The psychology of climate change
I was listening to Jonathan Porritt this morning on Radio 4 bemoaning the fact that politicians are only just waking up to the idea that tackling climate change should not be framed wholly negatively – as dourly doing less. He talked about transport, citing the fact that Government wonks have recently come back from parts of Europe and undergone a collective epiphany: reducing carbon emissions needn’t be simply about leaving the car in the garage and paying though the nose when one takes it out, but rather about getting from A to B in terms of an integrated high-class transport system.
This chimed with me as I spent nigh-on six hours in the back of a Nissan Micra driving from Devon to London yesterday. This seemed like a mild form of torture: a strange combination of boredom and stress. I normally take the train and will find it difficult to do the journey by car again – despite the distinctly non-high-class nature of British trains, a 2 hour 15 minute journey where one can read in comfort is a joy compared to bouncing along (or not) on highly congested roads.
This brings me to Porritt’s point – it would be much easier to promote behaviour-change that reduces carbon emissions if it is sold as part of a more enjoyable, less stressful future. The gap between Britain and the rest of Europe here is partly about quality of service, but also about cost. Some European countries far more heavily subsidise train travel than we do, and are able to pass on savings to travellers because services are not privatised and fragmented.
But here’s a slightly deeper point. Psychology and neuroscience tell us humans are congenitally bad at dealing with complexity – in particular, at connecting their individual behaviour to aggregate effects they cannot see. I was at the Cabinet Office last week and a civil servant told me that Defra has a job on its hands persuading fisherman that certain fish stocks are dangerously low. Fisherman see fish right in front of them and this biases their judgement by overriding the less palpable information that scientists purvey – information detailing fish stocks at the aggregate level. Psychologists call this the ‘availablity heuristic’ – what’s in front of a person’s nose is disproportionately valued or emphasised when making decisions.
We are also very bad at thinking about unpleasant things. Neuroscientists have discovered mechanisms that mean we will put out of mind bad things because we just don’t like thinking about them. This gives us a useful sense of optimism. But it leads to bad decisions – presenting changes in behaviour necessary to counteract climate change as grim froms of restraint means we just put the topic from our minds. We quite naturally don’t want to spend our days pervaded by a sense of low-level dread.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, as Porritt argued this morning. However, I think we could go further here. Making behaviour-change enjoyable will only get us so far. Travelling on a Swiss train one might think ‘it’s not so bad’. But travelling more often by train is only one of many substantive changes needed in the way we live, if we are to reduce our collective carbon footprint. Some of these changes just won’t be any fun and here we need leadership to make the case for the harder choices. So far there seems to be little political leadership. How could there be more?
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done numerous experiments that seem to confirm there are, what he calls, five basic ‘moral senses’: concern about harm, fairness, in-group loyalty, authority and spiritual purity. Haidt argues that western societies do not always successfully integrate and promote all five senses, liberals caring about the first two, conservatives all five.
Here’s a question: Isn’t climate-change the kind of issue that would benefit by being framed in a moral register that stretched beyond the two moral senses popular with liberals? Here are some reasons why this might be so.
First, given the availability bias, we find it hard to relate our individual actions to everyone else in the world (we find it hard to not make a car journey based on the rather abstract fact that it will contribute a small amount to overrall carbon tonnage). Perhaps it is better to start local then, and make use of existing loyalties.
When I was in Switzerland recently I noticed much food is labelled ‘aus der region fűr der region’ – from the region, for the region. Apparently a lot of Swiss make sure they buy food with such provenance. But the reasons why they do this are varied – some out of low-carbon concerns, some out of old-fashioned loyalty to a locale, some out of a feeling that Swiss standards of quality are higher.
Two things are key here: first, whatever the reason for buying local, consumer behaviour relates to something tangible – the region in which one lives. Second, loyalty to the in-group is appealed to as well as a sense of fairness and harm. In short, the labelling is psychologically effective because it works with, not against, a general cognitive bias (the ‘availabilty heuristic’), but also because it appeals to three rather than two moral senses.
However, the point is not only that we should pull all the levers we can in changing behaviour, it is also that moral reasons are a compelling and easy way to change behaviour. If one had to understand all the complexities of global injustice that climate change brings, one would be overwhelmed. So it might be much easier to appeal to existing moral senses that are ingrained, such as in-group loyalty. But not only might this be simpler and more effective, it makes people feel better if they think they are doing the right thing. So perhaps we don’t just need sparkling and efficient trians, we also need a sense of moral purpose that connects with as many of us as possible on the local or individual level? And perhaps this is where politial leadership is most needed?
