20130702_HZ

Source: BBC Radio 4: The Human Zoo

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0367slg

Date: 02/07/2013

Event: The Human Zoo: The psychology of climate change

Credit: BBC Radio 4, also to Geoff Chambers for transcribing much of this

People:

• Michael Blastland: Journalist and radio producer
• Professor Nick Chater: Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick University
• Pilita Clark: Environment Correspondent, Financial Times
• Linda Cotterill: Storyteller
• David Derbyshire: Freelance journalist and science writer
• Dr. Tamsin Edwards: Climate modeller, School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol University
• Timandra Harkness: Writer and journalist
• Dr. Helene Joffe: Reader in Psychology, University College London
• Dan Kahan: Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology, Yale Law School
• Dr. Kathleen Taylor: Neuroscientist, Oxford University

Michael Blastland: Another drizzly summer's day. [Laughs.] So, naturally, I'm out climbing a hill with the dog. There's psychology in this, and not just your presenter's obvious stupidity. The psychology is in what bad weather does to our thoughts about climate.

I know - weather isn't climate, everyone knows that. One rainy day means nothing. Except... In experiments - and we'll hear about them in a moment - a good predictor of people's views about the fate of the planet is today's weather here. We judge what's up with the climate by looking out of the window, essentially. Are we daft? Or is it in arguments that everyone on all sides says are about evidence and facts? This is only the beginning of the psychology that also comes into play.

Later this summer, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will give us its latest thoughts. Our question is not about whether we're going to fry - that's for others - but about the psychology of the debate. How much of what we say is all about evidence is really about evidence? [There is a peal of thunder.] Down the hill, I think, to look for that Nick Chater chap - you know the one, Professor of Behavioural Science in Warwick Business School and resident Human Zoo expert.

Nick, we have these conferences a couple of weeks ago, trying to work out the link between the odd weather we've had, over the last few years, climate and by and large, people say it's not climate - climate is decades, or longer, or something. But what's the experimental evidence about how quickly people's judgement on climate can be influenced by weather?

Nick Chater: Well actually, Michael, there is a very nice and rather compelling demonstration, which was done as a large-scale web survey on a single day across a range of countries in the world. And the question was just how much you believe that climate change is real. And the issue that the people were looking at is how much is that judgement affected by whether the temperature at a particular location was hotter or colder than average, for that time of year. And the paper was rather delightfully entitled "Local Warming". And indeed local warming turns out to be exactly right. So if it's a hotter than average day, people do have a tendency to think "Well, climate change... Yes, I think there may be something in it." If it's a colder than average day, they tend to be more sceptical.

Now, of course these aren't huge effects, but they're pretty substantial, actually, and sort of indicate that we're being pushed around by very immediate things - what we see when we peer out of the window really does affect - on a fairly moment by moment basis, almost - our overall views of how the world works.

Michael Blastland: There is this idea of attribute substitution - that when things are really complicated we substitute a complicated question for another one. Can you explain that to us?

Nick Chater: Yes, that's a very general dependency. For example, if you ask yourself how musical somebody else is, say, the kind of thing you might do is think "Well, that's a really big, broad, complicated thing", but I might know that they have, you know, Grade 7 Violin, so I think "Oh yes, that must mean they're musical." Grade 7 Violin is a concrete, simple thing. And, similarly, if I knew that somebody else had Grade 2 Violin, I might imagine they must be a bit less musical.

Now you might say "Well, that's a nonsensical way to make the judgement", because musicality is so much broader than that, and there are so many other factors which would determine how far you got with the violin. But attribute substitution says: if you can find a simple attribute, which you can quantify and is easy to bring to mind, then you'll use that as a short cut - often a reasonably good short cut - for answering a tricky, broad, complicated question.

Michael Blastland: Now, is that daft? Because you could say, you know, steady as weather... What a ridiculous way to address the climate by today's weather. But the principle of attribute substitution doesn't sound to me altogether stupid.

Nick Chater: No, it isn't. And it's part of a more general tendency to find short cuts to difficult problems. So if you're wondering how large a city is, for example, you might think "Well, it's famous", or you might think "It's got an enormous river flowing through it" or you might think "It has a well-known and very successful football team". All of those things might make you think it's a large city, and they're not crazy things to think. So, that's another form of attribute substitution, but another use of simple, available bit of information to solve a difficult problem. And, on the whole, that gets you quite a long way.

Michael Blastland: Well, I know I like to think my opinions rest on facts and evidence - doesn't everyone. But I'll tell you what - let's have a little model for that, a fictional champion for our point of view, from Dickens. Guess which character I have in mind.

