How studying our reaction to coronavirus can help us fight climate change
Lessons for climate change
Our own research has shown that significant cognitive biases also operate with messaging about climate change. One is confirmation bias – those who don’t believe that climate change is a real threat simply don’t take in messages saying that it is.
What’s more, unlike coronavirus messages, most climate change messages inadvertently accentuate what we call “temporal” and “spatial” biases. The UK government campaign “Act on CO2” used images of adults reading bedtime stories to children, which implied that the real threat of climate change willpresent itself in the future– a temporal bias.
Other campaigns have used the perennial polar bear in the associated images, which strengthens spatial bias – polar bears are in a different geographical location (to most of us). These messages , therefore, allow for a high degree of optimism bias – with people thinking that climate change won’t affect them and their own lives.
Research using eye-tracking to analyze how they process climate change messagesdemonstrates the effects of such biases. For example, optimistic people tend to fix their gaze on the more “positive” aspects of climate change messages (especially any mentions of disputes about the underlying science – there is less to worry about if the science isn’t definitive).
These gaze fixations can also affect what you remember from such messages and how vulnerable they make you feel. If you don’t think that climate change will affect you personally, the affect heuristic will not be guiding you directly to appropriate remedial action.
To make climate change messages more effective, we need to target these cognitive biases. To prevent temporal and spatial biases, for example, we need a clear message as to why climate change is bad for individuals in their own lives in the here and now (establishing an appropriate affect heuristic).
And to prevent optimism bias, we also need to avoid presenting “both sides of the argument” in the messaging – the science tells us that there’s only one side. There also needs to be a clear argument as to why recommended, sustainable behaviors will work (establishing a different sort of confirmation bias).
We also need everyone to get the message, not just some groups – that’s an important lesson from COVID-19. There can be no (apparent) exceptions when it comes to climate change.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyGeoff Beattie, Professor of Psychology,Edge Hill UniversityandLaura McGuire, Research Fellow in Education,Edge Hill Universityunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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