Sustainable behaviour-change: after nudge, ‘tweak’
My last post was about moving from behaviour to attitudes – coming to an informed choice through doing something and building-up the capability to see the benefits of a particular kind of activity. My example was healthy eating: I might need to actually eat healthily for a few weeks, even months, before I can properly grasp the benefits of it. When this happens my attitudes to what is desirable/good for me are partly reconfigured by my behaviour.
It seems to me this model of behaviour-change should be much more commonly employed (call it the capability-building approach). This is because we are creatures of habit: the way our brains work, through plasticity, means that sustainable behavioural patterns (ones we can maintain) result from the strengthening of neural connections over time (to speak metaphorically, the behaviour becomes ‘burnt-in’). But also, we know that successful social evolution is transmitted through culture, and for behaviour-change to work, it has to bed-down and become part of our way of life.
We might add to this principle of capability-building, another - what I am going to call ‘tweak’. This is the idea that when we try to change behaviour (our own or other people’s), we should bear in mind two principles:
- Where we want to engender some new kind of behaviour it is often beneficial to make sure it is analogous to something humans already do and which has proven to be sustainable – we ‘tweak’ some existing behaviour by augmenting it, or creating an analogue of it. For example, if you wanted to engage more young people in science learning, why not start with a computer-game-playing format?
- We should always try to think of the whole person in their social context and work-out where different influences on behavioural patterns are out of kilter – we then ‘tweak’ the influences so they are all pulling in the same direction. So for example, if we want a more sociable workplace, we make the staff-room nicer to sit in. But we also give people enough time to take breaks together, as well as encouraging staff activities and interaction.
This is both a conservative and progressive approach. It is conservative because it asks us to work within the limits of human nature – to not expect too much change too quickly and to respect, to a certain extent, existing institutions and social structures. But it is also progressive because it says sustainable change is possible – that the whole project of progressive politics is not misguided or naïve.
Doing and thinking: the ethics of ‘nudge’
Filed under: Social Brain, emotional cognition, neuroscience, philosophy
I attended this IPA event last night. Rory Sutherland and Matthew Taylor talked about the value of understanding behavioural economics for both advertising and social change. One question that came up was ‘What about the ‘dark side’ to this?’ – the idea that in knowing more about human psychology and brain functioning we can manipulate people to undue ends.
The first thing to say is that the power of manipulation that behavioural economics bestows is not of the 1960s-commie-paranoia-mind-washing variety. It is much weaker than that. Moreover, I actually think this question is less interesting than it sounds – its apparent power presumes something similar to the following argument: ‘don’t develop genetic therapies for diseases, because some mad scientist might create a super-race of beings and take over the world etc.’ This is faulty reasoning: the problem is not the genetic therapy but the mad scientist with the requisite power, resources and social influence to ‘take over the world’. And that problem is one we face and deal with all the time. (Think of Rupert Murdoch.)
A more interesting question concerns the ethics of ‘nudging’. The latter is based on two behavioural principles: that people are very bad at making decisions concerning long-term outcomes (such as their health), and that situations or ‘choice architecture’ (both social and physical) heavily influence behaviour. (The single most effective reducer of obesity? Using smaller plates.)
The ethical question is this: are we paternalistically interfering in people’s lives when we nudge them, or are we enabling them to do what they already want to do, but find hard? Nudging has been labelled ‘libertarian paternalism’ and the question is whether we think the two terms complement one another or that paternalism trumps.
One response is the one made by Sunstein and Thaler, that when people are nudged they are simply being aided to choose their ‘preferred preferences’. For example, if the healthy eating options are first in the canteen-line, a person might opt for them at first unthinkingly – she’s hungry, she goes for the first thing she sees. But then she might realise what she is doing. If the nudge continues to work, this is because her behaviour has been guided by a ‘choice architecture’ that enables her to more easily do what she already wanted to, but found difficult. Or so the argument goes.
I think this is fine. But it suggests that the only way a piece of behaviour can be encouraged without paternalism is if that behaviour chimes with an antecedent deliberated-upon choice. And this seems to me like an unwarranted bit of neo-classical prejudice. What is wrong with guiding someone to a behavioural pattern that is not the result of an antecedent consciously-endorsed decision?
Imagine that I have always pooh-poohed the idea of healthy eating, even though I’m overweight. ‘Life is for the living’, I have said many a time: ‘I enjoy my food, and being happy is the most important thing in life.’ One day, the canteen at work puts the healthy-food options first in line. I start eating more healthily. After a few weeks, I realise the nudge has taken place – I realise what I’m doing every lunchtime. But I think, ‘actually, it’s not so bad, this healthy-eating lark; I feel better, I think I might stick with it.’
