Don't Even Think About It (11 page)

There is even a persuasive argument that the biases that reveal themselves in cognitive psychology experiments may also be culturally determined. The participants in the vast majority of experiments that built the models of cognitive biases are university students. Common sense would tell us to be wary of drawing conclusions about innate human attitudes to long term risk from overconfident young people with a marked tendency to smoke and drink too much.

A team of anthropologists at the University of British Columbia termed these experimental subjects “WEIRD,” a provocative acronym for people from countries that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. They described them as an extremely unrepresentative and “exotic” group worthy of anthropological study in their own right. To prove their point, the anthropologists showed that archetypal psychological experiments could generate very different results when repeated in different cultures and asked for “caution in addressing questions of human
nature from this slice of humanity.”

And even within WEIRD countries, a cultural disposition to long-term planning can readily overrule the cognitive bias toward temporal discounting. A team based at Copenhagen Business School found little evidence of any discounting among the cooperative Danes and, as their report charmingly put it, virtually no sign of “hyperbolicky” behavior. So in Denmark, a national culture that historically has seen a high degree of cooperation around common goals can overrule the disposition to short-term interests.

The importance of cultural context applies to all other forms of cost-benefit analysis. For example, mainstream economic theory assumes that people will avoid incurring short-terms costs to themselves even though their personal action might prevent larger longer-term costs for others.

In a famous and much quoted anecdote, the Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling told of being caught in an hour-long traffic jam of vacationers returning from Cape Cod. When people finally saw the reason for the delay—a mattress blocking one of the lanes—no one took the initiative to stop and move it. “For all I know,” he wrote, “it may still have been there the following Sunday.”

Schelling argued that nobody moved the mattress because there was no system to reward them for doing so. With his tongue firmly in cheek, he suggested a market-based system “that a traffic helicopter proposes that each of the next hundred motorists flip a dime out the right-hand window to the person who removed the mattress.”

Schelling then applied the same thinking to energy conservation. Even though we are urged to turn down our air-conditioning in the summer to avoid brownouts, he said, we do not do so because we know that our reduction would account for only an infinitesimal part of the total demand and therefore be of no benefit to ourselves. Without a penalty or a reward system, he argued, there is no motivation to commit anonymous acts of altruism.

Except that this is not how people in Japan behaved in 2011 after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 led to a sudden fall in the electricity baseload. When called upon to make a personal sacrifice to avoid brownouts, people willingly sweltered in indoor temperatures of over eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Without duress or reward, people willingly turned down the air-conditioning in their homes even when no one could see them doing so. The result was a 20 percent fall in peak energy demand in Tokyo throughout the summer.

So people’s tendency to avoid costs and act only in their self interest—often considered major obstacles to action on climate change—can be overruled by a sufficiently strong appeal to group identity and a visible social norm. The energy crisis was given salience with posters and reminders on all media, and even large billboards above major crossings that flashed daily rates of power consumption and the likelihood of a blackout. Following the tsunami that had killed sixteen thousand people, this was a time of exceptional unity, similar to that in the United States after 9/11. People were actively seeking ways to make a personal contribution, just as they do in wartime when they are brought together in the face of a common enemy.

And there was another very relevant factor at work:
informed choice
.
In Japan, the social prominence of the energy shortage led people to see the normally neutral act of turning on an air conditioner as a morally charged
choice
between self-interest and the collective good. There is a very large difference between how people respond to a risk that is an accepted part of their current condition—their status quo—and to a risk that is presented as an informed choice. An experiment by the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, who has frequently collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, showed this very well. Imagine that you have been exposed to a fatal illness that has a one-in-a-thousand chance of killing you. How much would you pay for a vaccination? On average, participants in the experiment were willing to pay two hundred dollars for a vaccination to remove this small but deadly risk.

Now imagine that you have been invited to be a volunteer in medical research into this same disease. You will need to be voluntarily infected, with the same chance of death—one in a thousand. How much payment would you require as compensation for this risk? If you are like me, you would refuse to take part at all. The average of those who would accept payment was ten thousand dollars.

The experiment is frequently cited as evidence that people are more inclined to accept risk if it is an unavoidable part of their status quo. But, to my mind, it says something far more interesting about the role of informed choice and the underrated importance of anticipation. When you imagine being a volunteer, you can anticipate the horror of discovering that you have, quite needlessly,
chosen
a premature death.

This experiment contains important lessons for those building action against climate change. If climate change is regarded as an unavoidable condition, like a disease that we have already been exposed to, we will become resigned to it and, at most, might pay something to reduce our exposure to future impacts, just as we pay insurance on our homes.

If, however, climate change is regarded as an active and informed choice, it feels far more like being a volunteer in the medical research. Imagine, for example, that you are offered an immediate boost in your current standard of living if you agree to pass on an irreversible disruption of the world’s weather systems to your children (if you feel you can face it, look at the four-degree impacts at the end of this book to remind yourself of what is on offer). How much more income would you like to receive for that?

