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Tools for transformation

Humans & Climate Action: Seven Insights from Neuroscience & Psychology

The LEVERS project aims to reach diverse learners across communities by engaging them in action for climate justice. This requires tackling polarisation, and finding ways to unite those with opposing points of view around shared goals. To go beyond the bubble or echochamber of those already interested in taking climate action, LEVERS draws on insights from project partner UCL Climate Action Unit, and specifically their “Seven Insights from Neuroscience and Psychology” (henceforth “The Seven Insights”, see Roberts et al., 2021).

The Seven Insights as defined by UCL Climate Action Unit

Insight 1: Speak to the Elephant

Our brains think in two fundamentally different ways: intuitive thinking (the Elephant) and deliberative reasoning (the Rider). Intuitive thinking is automatic and shaped by people’s lived experiences. Deliberative reasoning, on the other hand, requires focus and effort. It allows us to think through hypothetical or future situations that we might not have direct experience of. Elephant and Rider interact in all of our thinking and decisions, but most of the time, intuitions come first, reasoning second.

The metaphor captures very well the power imbalance between the two: as a rule of thumb, expect that about 95% of what goes on in our brains sits in the Elephant, with only a few % of our brain processing going to the Rider. Neither intuitive thinking nor deliberative reasoning are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They coexist, and both can lead to good as well as to bad thinking. The more we become knowledgeable about an issue, the more that expertise becomes part of our Elephants.

The profound implication of this is that when engaging with people on climate change it is important to start from their personal, lived experiences. This applies to citizens as well as to professionals within the context of their professional expertise.

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The Elephant and Rider metaphor comes from psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. The metaphor is similar to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1/System 2 description of intuitive thinking and deliberative reasoning in Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Words and phrases may lack meaning or have opposing meanings to different groups. This often happens across different communities who have started to use words differently. Unhelpful reactions, powerful ones, to the misunderstanding that this creates, are often based on intuitive (Elephant) rather than deliberative (Rider) thinking.

Ginger-the-Dog effects often happen between professional communities. For example, terms like uncertainty and risk have almost diametrically opposed meanings in the physical sciences and in economics. These semantic differences have serious consequences for cross-sectoral communication on climate change and the threats it poses for society.

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Ginger-the-Dog – as we apply it to climate change – is a specific instance of a recurring problem throughout history: how language can break down when terms become instilled with different meanings. A recent overview of this is provided in Mark Thompson’s 2016 book Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? A Scientific American popular science article looks at recent evidence on the matter.

The forming and strengthening of an opinion or worldview can be likened to starting at the top of a pyramid and, tentatively at first, choosing one side. As a loosely held belief becomes more strongly held through self-persuasion, we are moving down the pyramid and progressing ever further from someone who took their first step down the other side.

The more entrenched our views become, the greater the degree of rationalisation our elephant-driving minds will produce. As concerns about climate change increase, and in the absence of recommendations for actions that people feel are concrete, doable, and meaningful, more and more people will make decisions as to what they think the correct course of action is.

These decisions trigger a process of self-persuasion, a descent down the pyramid. Without a sense of plurality and alignment between different views, views on ‘climate action’ are at risk of splintering into many incompatible and competing interpretations. If this situation is allowed to fester, this can lead to ‘action paralysis’ as democratic mandates for decisive policy action might not materialise.

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The Analogy of the Pyramid stems from Carol Tavris’s and Elliot Aronson’s book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

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How this translates into the polarisation of public opinion on many pressing societal issues is explained in Dr Kris De Meyer’s TEDx talk The Genie of Polarisation.

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How it affects climate change in particular is explored in the podcast Why there’s more to climate action than reducing your carbon footprint.

All high-stakes debates in society that are thought to be factual, are actually dominated by social factors. The positions we take in these debates depend on how our brains interpret the intentions and motivations of the people we disagree with (‘stupid-crazy-evil’ reasoning); whether we trust particular messengers or not; and what people around us think about the same issue.

On the upside, we learn readily from stories about the actions and experiences of other people. We can also empathise with them and truly understand their perspective, rather than succumb to snap judgements.

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Social: why our brains are wired to connect by social neuroscientist Matthew Liebermann provides an excellent overview of the main social sides there are to the human brain. The Social Animal by Elliot and Joshua Aronson is a classic textbook in social psychology – yet very readable. ‘Stupid-crazy-evil’ reasoning in the context of climate change is explored in Kris’s article Sustainability: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ .

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On empathy and engaging in non-judgmental communication, see Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg (video)

‘Values’ – loosely defined – are answers that people give to the question “What do you care about in life?”

Several frameworks exist that look at how to foster people’s pro-environmental values; or how to connect with people who put other values above pro-environmental ones.

From our perspective, values are a shorthand to help understand what resonates with our intuitive, elephant brains. They can help to understand why certain stories and message frames may lead to engagement, while others lead to indifference or even angry rejection. They can also help to understand why different groups of people can be engaging in the same behaviour for different underlying reasons.

Ressource 

Much research in the psychology of values traces back to Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values. In the UK, work on how to foster pro-environmental values is led by organisation The Common Cause Foundation.

Two organisations with a focus on connecting to different value groups Cultural Dynamics and Campaign Strategy. The value segmentation framework of the latter 2 organisations (‘Settler – Prospector – Pioneer’) is explained in Chris Rose’s book What Makes People Tick.

Is it ever useful to scare the Elephant?

Fear can be an effective motivator of personal change. This will work especially well if a threatening message is accompanied by actions that feel concrete, doable and effective: once you take the action, you should no longer feel fear.

Communications about climate change rarely meet these criteria – yet these are the messages that many instinctively reach for. Whereas fear messaging works for some individuals, it can also create anxiety and hopelessness, numbness and switching off or angry rejection and denial. This means that, as a strategy to drive change across society, fear won’t do it: it has too many unintended side effects.

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The idea that fear and threat messaging can have adverse effects is prevalent in the work of many psychologists. One entry point is Elliot Aronson’s excellent article Fear, Denial and Sensible Action in the Face of Disasters.

The conventional view is that beliefs, understanding, knowledge, awareness and concern lead to action. This is correct – but only when we have strong convictions about a particular issue.

That does not explain where our strong beliefs and convictions come from. Nor does it explain what happens when our opinions are weak, or when we experience difficult choices between different options that matter to us.

In these circumstances the arrow points in the opposite direction: our choices and actions will change our beliefs, understanding and awareness through a process of self-persuasion. The more we do about an issue, the more we will start caring about it.

This insight is a major challenge to the conventional approach, which seeks to change beliefs and convictions as a precursor to changes in behaviour.

 

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The idea that actions drive beliefs originated with social psychologists in the 1950s. In 2020, LEVERS contributor Dr Kris De Meyer published an academic paper summarising the evidence, and what it means for the stories we tell about climate change.

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Dr Kris De Meyer also gave a TEDx talk on the same topic. An example of the profound impacts this can have in real life is explored in documentary Right Between Your Ears

Take-home messages from the Seven Insights.

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