Actor playing the part of Thomas Gradgrind: Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.

Michael Blastland: Gradgrind and his "one thing needful" - not humane, exactly, but seems an important part of what we claim for ourselves. Facts on our side. And in contrast, the other side - whichever it is - well, fast and loose with the evidence, obviously. That's what Ed Davey, the Environment Secretary, said, the other week, about climate change scepticism - "born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness". Ouch. Still, I'm sure they're equally nice about him. Nick, all this makes psychology sound like an accusation, an insult. Me, I do facts. You, you're full of biases and... you know, perceptual tosh. Is that - how do you respond to that, as a psychologist?

Nick Chater: Well, I think we should be more respectful, in a way, of the miracle that is the human brain. I mean, the problems that the world faces us with - in understanding the concepts in the world around us and the perceptual world around us - are vastly complicated, and they need to be simplified fairly dramatically to make any progress at all. So you find as soon as you try to build an artificial robot to run about or to recognise the things around it or speak and be understood, you realise how enormously difficult it is to deal with the complexity of the real world. So I think the simplifications, these short cuts, although they do introduce biases, are absolutely essential, they're an essential part of human intelligence. They're what allows us to behave effectively and successfully in a world that we can't possibly analyse in full detail.

Michael Blastland: Right, let's have a look at the way people process facts. Is Timandra around? Timandra Harkness, Human Zookeeper and intrepid seeker after facts.

Timandra Harkness: Hello.

Michael Blastland: Ah. Timandra, you have a robust belief in.

Timandra Harkness: It's the best method of doing science.

Michael Blastland [laughs]: Okay, because I'd like you to go and explore a tricky human question - how much the facts ever speak for themselves.

Timandra Harkness: But I don't think the facts do speak for themselves. Someone has to turn all those figures and spreadsheets into words.

* * *

Timandra Harkness: Cheltenham Science Festival - lots of speakers here, including Tamsin Edwards, climate scientist.

Tamsin Edwards: Science isn't just a list of facts. It's all about uncertainties, it's all about understanding, it's all about a process. We're trying to improve our understanding all the time. So yes, climate science is incredibly complicated - we're trying to measure and understand and predict a planet of unimaginable complexity.

Timandra Harkness: So what else do people bring to the public debate, apart from the science and an understanding of the science?

Tamsin Edwards: Well, obviously it depends a bit on what information they've heard already, and where from. I think people often can bring values to the climate change debate, because it's so wrapped up in policy, it's sort of talking about global-scale economics, complete change - I mean, people are proposing huge changes to our society, so of course it's natural for our values to affect what we think about climate science. But I think it's certainly possible to separate out the values from the science.

Timandra Harkness: So, do you think we should get rid of it all? All the other stuff and just look at the science?

Tamsin Edwards: Well, we're humans - we have to do what we think is the right thing to do. We have to make decisions, somehow, that science can't give the answer for what to - it can't say "Here is the evidence for... You know, what we think if we do this is that, and what we do if we think this, this will happen." And that's not an answer, that's just a set of predictions. And so you need to have humans and their emotions and their priorities and their values. You know, we have these ways of thinking about trying to process information from different people - do we trust them? Is it what we expect? Are we retrenching into our own views, because we've been challenged? Are we optimistic people or pessimistic people? So we trust authority? So I think all of these things often will build up a coherent picture, kind of coherent story of how we view the science and what we think we should do about it.

Timandra Harkness: Would you say you're an optimist or a pessimist?

Tamsin Edwards: I'm an optimist.

* * *

Timandra Harkness: I would say I was an optimist, too. But is optimism always a good thing when it comes to planning for the future? Professor Helene Joffe at UCL researches the psychology of risk.

Helene Joffe: I think, from years of working in the area of risk, I'm not an optimist, but I think that makes me unlike the majority of the population, who show strong signs of feeling optimistic in relation to a range of risks.

Timandra Harkness: Do you think it's a barrier, then? Do you think our tendency to be optimistic is a problem?

Helene Joffe: Yeah, it's certainly seen something called an optimistic bias, in psychology, and it's certainly seen to be a barrier to people actually preparing themselves for a range of risks.

Timandra Harkness: So are there any advantages to being unrealistically optimistic?

Helene Joffe: There actually are. I think we've always assumed that people being overly optimistic makes them feel invulnerable to a host of risks, but I don't think that's the only thing that determines whether we act, firstly, and we might be optimistic because we are taking actions to prepare ourselves.