As soon as it is presented this way, all sorts of other considerations come into play—of anticipation, fear, responsibility, guilt, and shame. There is no option of being an innocent bystander to a crime that you have knowingly agreed to.

Climate change is never presented as a choice in this way. Most energy and fuel use is entirely automatic or woven into our daily lives. Government policy, in which decisions are more carefully constructed, deliberately removes or sidelines climate change in its choices. Even the people who deny climate change have never chosen short-term personal consumption over long-term collective climate disaster: They have chosen to believe that there is no problem.

There are, I believe, rich opportunities here for rethinking climate change in ways that might overcome the stultifying cognitive indifference to future loss: to talk less about the costs of avoiding climate change and more about the lousy deal we are getting in return for a marginally higher living standard. What is required is a moment of
informed choice
when people have to decide whether they want to accept this risk and, with it, the responsibility for being wrong.

Above all, as I will argue repeatedly in this book, people will willingly shoulder a burden—even one that requires short-term sacrifice against uncertain long-term threats—provided they share a common purpose and are rewarded with a greater sense of social belonging.

15

Certain About the Uncertainty

How We Use Uncertainty as a Justification for Inaction

Uncertainty is (I can say
with some certainty) likely to be a major reason why people ignore climate change. In experiments, uncertainty about future outcomes is one of the key factors that lead people to act in their own short-term self-interest.

Policy makers and campaigners on all sides understand very well the importance of uncertainty in regard to action. This is why the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change expressly states, in its third principle, that a “lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures” to minimize the causes of climate change. And this is why President George W. Bush excused his inaction on the issue by saying that “no one can say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and, therefore, what level must be avoided.”        

The main source of public uncertainty, though, relates to the widespread perception that scientists are themselves divided on the issue. In the United States, more than a third of people believe that “most scientists are unsure whether global warming is occurring or not.”

In part this distorted perception is due to the way that the media presents the issue as contested and adheres to a debate format that pits a climate scientist against a contrarian drawn from a spinning Rolodex of professional deniers. But this uncertainty also originates in the professional caution with which climate scientists present their findings.

There is even widespread uncertainty over the very meaning of the word
uncertainty
. The precise language of science uses the word to mean the extent to which the weight of available evidence supports a conclusion. Scientists argue that full certainty is unattainable, indeed damaging, and that the maintenance of doubt is the very
foundation
of the scientific method.

However, the lay public uses the word in a quite different way: to mean the extent to which the expert is confident in his or her stated opinion. When scientists say
uncertain
, the public hears
unsure
, and considers them less reliable or trustworthy. Thus we might be more inclined to trust an expert who is certain that something is unlikely than one who is uncertain that something is very likely.

Social trust is determined by confidence and is conveyed by body language, eye contact, and a clear and unfaltering delivery. Scientists can still generate trust in their work if they can communicate their uncertainty with social confidence. All too often, though, professional scientists project a lack of confidence, especially when set up against a professional contrarian who spends much of his life in television studios. Here, for example, is a leading climate scientist feeling the pressure in a live TV debate against a leading climate denier.

“There could be catastrophe in the air. We hear all kinds of explanations about the uncertainties, but the uncertainties—and indeed one of the quotes in the [denier’s] book is ‘uncertainty is uncertainty.’ Well, uncertainty can play both ways.”

Rather than talking confidently about the certainties of what is known, he is talking unconfidently about the uncertainties of what is not known. He is trying to say that the uncertainties are themselves dangerous, but for the listener, it seems as if he has just said “I don’t know” five times in a row.

This is not to say that climate change is uncertain at all: As with any complex issue, it can be read in terms of layers of confidence. Some aspects are well known, well understood, and almost certain. Some parts are conjectural, little understood, and highly uncertain. As former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have it, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

Defining climate change as a whole as certain or uncertain is therefore a choice. Advocates of action focus on the known knowns and emphasize the scale of agreement around that. Opponents of action, such as the skeptical climatologist Judith Curry, emphasize the “whole host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify.”

This interpretation of climate change as exceptionally uncertain is as much a matter of confirmation bias and convenient storytelling as the sibling arguments that it is a distant future issue or that action requires unacceptable losses. Even the most skeptical of skeptics cannot, with an open mind, explore this issue and not conclude that the core science is extremely firm.

In 2008 Professor Richard Mueller did exactly that and decided that climate science was in need of a more combative and
rational
challenge from a critical outsider.

Mueller, I should say, likes the word
rational
.
Sitting together at a bustling sidewalk cafe opposite his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches theoretical physics, he tells me that the Senate was quite
rational
to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The skeptical public, he says, has been more
rational
than people give them credit for. For someone who is clearly very emotionally attached to his arguments, Mueller speaks an awful lot about rationality.

Mueller is extremely unwilling to accept any conventional opinion on climate change: There is, he says, not a single weather event that can be attributed to it using the standards of science; almost all solutions are pointless; the United Nations is “shameful”; electric cars are all about feeling good—they are “like the person who goes out to get exercise and then gets a milkshake.”