“Global warming doesn’t make evolutionary sense to us,” says Weber. “Our minds haven’t adjusted to the much more complex technological risks that are removed in space and time.”
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Our lack of past experience with global warming is also exacerbated by the fact that global warming is not a clear and present danger but, rather, something that is projected to reveal its most dramatic consequences decades from now.
“It’s a very well established fact about human behavior,” says Slovic, “that we discount future negative outcomes a great deal, especially if it means having to postpone some immediate positive benefit, such as the convenience of driving our car.” He likens our attitudes toward the future risks of global warming to how teenagers discount the risk of smoking, despite abundant evidence of its risks.
“Young people tend not to be quite clear about whether there will be consequences from their smoking, what they would be, and what it would be like for them,” he says. “The future risk is not imaginable, and that tends to make people more complacent.”
The fact that global warming appears to represent a hazard of nature also leads people to underestimate the risk. “People don’t respect nature and what it can do,” says Slovic. “They feel nature is benign, even though it really isn’t.”
Case in point: He contrasts the response to Hurricane Katrina with the response to September 11: “After Katrina, people started to pay more attention to strengthening the levies even though the information was available in advance. There was a short period of time when there was a heightened response; then it dampened.”
The response to September 11, in contrast, has been far more significant and long-lasting, even though, he says, “from a physical damage standpoint, 9/11 was relatively smaller.” The difference was that Katrina, which many scientists believe was fueled by human-driven global warming, seemed like an act of nature, and that failed to trigger our millennia-old fears of having our homes and lives invaded by a stranger—fears evoked by September 11.
REALITY VERSUS WORLDVIEW
A third obstacle that limits people’s response to global warming—and even their willingness to believe in it—is also one of the most intractable. In a series of recent studies, a group of scholars from Yale and other universities have been studying how cultural values shape our perceptions of risk. Based on the premise that Americans are culturally polarized on a range of societal risks, from global warming to gun control, Paul Slovic, Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, and others analyzed the results of surveys and experiments that matched the risk perceptions of some 5,000 Americans to the worldviews of those Americans. Their finding: People may simply reject evidence that clashes with their worldview.
“To a certain extent our attitude toward risk and behaviors are conditioned not just by the raw facts of the matter, but by the orientation that we have to the world,” says Slovic.
In the case of global warming, researchers found two general worldviews that seemed to have the most significant influence on perception and action. One group consists of egalitarians, or people who prefer a society where wealth, power, and opportunity are broadly distributed. Researchers called the other group the hierarchists, those who prefer a society that is linear in its structure, with leaders on top and followers below.
“What we’ve seen through this research is that egalitarians are generally more concerned about environmental risks over a range of hazards, including global warming. Hierarchists tend to be less concerned,” says Slovic. In fact, he says, when it comes to perceptions of risk, one’s worldview is vastly more influential than other individual characteristics, such as race or political ideology.
The researchers also found that when proposed solutions to global warming clash with people’s worldviews, those people are more likely to reject evidence of the problem altogether. For example, in one experiment, Kahan and his colleagues gave two groups of people two contrasting newspaper articles about global warming. Both reported the problem in similar terms: temperatures were rising, human behavior was the cause of climate change, and global warming could lead to disastrous environmental and economic consequences if left unaddressed. But the articles then went on to offer different solutions: one called for increased regulation of pollution emissions, while the other called for revitalization of nuclear power.
When people with a hierarchical worldview received the article that called for increased regulation—policies currently associated with a more egalitarian and liberal worldview—they were more likely to reject that global warming was a problem than when they received the article that called for a revitalization of nuclear power.
This research helps explain the attitudes and behaviors of global warming skeptics. Slovic says it also shows how difficult it is to communicate persuasively when people feel their worldview is challenged. “The truly disconcerting thing about this work is that it shows how difficult it is to change people’s views and behaviors with factual information,” says Slovic. “People spin the information to keep their worldview intact.” They do their best to hold onto their worldview, says Slovic, because so much of their personal identity and social networks are tied up in maintaining it.
FEARFUL FUTURES, HOPEFUL ACTIONS
With such significant obstacles to spurring action on global warming, what can social scientists recommend about how to inspire the necessary response?
First, communication about global warming needs to reach people’s emotions and trigger fear, and that means emphasizing the dramatic consequences to come. “It is only the potentially catastrophic nature of (rapid) climate change (of the kind graphically depicted in the 2004 film Day After Tomorrow) and the global dimension of adverse effects, which may create hardships for future generations, that have the potential for raising a visceral reaction to the risk,” Elke Weber writes in a recent paper on why global warming doesn’t scare us yet.
This means making future hardships vivid, imaginable, personalized, and credible, says Slovic. For example, he suggests that people communicating about global warming answer the questions, How will it change the whole economy and whole quality of life in a particular region? Will the forests die out? Will the summers be so hot and dry that the earth will be uninhabitable?
In setting out to evoke fear, however, one must tread judiciously. “If people are being scared without seeing a way out, it makes them dysfunctional and freeze,” says Weber. “They will switch channels and watch Britney Spears instead.”
And that leads to a second recommendation: people need to be offered a set of actions they can take to combat global warming. “In general, a good guide is: Where does most of our energy get used?” says Susanne C. Moser, coeditor of the 2007 anthology Creating a Climate for Change. The top three categories of energy consumption for individuals are transportation, home energy use, and food consumption. Already, plenty of books and Web sites offer tips on how to reduce energy use in all these areas. Reports on global warming need to draw on these resources so that people feel there is something concrete they can do about it.
Finally, beyond the many small energy-saving solutions people can take, combating global warming will require making people more aware of the large-scale lifestyle changes that will really make a difference. “I don’t want to have to make a zillion little decisions,” says Baruch Fischoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the former president of the Society for Risk Analysis. “Rather, I’d like to see people working out for me some alternative ways of organizing my life where it will really be a sustainable way to live.”