Watch these two videos from France and the USA, which explore how young people in particular may be affected by different emotions with relation to the climate crisis. Do you relate to any of the emotions the young people express? Do you feel that any of the emotions expressed are less relatable for you? If they are not relatable, what are the reasons for them feeling these emotions when you don’t necessarily do so?
The young people in the videos were knowledgeable and passionate about climate change and said that they found that taking action helped to relieve anxiety, but that anxiety increased when seeing those around them and particularly those in positions of power not acting quickly enough.
Scientists tell us that we have a short time in which to act decisively or humanity will face extreme consequences. We are making changes, but the science indicates that it’s not yet enough. So, an obvious question is, why are people not taking sufficient action when the dangers are known and understood? Why, for example do people still choose to fly for holidays when they know the impact it has – and that in some cases it may be destroying the very locations that they are choosing to fly to?
The solutions exist – so what is it about our emotions and psychology that is preventing us from acting to combat climate change and from demanding an adequate response from our leaders? There are lots of complex psychological factors which may serve as barriers to action, but here are just a few:-
Brain biases
Hyperbolic discounting. Our brains are wired to pay more attention to the present rather than the future. Throughout most of human evolution we needed to react quickly to what might kill us or eat us now, not to something that would happen later. This means that it is psychologically easy for us to take action to address clear, immediate threat, but very hard to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges like climate change. The problem is that when the threats of the climate crisis becomes immediate for those most responsible, it will likely be far harder to take effective action to combat it.
The Bystander effect. This is a phenomenon whereby a critical situation (such as a crime) occurs while a crowd of people stand and watch without taking action. One reason for this is that we tend to believe that someone else will deal with a crisis. This belief again developed for evolutionary reasons – if a group of hunter gatherers was threatened it was a waste of effort for every single member to act in defence. In smaller groups, it was clear who would act to protect the group. Today, though, this leads us to assume that someone else will do something. The larger the group is, the less responsible we feel to act and the stronger this bias becomes. Another cause of the bystander effect is that we rely on others to make sense of an ambiguous situation – so if we don’t see others taking action we think that acting must be the wrong thing to do. We don’t want to put ourselves at a disadvantage or look stupid by taking action when no one else is. In order to stay safe, we take our cues from others and wait for enough others to take action that we are sure it’s a sensible thing to do. When we look at others continuing ‘business as usual’ despite the threat of the climate crisis, the bystander effect convinces us that that must be the right way to behave and we follow suit.
Cognitive dissonance. This is the discomfort we feel when we encounter an idea that conflicts with a belief we already hold. We then try to resolve the discomfort by arguing away the new evidence. It is important to us in general to believe that we are decent and kind people. But the evidence of the climate crisis is that, by continuing our patterns of consumption, we are complicit in a crime which threatens the very existence of humanity on this planet as we know it. ‘No one wants to believe that their daily activities – from switching on a light to checking your phone to washing your hair – are responsible for a global disaster that has already turned millions of people into climate refugees.’ So Robert Gifford, environmental psychologist, says ‘people change their minds about the issue rather than changing their habits because it’s an easier way to cope’. We KNOW about the seriousness of the issue but we simultaneously find a way to NOT KNOW, or to ignore it and push it to the corners of our mind so that we don’t have to change our behaviours in a way that challenges us too much.
Information taken from:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-your-brain-stops-you-from-taking-climate-change-seriously