Source: The Guardian
URL: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/audio/2015/apr/29/podcast-biggest-story-psychology-episode6
Date: 29/04/2015
Event: The Biggest Story: Episode 6: Psychology
Credit: The Guardian
Also see:
People:
Aleks Krotoski: Confession time.
James Ball: Hey, um, I'm James, I'm the special projects editor of the Guardian...
Aleks Krotoski: Climate Change Anonymous, at the Guardian.
James Ball: I think I should just quickly confess - I find climate change really hard to engage with. I kind of know it's at risk of killing us all and starving us and causing us massive misery - I find it really hard to read stuff, to start make it immediate, and relate to it, so... I kind of understand the mass of people who know they should be interested in this and aren't. Um, that's probably [inaudible] but, yeah... Sorry.
Aleks Krotoski: To the right of James...
Merope Mills: I'm Merope Mills, I'm in charge of the multimedia, the video and the podcasts, um, and er, I would consider myself a person who's very, very interested in this subject and a massive hypocrite, because shortly after reading the Naomi Klein thing which completely engaged me, and I was totally on board, I then booked a holiday with four flights, um... [Laughter in the studio.] So, that's the kind of stumbling block I'm interested in getting over.
Alan Rusbridger: So, our task this week is to convince James. If we fail, you're on the first bus home, in the morning. [Laughter in the studio.]
Aleks Krotoski: This is the biggest story in the world, from the Guardian. And on this week's programme, we go right to the heart of the problem - why do we find it so hard to care?
Naomi Klein: The trickiest thing about climate change is just knowing that it's this issue, that we are all actively turning away from.
Aleks Krotoski: Most of us know that climate change is something we should be thinking about. In fact, we feel a bit guilty about it. But the message isn't getting through. And if it's the message that isn't working, then it's the messenger that's getting something wrong. The Guardian is one of those messengers. If their well-resourced, high-profile campaign is going to have an impact this time, they need to do their homework, otherwise they're setting themselves up to fail. So what's been the problem, so far?
Naomi Klein: It's just this jargon soup...
[Different voices in the background are saying: "carbon capture and storage"... "thermohaline"... "CCS"... "the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change"... etc.]
Male voice: The words they use just don't make sense to the ordinary person.
Naomi Klein: The IPCC and the UNFCCC - seems like you scan a news story and all you just see are, like, a bunch of numbers and acronyms and phrases that you don't know.
Female voice: I don't know what that means.
Aleks Krotoski: The language is off-putting and the imagery doesn't connect. Endless pictures of polar bears...
[Different voices say "polar bears"... "polar bears"... "polar bears"... etc.]
Female voice: Perched on an ice floe...
Female voice: On a tiny piece of ice...
Male voice: The lone...
[Different voices say "polar bears".]
Female voice: - which is obviously really sad, but not something that you can really relate to, yourself.
Aleks Krotoski: In fact, the Guardian banned polar bears, right from the start. But, communications being what they are...
Alan Rusbridger: I think on Day One we did have a polar bear on an ice floe, but obviously we quickly killed it off, um, the picture and not the polar bear.
Female voice: The piece launched with an iceberg, and we replaced it, and the polar bear came back up... And if we can't, like, convince our own staff or, like, translate the message to our own staff, that will keep happening.
Alan Rusbridger: They come from a different continent. We don't get very close to them, and in a sense, that sums up the problem. Equally, those images of cracked, skeletal cows lying on a remote savanna - they're far away from England's green and pleasant land.
Female voice: Ice... snow... glaciers... It may seem obvious, in a way, but at the same time, it is very, very bizarre that global warming should be presented through things which are -
[Different voices say "polar bears".]
Female voice: - icy.
Female voice: I do think it matters very much indeed what we see, because the picture we hold in our heads when we think about something, it's literally what we see in our imagination.
Aleks Krotoski: The semiotics of climate change tells us a new language is needed, along with a new set of pictures. But we need to go much, much deeper into all this. Look at our psychology, to really understand what's going on.
George Marshall: One of the real peculiarities about climate change is that if you ask people "Are you concerned about climate change?" the majority of people say "Yes". A significant number of people say "Yes" they're very concerned. However, if you go out and you ask people "What are you really concerned about?" very few people mention climate change. So there's something going on which is complex and unusual, with this.
Aleks Krotoski: George Marshall lays down the gauntlet. He's written all about this, and we'll encounter him more, later on. So throw it all at us! Call in the experts, lay it on the table. Is there anything that journalists can do, here? Or are we hardwired to shut it all out?
Daniel Kahneman: Really, climate change, from a psychological point of view, looks like the problem from Hell...
