In this section we are going to explore a bit about our feelings and how they influence our behaviours; both at a personal and a society level.
It’s a cultural stereotype that English people don’t talk about or acknowledge their feelings (and maybe men more than women ?), but perhaps there is a degree of truth in it.
Whether or not we think about them or even recognise them, our feelings have a huge impact on our behaviour. Emotions and psychological factors may drive our actions more than we are ever aware. Advertisers know this very well, and use our emotions to sell us products. As Dale Carnegie wrote,
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.”
Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the father of the modern advertising industry. He called influencing consumer behaviour (often to people unaware of what was happening) the “engineering of consent”. Bernays pioneered the mass marketing of fashion, food, soap, cigarettes, amongst many other consumer products through emotions and psychology. This was the beginning of mass consumerism as we know it today. It didn’t evolve by chancce, but was very deliberately engineered. Mass consumerism is key causal factor or ‘driver’ of the climate crisis.
Just as our emotions and psychology play a huge role in consumer culture, so they also have a huge influence on our actions and behaviours in response to the climate crisis. In this section we will invite you to consider how emotions and psychological factors may impact on us as individuals, and also to explore the effect that they are having on the wider response of human society.