What has happened here is that a capability has been built – a capability to feel the benefits of healthy eating, something I could not do before. My ‘preferred preferences’ have changed rather than simply been realised. The direction of change has been from behaviour to attitudes. (I did something without thinking; after a while realised I liked it; I consequently changed my ‘higher order’ preferences about what kind of life I want to lead.)
Is this unethical (overly paternalistic)? I don’t think so. I can still go back to unhealthy eating if I want, but now that choice is informed by an ability to viscerally feel the benefits of healthy eating, and is much the better for it.
What I am trying to get at is an implicit prejudice even Thaler and Sunstein display – that all ethical behaviour-change results from behavioural patterns conforming to attitudes we already hold and have consciously endorsed. But another way that nudges can work is through developing a behavioural capability. When this occurs someone can end up consciously endorsing a behavioural pattern they actively rejected before. The nudge, through guiding behaviour, has allowed a person to see the options clearly and make a properly informed choice for the first time.
What stops us from having this equally benign aspect of libertarian paternalism in view is the implicit prejudice that only behaviour-determining choices can be ethical, not choice-determining behaviours – that only the former do not override our free will. But that just falsifies how we actually make lots of informed choices – not by disembodied choosing, but by realising after a period of time the benefits of doing something.
Can we be honest?
We walk, live and breathe amidst the clamour for a new politics – for a root and branch clear-out of the political system and the political class that populates it. Yet whilst it is true that we need new political blood, and that both the MPs’ allowances system and the constitutional set-up need reform, the lurch to the anti-politics of mass anger, vengeance and fatalism asks for much more than this. But for what, exactly, does it ask? The answer is that it doesn’t really know, it simply morphs from this to that form of indignation, like a storm rolling across a turbulent ocean.
But there is a ridiculous delusion at the heart of this hysteria: that somehow it is the political class – and the bankers, don’t forget the bankers! – that have wronged society. Nothing to do with the people. They didn’t vote for them, take out their hundred percent mortgages, speculate on properties financed by the low interest rates they set. Oh no, nobody did any of that, and if they did, it’s all somebody else’s fault.
For a while there was a sense that we were all responsible. George Osborne announced a new austerity, David Cameron the importance of responsible communities. Labour played catch-up, John Cruddas thinking hard about how the Left should respond to the financial crisis. Some kind of collective recognition of what a new politics would look like seemed to be at hand: one where communities came before individuals, where change started at home, where our own selfishness and materialism were acknowledged and rejected. But then the mania set in, and now we’re not at fault at all.
There is a psychological explanation of this mass delusion. Psychologists talk about ‘fundamental attribution error’. This is where we attribute mistakes made by others to their personalities rather than the situations they are acting in, but where we only attribute positive achievements to ourselves, while attributing our mistakes to the situation. This leads to an unholy alliance of arrogant self-aggrandisement, ‘not my fault guv’’ buck-passing, and hypocritical blame-mongering.
This explanation works reasonably well, but what does it really say – that we’re all just a bit rubbish? I think there’s a deeper explanation to the mass rage. This explanation has two parts, a story and a reality.
The story is based on what Michael Oakeshott called ‘rationalism in politics’ – the idea that western enlightened democracies are inexorably moving toward economic and social perfection: a society capable of uniformly making the right choices through rational deliberation. The latest version of this story came in the form of a triumphant neo-liberalism.
The reality is that most of the time we are not rational deliberators. The pandemics of anger, disgust, and fear, all manipulated by various media, testify to our largely irrational natures: we copy one another, we get swept along by the herd, we vent our emotions in mass swathes.
But the story and reality are connected. It is because we implicitly feel that our societies should be moving towards perfection that we are so angry they are not. And because we don’t think we need to do anything much to bring about inevitable progress, we shirk responsibility in a collective fit of indignation. White Van Man’s anger over immigration and Europe is at bottom due to disappointment: his was to be a gilded journey to Jerusalem, but he’s stuck somewhere on the M1 instead.
MPs expenses are a side-show. The truth is our political system is broken due to a lack of honesty about what politics can achieve, and how it can achieve it. We must recognise that the good society only comes to those who work at it, bit by bit, mistake by mistake. And that we as citizens are required to contribute as well. The Victorians’ great surge of municipal development was based on lofty ideals, but they also put the hours in. They would’ve laughed off our callow belief that society can be perfected without doing much ourselves. Theirs was social change brought not just through government bills but the associative bonds of grass-roots activity. Passive consumerism and political spin have kept us from this truth about what social improvement really requires.