Aleks Krotoski: Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning cognitive psychologist.
Daniel Kahneman: ... because this threat is quite remote and abstract. And it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what is happening. And a threat that is remote and abstract makes it quite difficult for people to mobilise. In the context of climate change, any move, you know, any sacrifice that people make, involves losses - they've got to give some things up...
Aleks Krotoski: Blueberries... your car... that plane flight to the sun. For years, that was the environmentalist argument.
Daniel Kahneman: ... and those losses loom relatively large. The gains from action that we take, you know, for the environment, are remote and uncertain. If you think of a threat to humankind, this is the worst type.
Aleks Krotoski: Back in the Guardian's climate-change therapy room, the team are going in the same direction as Daniel Kahneman.
Charlotte Higgins: Um, hello, I'm Charlotte Higgins - I write about culture and I'm not an expert on climate change...
Aleks Krotoski: She's an expert on classics.
Charlotte Higgins: For me, the sort of caring bit is really, really difficult, isn't it, because we all care in a vague way but is it a built-in human thing of akrasia, that we can't - as Plato said - we can't, er, you know, dinner today and we don't care about tomorrow - how do we get people to really care about people a long way away and to care about the future?
Daniel Kahneman: People tend to get mobilised when their emotions are activated.
Aleks Krotoski: For this, we need to understand the brain is divided into two parts. There's the right side...
George Marshall: This is the basic, instinctive, evolutionary thinking.
Aleks Krotoski: The intuitive part. But there's a parallel process happening on the left-hand side.
George Marshall: A rational, information-driven system.
Aleks Krotoski: We think that's in the driving seat. The ever-so-clever logical part.
George Marshall: Both work together in the brain, they're constantly communicating with each other, but the important thing is: the emotional side dominates. That's to say: if you have, on the rational side, very strong arguments - as we do, with climate change - that this is a major threat, we - that will not demand our attention, unless it is also receiving support from the affective emotional side.
Aleks Krotoski: Just the plain facts, in the case of climate change, won't cut it, on their own. We need to persuade that right-hand side of the brain to listen, by sweetening the message with some emotive content. But what does this mean, practically, for the journalists, whose job is usually breaking stories? And is this not all a little fluffy, for the editor-in-chief, 40 years or so in the industry?
Alan Rusbridger: Normally, my view in life is that if you lay out the facts, clearly that is what journalism is for, and I think we've tended towards the scientific, so it hasn't been so much pulling on the emotional heartstrings. I think two things are different about this - one is the urgency, so things have to move very quickly. The other is the sheer complexity of it, that simply leaving it to the facts, I think, is not winning.
Naomi Klein: As journalists, we think of our job, a lot of the time, is just conveying information, right, and then when people have the information, they will maybe do something about it. But I think climate change is - occupies a very, very different place in our culture.
Aleks Krotoski: As journalists, the team should be great at tugging at the heartstrings. Still, climate change doesn't get the attention Alan and Naomi Klein feel it deserves. So, let's dig in a little bit more. What exactly are they not getting right in their storytelling?
George Marshall: The media is struggling with climate change in the same way that we all are. We become engaged with things that are here and now and demanding our attention, have clear causes, things outside of ourselves, especially enemies, people who we can see have an intention to cause harm. Our brains, our circuitry responds very strongly to that.
Aleks Krotoski: But with climate change, it isn't really clear, exactly, who the enemy is. Is it the carbon floating in the atmosphere? Is it the fossil fuel companies digging it out of the ground? Is it the states stockpiling oil reserves? Is it the businesses producing the ever-growing number of technical devices demanding to be charged every day? And then there's us. We're tangled in all this, too. Our responsibility for this increasingly warm world.
George Marshall: And, rather than dealing with the moral complexity of that, I think we tend to just run away and actively avoid it.
Aleks Krotoski: So, time for the team in the climate change room to start the hunt. Who should we be pinning the blame on? As investigations editor, James Ball spends his time looking under rocks for these people.
James Ball: You want some bad guys, you want some people in boardrooms. People really hate bankers, execs and that kind of thing. Tobacco is surely the model. And we're kind of about the same distance from the start of companies being aware of climate change, as the start of tobacco companies being aware of, sort of, the problems of lung cancer, et cetera. You want some bad guys, you want some people in boardrooms. That starts to get people angry. And that should work.
Felicity Lawrence: I'd love to see a sort of gallery of shame, where we actually start pulling together these filthiest companies - we know who they are, from Carbon Tracker, how they've actually employed people from the tobacco confusion industry, we know masses about them already. But we haven't, sort of, really gone for them.
Male voice: ... like one a day, for ten days, or...
