To generate action against a problem, people must feel pain, says Harvard professor of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, Dan Gilbert. (source: video from the PopTech Conference)
Specifically, they must feel that the threat is:
- Personal – it needs to have a face.
- Abrupt – not slowly warming water, but the immediate difference between very cold water and boiling water.
- Immoral – it should evoke nausea and horror.
- Now – it needs to be immediate.
9/11 meets these criteria perfectly – Osama bin Laden the treacherous face; it was sudden and unexpected, thus abrupt; it was sickening; and by demonstrating vulnerability, it demonstrated that such an action could happen again, now.
Climate change, on the other hand, fails on all these fronts. There is no one person behind it (just “society”); it is happening slowly by human standards; it should feel sickening, but is happening so slowly that in our day to day lives it doesn’t feel particularly blameworthy, and we prefer to rationalise our roles; and the effects are happening at some time in the future…
Were this not so, says Gilbert, “we would be declaring a War on Warming”!
To back this up, he demonstrates that the human brain is focussed to the greatest extent on the immediate present, and the fraction that is dedicated to considering all eternity is very small indeed.
That said, while Gilbert kept to a discussion of our hardwiring, it bears noting that societies has been successful in reaching global agreement on phasing out CFCs. This met some of his criteria (the understanding was abrupt; the impacts quite clear in the near terms), but not all – and none of them as well as 9/11.
Which suggests that we can call on the part of our brains that focus on the long-term, and use them to overcome our innate preference for short-term thinking.
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