just gave up on her.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Expertly managed and heavily funded disinformation should be top of the list. nt

[SkatmanRoth]

5. Misinformation from right wing talk radio

Every program, every day proclaims global warming is a leftwing conspiracy to rule the world. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity indoctrinate their listeners that it is their patriotic duty as true conservative patriots to fight any solution to climate change. To the voices on hate radio it is all political with no science involved.

[The2ndWheel]

4. We're the self-defined stewards of the planet

That's like leaving the writing of government regulation to Wal-Mart(or your favorite corporation of choice).

We can't act on climate change because the things we do is what causes the environment to change. We altered environments with sharp sticks. We want to change the climate when we believe in renewables. Yet we can't take every variable into account. We can fix A, but then B needs fixing. We can fix B, but then there's C. Fixing C causes something to go wrong with A, so we go back to that. Then in trying to fix A so that B and C keep working, something goes wrong with H, which we didn't even know about. That just keeps going on and on.