* * *

Timandra Harkness: We're always looking through lenses, building narratives. Why do we need stories? I'll ask a storyteller - Linda Cotterill.

Linda Cotterill: They say that stories are natural science, because it's looking at how and why and what, and all that... It's people looking at the world and needing to make sense of it.

Timandra Harkness: So that's the, kind of, the storytelling side of science. That's obviously still part of science, that you create a story, a hypothesis, then you try and match that against the world. But some people would now say "Well, having to make a story out of it is actually a barrier. What we need - especially with contentious things, like the science of climate change - is we need facts, we need information, we need to be really objective. And get away from the need to tell stories. What would you say about that?

Linda Cotterill: Wow! It's I read something by a doctor. He was a medical doctor. When you are telling people that they have illnesses and that... He said what they need is a story. It's an ordering of facts. They need a structure that they can hold onto, even if it comes down to actually saying to somebody "It's your fault that this has happened - it's not, kind of, fallen out of the sky on you". He said they prefer that.

So, in the Greek myths, humans weren't made by the gods. They were made by Prometheus, who was one of the titans...

Timandra Harkness: Prometheus is one of my favourite stories. He defies the gods to bring fire to humans, giving us godlike power over nature. But the other half of the story is curious Pandora, opening the box and releasing all the ills of the world. Either could be a metaphor for our relationship with nature.

So I do look at the facts. I do respect the scientific method. But I do so as a Promethean. I'm glad we have godlike power over nature. Without that, how would we sort out all the ills the gods put in Pandora's box for us?

Linda Cotterill: ... one of them slipped in - Hope. And that remains to us.

* * *

Michael Blastland: Nick, we promised another experiment. What tricks have you been playing, to discover how people tick, about climate change?

Nick Chater: Yes, this week we thought we'd have a go at trying to understand how people's views about climate change affect how they look at climate data.

Michael Blastland: So this was based on an experiment by Stephen [sic] Lewandowsky at Bristol University, and we thought we’d give it a try with the Warwick students.

[To students.] So what you’ll see in front of you is a wiggly line, and we want you just to continue the wiggly line in the way that seems the most natural. There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, it’s just a wiggly line.

Male student 1: Do we have any indication what this might be?

Michael Blastland: No, no, just an abstract task.

Now after they've done this, we’re going to get them to do some other experiments, just to distract them a bit, and then we’ll give them another wiggly line, but this time we’ll tell them what the wiggly line is really about.

[To students.] ... wiggly line, as you’ll see. And this wiggly line is real data, it is in fact average global temperatures from 1880 to 2010, so this is a climate change prediction task now. So you need to make your guess about how that graph is going to continue.

Then a final little question...

[To students.] ...just says, "on a scale of 1 to 7, how worried are you about climate change?"

[To students, after the experiment.] ... climate change graph, what made you complete it in the way that you did?

Male student 2: The temperature can't go up at the same rate for ever.

Michael Blastland: Right.

Male student 2: So I tried to slow down the rate.

Michael Blastland: Yes.

Male student 2: ...it was still increasing.

Female student 1: Mine was a bit apocalyptic actually. I thought of, while you know obviously it's been rising a lot since the industrial revolution and things like that, there's a definite pattern of like, plateaux and then going up, so I assumed there would still be sort of a plateau around now when the graph ended, and then it would go up more, and I don’t know if it's going to make the earth explode or whatever, but...

Michael Blastland: You've got a pretty serious, serious -

Female student 1: That's what I thought.

Michael Blastland: - scenario heading our way.

* * *

Michael Blastland: Nick, what were the results? And what do they tell us?

Nick Chater: If somebody thinks that climate change is real and present, then they tend to extrapolate upwards, in terms of temperature, more than people who have the opposite view. And that's true when they think of the data as about climate. Of course it isn't true when they just see these very same wiggly patterns as mere random noise.

What it seems to indicate is that it's very hard for us to look at data in a very dispassionate way. And in a way quite rationally - when we're considering how a set of data can continue, we think both about what the data shows so far, but also we think about what our general knowledge or general beliefs tell us. But there is a danger to this. Because it can mean that the data itself, as it were, seems different, looks different, depending on your perspective. Though if I am a climate sceptic, I might look at the same data as a non-climate sceptic, and I might think "That doesn't really show much of a trend upwards, or much of a little trend upwards", as someone who's got great faith in the reality of climate change might look at that very same data and see in the data a much more alarming trend.

