Want to Inspire Action on Climate Change? What We Need Is a Little Salesmanship and Psychology

Sometime in the last decade, as mainstream science has outlined the man-made causes of climate change and as much of society has begun to accept that view, global warming has turned into a people problem as much as a technical and scientific one.

People have fed the increase in greenhouse gases, and people can reverse that trend through consumption choices large and small. One of the central paradoxes of climate change is not why the world is warming, but how people are handling it: If polls show so many believe a crisis is unfolding, why are so few doing anything about it?

NASA physicists probably couldn't answer that question. The people who can have rarely been asked. They are the behavioral experts, the psychologists who have long studied the disconnect between our attitudes and our actions, and who are now realizing themselves they have a role to play in climate policy.

If you consider that solving climate change requires adjusting human behavior on a vast scale — getting people to drive hybrids, weatherize their homes, cut their energy use, consider their carbon footprint — what's needed is a more effective campaign to get them to do so. Brow-beating isn't working. Psychologists know guilt is a terrible motivator. And moral arguments don't work on people who don't share your morals.

If a more nuanced understanding of human behavior has been used to push all kinds of products and ideas throughout the history of Madison Avenue, couldn't we use the same insights psychologists study and "Mad Men" apply to better sell the world on energy-efficient appliances and new environmental social norms?

Attitudes Don't Matter

Two years ago, the American Psychological Association began thinking about this idea. Janet Swim, a social psychologist at Penn State, suggested the APA create a task force to examine the relationship between psychology and climate change, two topics that weren't readily connected for many APA members, let alone the broader climate science community.

"When I first thought about this, I had a limited range of what psychology could do," Swim said. "I had no idea we'd end up with a 240-page report."

The report, released this summer, outlines what psychology gets about why we don't act on climate concerns and suggests research queries to guide policy in the future. It urges APA members to present what psychology can offer as "the missing pieces in climate change analyses."

The report assesses the current challenge as one of almost irrational human behavior.

"Just as one might puzzle over the collapse of vanished regional civilizations like the Maya of Central America, the Anasazi of North America, the Norse of Greenland, and the people of Easter Island," the report reads, "future generations may find it incomprehensible that people, particularly in industrialized countries, continued until well into the 21st century to engage in behavior that seriously compromised the habitability of their own countries and the planet."

Psychologists thankfully don't find this so incomprehensible. Many people fail to turn a theoretical concern for the climate into tangible action because the problem is imperceptible to anyone without climate-modeling software or satellite images of Antarctica. That leaves many relying on mediators like journalists they may not be inclined to trust.

Psychologists understand that we also weigh concrete sacrifices in the present more heavily than distant, abstract benefits in the future. It's difficult to ask someone to give up his SUV now to make the planet more livable in 50 years.

"I sum it up a lot of times by saying, ‘It's not easy being green,'" said Paul Stern, director of the National Research Council's Committee on the Human Dimensions of Climate Change and another contributor to the report. "You might want to be green, but it's hard to find out how, or sometimes you can't get the products you want."