Aleks Krotoski: The team continues to brainstorm for George Marshall's perfect climate-change enemy. And they're using Daniel Kahneman's emotive language, too. Anger, outrage, disgust. But are they the right emotions for the journalists to be triggering? Kahneman didn't specify. And the editor wonders if this tactic might not work for this story.
Alan Rusbridger: I think bad news stories traditionally have sold and, you know, it's a sort of cliche to say that good news doesn't sell newspapers. But I think if it's just bad news, in an area like this, and you can't offer any hope or any prospect that there is a solution around the corner, then I think that is demotivating.
Naomi Klein: For me personally, when I choose not to click on that story, right? It derails my day, you know, it gets us at our core sense of safety.
Aleks Krotoski: So what do we want to feel? Fear or hope?
Female voice: Um, I broadly agree, but I wanted to put my, um, stake very firmly on the side of hope. Um, because I think this uniquely feels overwhelming to the vast majority of people, and there isn't really a way out. And that if you look at the social movements and the election campaigns that are successful, it's the ones that have an alternative that people can see as a possibility. You look at Obama and "Yes, we can", I mean, the slogan says everything. You look at Scotland, that got 16 year-olds out voting - that's because it was something new and something different.
When we launched and I tried to speak to as many people on the climate march as I could, and overwhelmingly, most everybody came out with the same thing and said, you know, "The artwork's beautiful", "The message is incredibly important", but loads of people who would be really interested in it, were just like: "I just don't want to read it, as it makes me so depressed". So I just think we need to focus really sharply on: what is the hope in this? What are the positives.
Alan Rusbridger: Charlotte's job... It's your job, by the way.
Charlotte Higgins: My mind's gone blank as a result of you saying that, Alan. Honestly... I agree - I do think... I - I do agree with the hopey, hopey-changey, but I just don't think emotions are binary, you know, I think we're complicated beings. So I think they're potentially a bit of a false opposition.
George Marshall: I think climate change is a very unusual issue, in that it doesn't lend itself readily to the normal narratives of "This is us, fighting the enemy", and then when we try and force it into that position, because clearly we want to mobilise people, that's a strong way of mobilising people, we give it a simplicity which is actually - well, it's not true to the issue, it's more complex from that.
It's very important, with human psychology, to understand that we pay attention to things but we also actively don't pay attention to things. We have to have a process for dis-regarding things. Even when people are confronted with direct evidence of climate change, even when it's literally knocking down their own houses, people have an amazing capacity to disregard the evidence of their own eyes.
Aleks Krotoski: Our mind might just outright ignore it, reject it, stubbornly refuse to pay any attention to it, whatsoever.
George Marshall: When I interviewed people on the New Jersey seashore, five months after Hurricane Sandy, nobody there could recall for me the last conversation they'd had about climate change. Why? Well, not because they didn't believe in climate change - many of these people did. It was because it wasn't considered a suitable thing for you to talk about. And in a way, that stands to reason. If you are recovering from an extreme weather event, you don't want to start telling each other a story that this might be the beginning of something more serious which might come again. So people create optimistic stories.
Aleks Krotoski: The team has heard the psychologists, learned the pitfalls. What are they going to do about it? Breaking up the therapy circle, they spring to their feet, armed with coloured markers and post-it notes. Now is the chance to put these learnings into practice. Time for jargon-free, positive stories. Come on, team, here's your chance to come up with something that will cut through.
Female voice: I hate to say this, but we should perhaps incorporate cats.
Male voice: Cats against coal.
Female voice: For sure!
Charlotte Higgins: ... one of which is the amazing viral video, which we know very hard to make viral.
Female voice: Dancing... a dancing - dancing babies...
George Marshall: The whole point about this is that it's - you just pick an extraordinary human achievement, something that you just can't help but want to share, because it's just amazing.
Alan Rusbridger: Well, I think we should be doing lots of everything. Really, it's - the fascinating thing about being a journalist, at the moment, is that - almost everything - cats [?] as journalism! - because we're making it up as we go along. I mean, who - ten years ago, if you had told me I would be talking to you for a podcast, I think I'd have been quite dubious about that. But here we are, and some of the ideas that, you know, mainly the other members of the team were so... Here's something I've not cut [?] in the last five minutes that involves a bit of Elgar...
Male voice: Stuff like a pianist playing a staggeringly kind of hard piece of music, or if you see someone really amazing doing [inaudible], just like "Wow!" - kid on a skateboard...
Alan Rusbridger: I think most of the older journalists in the room, up to about three or four years ago, would have said "Well, that's not journalism". It's, you know, it's really fascinating.
