– Nice article over on Dot Earth by Andrew Revkin.  He’s writing about a new 225 page report by a task force of the American Psychological Association in which they are examining what aspects of human psychology are tending to make us, as a species, make bad choices about so many things – like the environment.
– It’s a subject near and dear to my heart.  In fact, my desire to chronicle the gathering Perfect Storm is beginning to be overshadowed by my desire to explore questions like these.  Because certainly the first step towards solving a problem must be to understand where the problem is coming from.
– Everyone can, perhaps, go take a moment now and look in the mirror.
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A task force assembled by the American Psychological Association hopes to spur more research on the role of the human mind in shaping the behaviors resulting in rising greenhouse-gas emissions as well as on traits that can impede an effective response to global warming and similar slow-building environmental risks.
The task force has produced a 225-page report on psychology and climate that is being released to coincide with special sessions on climate at the association’s annual meeting in Toronto. (The link to the report has been balky; I’ll update if a better one is created.)
The group is hoping that the report can also inspire specialists in other fields to collaborate with psychologists. For instance, an effort to shape an initiative for curbing emissions would have a higher chance of success if it considered research showing which messages and incentives cause people to change, or resist change. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act,” Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Penn State and the task force leader, said in a statement.
The report reviews research on the behavioral element in every part of the climate problem — from consumer habits to the human tendency to give outsize importance to immediate costs even when confronted with evidence of big long-term risks. In essence, as this report and many previous studies show, the human mind appears to be set up in the worst possible way to grasp and act on global warming, which is one of those problems where the most damaging outcomes are somewhere and someday, not here and now. (My guess is that these tendencies are one reason we need to approach climate change and the energy gap more in the way we treat Medicare insolvency than the traditional environmental problems we grew up with back in the 20th century — sewage in rivers, smog in air — which were literally in your face.)
More… ➡