A good dose of honesty about the myth of inexorable progress and perfectibility would do us the world of good. Then our irrationalities, our herd mentality, could be put to work in our favour – a mood of humility would bed down and we could face up to our problems together. The first thing politicians can do in this direction is be honest about the reach of politics. For their lack of honesty here is what we are really angry about. But like all the most vehement anger, it’s in part a projection of anger with ourselves - deep down we know we are not being honest either.
Exercising choice?
Last week we had Andrew Lansley speak at the RSA, setting out his vision for the health service. He didn’t say much about public behaviour and health (although he did say a little), but there’ll be an opportunity to catch up with his views on that at this Social Brain event on June 29th.
One thing that came up in his speech was a commitment to choice as a driver of competition, and thus standards of care and efficiency in the NHS. New Labour too is committed to the ‘choice agenda’ in health (although not nearly seriously enough according to Lansley).
I wonder about this commitment. There are lots of worries: that only the middle-classes get to exercise choice so that health provision based on it further entrenches inequalities in health outcomes; that we are simply not that good at making choices about our health; that choice-driven competition will lead to hospitals avoiding ‘difficult’ patients and ailments (although it is only fair to say that Lansley did speak to some of these worries). There also seems to be a worry over how the Conservatives (quite admirable) desire to empower and trust the professionalism of doctors and nurses conflicts with the choice agenda – if it is the professional honour and altruism of health workers that secures high standards of care and efficiency, why do we need choice to drive competition, in turn driving up these latter?
Setting these worries aside, I have concerns based on some quite simple mathematical considerations (or rather mathematically expressed considerations). As Thomas Schelling noted in his seminal work ‘Macromotives and Microbehavior’, we often do not realise the aggregate effects of individual choices, even when they require no empirical research to be identified. Take, for example, a future in which every family chooses to have two kids, a boy and a girl. Great, one might think, every son will have a sister, and every daughter a brother. But a little reflection will reveal that no daughter will have a sister, and no son a brother. Is that something we want writ large across the whole of society? This result of our collective choices is blindingly obvious, but we need to be reminded of it all the same.
Now, take ‘choice’ over which hospital one attends. Say that there are two to choose from within reasonable distance, Butchers’ Den and Slackers’ Yard. Butchers’ Den is very efficient, has short waiting lists and high-standards of care. Slackers’ Yard is overworked, has long waiting lists and care is patchy. People are aware of this information, and start demanding en masse that they be treated at Butchers’ Den. But now, Butchers’ Den’s waiting lists suddenly increase and standards of care drop due to overwork. A lot of the people seen at Butchers’ Den get a bad service, but before this information can be collated and disseminated, a lot more get a really bad service.
Eventually the information gets out that Butchers’ Den has gone downhill and Slackers’ Yard has greatly improved. Everybody now chooses to go to the latter. The process repeats and we get an oscillation between everyone wanting to go to each hospital, with the majority of patients getting bad or really bad care. This can all be known without any empirical research into the particular circumstances of either hospital or the population that uses them. It is just a blindingly obvious aggregate-level result of individual choices, given the variables.
That this doesn’t happen in reality (where such ‘choice’ exists) is not because the analysis is wrong. Rather, this is what would happen if informed choice were the determinant of which hospital each patient attends. Thus plainly it isn’t. So the politicians who advocate the choice agenda in health are in a pickle. Either choice isn’t taken up in reality, or if it is only by a limited few. For if everybody chose their hospital based on the obvious variables, scenarios like the above would emerge – scenarios in which everybody would receive much worse care.
Of course these variables might be wrong, but they are the ones the advocates of choice are presupposing.
So why does no-one concerned make this blindingly obvious point?
*** Chris Dillow has pointed out to me that the argument above runs on some specific details, so they should be brought out. Here are two details he suggests are salient:
1. The fact that Butchers’ Den can’t cope with the extra patients is that I am presuming it has limited capacity, both in terms of infrastructure and staff. Neither of these can be increased at anything like the rate needed to stop waiting lists lengthening and provision of care suffering from overwork and staff shortages.
2. Real-time data dissemination is not really possible, it will take months to collate, so that patients cannot get information up to date enough to make decisions that would stop the oscillation effect between hospitals. If real-time info were available, it’s collation would take so much time and effort as to make for an even worse bureaucratism than already exists.
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