Male voice: You know, this - someone's playing this violin is kind of like - this is amazing, isn't it, doesn't need fossil fuels -
Female voice: - yes, I like that...
Charlotte Higgins: - we could call it the Sophocles Project... Okay, so where are we, time-wise? We've - good, we've absolutely cracked that, we're going to solve climate change with that, I'm sure...
Aleks Krotoski: ... and before lunch.
Charlotte Higgins: I suppose, from my own perspective, it - I've started to care a bit more, as I've encountered different ways of storytelling. And actually, this might be one of the slightly mad ideas that no-one's allowed to utter outside the room, but the things that have engaged me most have, oddly enough, been science fiction. And... you know, Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Attwood writing about futures that are affected strongly by climate change. What happens in the imagination, I think, is profoundly powerful and so I would be interested in finding some apparently non-journalistic, er, powerful ways of changing people's imagination.
Aleks Krotoski: Perhaps it's no surprise that the Guardian's piano-playing, gallery-going editor had, right from the start, thought about looking to the arts for inspiration.
Alan Rusbridger: You know, if you believe that art and artists are there to say powerful and deep things about our condition, then they're very good people to - and natural people to - approach.
Aleks Krotoski: They know emotion.
Alan Rusbridger: You know, someone like Anthony Gormley, who I know he's thought about this very deeply, he's gone on Arctic cruise ships in order to see for himself, and I think there is something very powerful and elemental about the imagery that he's produced.
Anthony Gormley: You can make a difference, simply by making things.
Aleks Krotoski: The man himself, Anthony Gormley.
Anthony Gormley: Here is this thing that didn't exist before. It now does. That is a fundamental act of hope. It's a fundamental belief that there can be a future. I don't think that art can be used for propaganda. I think that's the end of art. However, we need a cultural shift. I think art is intrinsically political, it intrinsically questions, er, you know, how and what we think. And I guess, you know, art, in reflecting the wider issues of climate change - whether it chooses to image it or not - is a force for the cultural change that I hope will allow us to make those policy decisions that actually have to be made by our leaders, but under our pressure.
Aleks Krotoski: And we know now where this has ended up. Mobilisation.
George Marshall: As humans, our greatest moments are when we show collective purpose and, um, cohesion, not division. And there is, within that, I think an optimistic narrative that would be very appealing to people.
Aleks Krotoski: The team gave it a good shot with the viral videos, the artists are getting somewhere by connecting emotionally, but to really get past the hardwiring problems, the solution is mobilising the people, something much more basic, possibly obvious, that to engage people on climate change you have to involve them.
George Marshall: I think the big selling point, really, on this, is not that this is a chance to settle old scores but it's actually a chance to build something new and optimistic about how we can start to come together.
Naomi Klein: So, I think people are longing for ways that they can get involved, that are concrete but are more than just changing their lightbulbs and making individual lifestyle choices.
George Marshall: Let's all pull together. Let's - let's try and make a better world.
Naomi Klein: I think people really care. I think there's - the perception that they don't care is, in some ways a false perception that's peddled by the people that are trying to block action on climate change. And that overwhelms the sort of day-to-day story of people's lives that isn't being told, that people are actually making good choices, as much as they can.
Alan Rusbridger: Of course, people care. Of course, people care - they're not stupid. Um, and people have read enough of the science to feel great anxiety about the future of the species. Um, it would be weird and irrational not to care. But that is - that's different from being to do anything about it.
Naomi Klein: It's one of the things we can do, as journalists, um, we can raise the alarm and, if our politicians aren't acting like this is a crisis, then we have a moral responsibility to do so.
Alan Rusbridger: I've come to believe that there is something more interesting going on, and if a divestment movement did snowball and that that became a societal moment in which it was not very respectable to have your money in companies which show no interest in changing or behaving responsibly, then I think the picture could change quite rapidly.
Aleks Krotoski: Let's hope so! With just weeks left at the helm, Alan's still got a ways to go.
Male voice: This almost fetish on 2 degrees, to me is a dangerous obsession.
Aleks Krotoski: Next week - attacks.
Male voice: The whole intellectual basis of the campaign seems to me to be a very strange one.
Aleks Krotoski: We'll hear the Guardian's attempt to bat off these criticisms, and find out if they're making headway with their ultimate goal, to get Wellcome and Gates to divest. The biggest story in the world is narrated by me, Aleks Krotoski. It's produced by Alannah Chance, Lindsay Poulton, Matt Hill, Nabeelah Shabbir and Lucy Greenwell. Sound design is by Chris Wood, head of Audio is Jason Phipps, and the executive producer is Francesca Panetta. Subscribe. Subscribe! Subscribe...