Michael Blastland: Okay, thanks very much, Nick. One response to all this is to say "My psychology has nothing to do with it, because all I do is listen to the experts." Well, a while ago I interviewed Dan Kahan from Yale University, for the Analysis programme. He's a lawyer with a keen interest in how different groups convince themselves that the experts are on their side, whatever side it is.

Dan Kahan: So one group is very committed to markets, very committed to individual initiative - they tend to be sceptical about climate change risks. And the reason is they associate climate change risk with the idea that we're going to have to restrict markets, restrict private agreements, private orderings, that commerce and industry have to be shut down because they're hurting people. And that's a kind of resonance that provokes resistance.

Now there's another group - this group is more egalitarian, more group-oriented. And a lot of them are concerned, and maybe should be, that commerce, industry, markets can produce unfair outcomes, unjust disparities. Well, that makes them very open to the association of climate change with the restriction of industry, commerce. So they latch onto that evidence very readily.

The remarkable thing is: in none of these conflicts, like climate change, do we see one group saying "I'm going to go with the experts", and the other group saying "Who cares what experts know. You know, I don't believe in science". Those on both sides are convinced that the position that predominates in their group is consistent with the expert view. I ask them, at some point: "What do you think about climate change?" And they know that they don't know themselves what experts say. And they go "Every expert I can think of says this." And the problem is they've engaged in a biased sampling, right? They're much more likely to count somebody as an expert if he takes the position consistent with the one that predominates in the group.

* * *

Michael Blastland: Dan Kahan. Each week we invite a non-psychologist into The Human Zoo, to hear their thoughts, partly to see if it provokes you to email us, at thehumanzoo@bbc.co.uk. Our leader writer this week - that's what we're calling them - is Kathleen Taylor, a neuroscientist and writer.

Kathleen Taylor: Time was when the best achievements of the human mind - the ones that artificial intelligence researchers dreamed of matching in silicon - were all to do with logic. Chess-playing, maths and science, rational thought and the chilly stripped-down reasoning of economics. These days, computers are essential for maths and science and they're pretty good at chess, too.

They weren't so good at predicting the financial hurricane. Our amazing logic machines are poor imitations of human beings and their influence on markets. Humans have emotions, hormones, immune systems, a brain embodied, a complex, visceral slush. When we receive a piece of new information - say, about climate change - we don't just record it as a computer would. It's processed, tested against prior expectations, adjusted to fit previous knowledge and beliefs. If it fits easily - fine. If it doesn't - and in particular if it directly challenges a pre-existing belief - the contradiction makes us uncomfortable, so we try to resolve it.

There are various ways to do this. We could re-examine the belief, and decide to discard it. For lovers of logic, it's astounding how rarely we do this. We could check our source. Is it trustworthy? Are there other, independent sources? Is there an agenda? Who stands to profit from having us accept the information?

Alternatively - and this is a very common strategy - we can ignore the contradiction until it fades from consciousness. It's only discomforting while we're actively thinking about it. To prevent future discomfort, mental filters can lessen the chance of climate-change related information even being noticed, much less analysed.

If, however, the challenged belief is important to us, we may defend ourselves by attacking the information source. "They're paid to say that". "She's stupid, he's lying, they're evil". Ad hominem attacks - a signal that someone feels threatened.

How we react to a statement on climate change depends on so much more than the information. It's not just what we believe, but whom. It's how we feel, who we are, whom we trust and distrust. When a person feels strongly, the topic can become a hook with which to wrench a sense of identity. Apparently neutral claims can trigger vehement defences. If you're assessing the pros and cons of climate change, you might like to ask if you've been hooked by the heated media debate around the topic. Being aware of our emotional biases doesn't automatically cancel them out, but it's better than not realising we have them.

* * *

Michael Blastland: Down by the Thames, by the Financial Times, and it's an overcast day, and I can see a few people carrying umbrellas just in case, and of course this is - well, June in England. Well, that tells us about the climate - probably nothing, actually, one day's weather really but it sort of feels like it does, anyway. And I'm here with Pilita Clark from the Financial Times and David Derbyshire who's written for just about every national newspaper in the land, I think. I'll try and not invite you to insult your readers. But are you always convinced that there's a rational conversation going on out there about the environment?

Pilita Clark: I'm absolutely not going to insult the readers. I'm going to say the readers, by and large, are exceedingly knowledgeable and often know a great deal more than I do when it comes to these topics. But - not always, but certainly tend to know a lot more about the investability of what I'm writing about, and that's primarily what they're interested in, and therefore what I'm interested in.