What psychology teaches us about communicating climate change | D+C - Development + Cooperation

Kimberly Crystal Doell in an interview with Eva-Maria Verfürth

You have led one of the largest global studies of climate-change psychology, involving over 59,000 participants from 63 countries. The outcome is surprisingly positive: 86 % of participants believe in climate change, and 73 % support policies that tackle it. However, this does not seem to be adequately reflected in policymaking, public debate or the media. 

There are many reasons. An important one is pluralistic ignorance: people tend to vastly underestimate how much other people believe in climate change. Pluralistic ignorance is one of the psychological barriers which prevent people from taking action on climate change. We call them “dragons of inaction”, which is a really fitting name. A study we conducted in the United States revealed that even policymakers significantly underestimated public support for policies tackling climate change. 

What are other reasons?

Furthermore, it is difficult to translate what the public wants into actual practice. In order to reduce our carbon footprint, humankind will have to give up certain things or behaviours. However, if you ask people who should take responsibility, most will point the finger at someone else: big oil, the airlines, agricultural companies or the government. People also don’t want to be the ones who have to pay for it. So, although people generally support climate-friendly policies, they don’t support policies that affect them personally.

During the Covid-19 pandemic we saw that decisive global action is possible. From a psychological perspective, why was the policy response to the pandemic so much more resolute than the response to climate change?

The way people and governments dealt with and communicated about both crises was quite similar. The difference is the timescale: the threat of the pandemic was immediate; it needed to be dealt with here and now. One of the major challenges in raising awareness of climate change is temporal discounting, which is another dragon of inaction.

What is “temporal discounting”?

Humans are known to prioritise immediate rewards over future rewards, even when the future rewards are better. For example, if I offer to give a person either $ 5 now or $ 20 in a year, most people will choose to receive the money now, even though it is four times less than what I’d give them in the future. That’s also part of the reason why people smoke. As lung cancer only develops after several decades, people are confident that they won’t be affected. If smoking caused lung cancer the next day, it would certainly lead to a huge decline in smoking. Similarly, climate change is easy to ignore, because its effects are neither immediate nor concrete.

But the effects of climate change have become very threatening and palpable in many parts of the world. Yet people don’t seem to be feeling any greater sense of urgency. We talk about the weather, the droughts and the heat, but not about climate change itself.

This is the challenge of attribution: heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events have always occurred, so it’s difficult to determine whether a certain event has been exacerbated by climate change.