20151208_AM

Source: BBC Radio 4: All in the Mind

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r5d0h

Date: 08/12/2015

Event: Sander van der Linden on climate change communication

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

• Claudia Hammond: Author and radio presenter
• Dr Sander van der Linden: Social psychologist, Princeton University

Claudia Hammond: As the climate change talks continue in Paris, some are calling for psychology to come to the world's rescue. The prevention of climate change often involves being told what we shouldn't do - driving cars, using electricity. It's not much fun. And when the problem is global, it can feel that, as individuals, there's not much we can do about it. But could the insights from psychological research be used to engage all of us with the reality of climate change? Sander van der Linden, director of the Social and Environmental Decision-Making Lab at Princeton University, has scoured the psychological literature to find the five best insights, and he told me what's missing from the conversation, at the moment.

Sander van der Linden: Even though we tend to think that our thoughts are very important in driving our behaviour, often it's our experiences that can play a larger role. And I think that's where climate change communication lacks an essential component, in a sense that it fails to experientially engage people. For example, in the UK you might talk about the risk of flooding - and not just in a global sense, that often, often the communication's "Oh well, global sea levels will rise", but that's very abstract to people. It is true that it's not always easy to attribute the role of climate change in extreme weather events, but to the extent that we can and that there's reliable information to indicate that certain extreme weather events are getting more intense and that climate change does play a role in driving those events, I think those are opportunities to highlight the role of climate change and to make it more experiential for people.

Claudia Hammond: In the north of England and in Scotland, there's been very serious flooding, just in the last week, and of course that makes people wonder about whether that's due to climate change. But I see your point, that generally climate change can feel very far away, whereas with something like terrorism, we can see the pictures right now, so that makes it feel as if all these things are happening right now and we need to worry about them. Is there a way of making climate change and its effects feel more immediate and more something that we should be concerned about, right now?

Sander van der Linden: I think we want to be careful not to scare people, in a sense that when you, sort of, communicate these very intense, scary messages, that can often elicit the opposite effect and that paralyses people. So, at the same time, I think it's important to highlight what people can do and what actions they can take to mitigate the risk of climate change, so I think combining this idea of highlighting how climate change is impacting the weather and, and different regions, but at the same time giving people opportunities to play a role in mitigating that risk - I think that's an important and powerful combination.

Claudia Hammond: Yeah, 'cause there can be a feeling of powerlessness, can't there, that it's such a global, huge issue, that, you know, "What can I do about it? How am I going to change the world?" - it's too big for that.

Sander van der Linden: Certainly I think that's a very common feeling, that people feel that they're relatively powerless in addressing this issue. And to some extent, this has to do with the amount of information that people have about what other people are doing. So I think in that sense, highlighting social norms and leveraging group norms is an important element of inspiring people to act, because it could be the case that many people in one's community are doing something about climate change - reducing their energy consumption - and simply that people don't know about it.

Claudia Hammond: It can also feel as if we mainly have things to lose and to lose now, in order to prevent something from happening in the future, that, I don't know, that you need to give up your car or pay more for your electricity, that you're going to suffer now for something that we don't know that much about, exactly, and that has uncertainty around it, in the future. How can you get around that?

Sander van der Linden: I think that's a great question - I think that's a major policy issue, these policies that are going to restrict your personal freedom or you're going to have to sacrifice some personal level of comfort to help reduce climate change. And those are certain, but then whether or not we mitigate climate change in the future, it's framed as relatively uncertain, and so that doesn't sound like an appealing trade-off for people, at least psychologically. And I think that's really important to keep in mind, so what we do about that, from the literature at least, is shifting the psychological frame of reference to what can be gained from immediate action, rather than focussing on what people have to lose. I think that's a powerful narrative.

Claudia Hammond: Well, what could we gain, now?

Sander van der Linden: Well, for example, reducing emissions often comes with the positive benefit, that it improves air quality and life expectancy and well-being, and so there's these immediate benefits that come with reducing emissions, as well, and so focussing on what people gain can be a powerful frame.

Claudia Hammond: And how about doing something like paying people to be green, so that they have something to gain right now? What can psychological research tell us about whether that would work?

Sander van der Linden: What's really interesting is that this tends to backfire, in a sense that it undermines people's own motivation to help. So there's this dominant assumption that everyone is driven by money and self-interested incentives and motives, and that's really not true - lots of psychological research shows that people want to contribute to help others because it makes people feel good, and providing people money or replacing that intention with a self-serving objective can actually undermine people's motivation to help.

Claudia Hammond: It sounds as though there are a lot of different areas where psychological research can play a part, in telling us what we should and shouldn't do, in getting people to act in certain ways about climate change. Is it frustrating for you, that these insights don't seem to get taken notice of more, if they're all out there like this?

Sander van der Linden: It's certainly frustrating, in a sense, on a very general level - especially compared to other disciplines like economics or engineering, psychology has really played a very small role in informing policy-making on this issue. But hopefully that's changing, and that will continue to change in the future.

Claudia Hammond: Sander van der Linden, and his paper outlining the best psychological insights is published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.