Why We're Better With Some Threats Than Others (An Earth Month Re-Run)
Harvard professor Dan Gilbert explains why humans struggle to address long-term threats like climate change, despite being adept at immediate dangers. He discusses psychological biases that hinder action and explores how framing and social influence can motivate more effective responses.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Introduction to Human Bias in Addressing Climate Change
Evolutionary Roots of Human Threat Response
Why Climate Change Doesn't Trigger Our Threat System: Agentic Threats
The Power of Intent in Perceiving Harm
How Moral Harms Drive Human Reaction
The Impact of Instantaneous Threats on Action
Limitations of Human Future Planning and Adaptation
Harnessing Social Norms for Environmental Action
Leveraging Moral Outrage for Climate Solutions
The Impact of Immediate Climate Damage on Perception
Imagining Positive Futures to Drive Climate Action
Affective Forecasting and Sustainable Behavior
Systemic vs. Individual Approaches to Climate Change
7 Key Concepts
Expected Utility
A logical framework, proposed by Pascal and Fermat, for evaluating threats based on their likelihood and magnitude. This model suggests that action is warranted if a threat is highly probable and has a very bad outcome, but it doesn't account for human psychological biases.
Agentic Threats
Threats that originate from individuals or groups, which humans are evolutionarily wired to respond to strongly. This is because people are the most significant source of rewards and punishments for social animals like us, making us highly attuned to human-caused dangers.
Intentional Threats
Harms inflicted with deliberate purpose, which elicit a much stronger psychological and physiological response than accidental harms. Whether someone intends to harm us can be more important than the actual harm inflicted, leading us to forgive accidents but prosecute intentional acts.
Moral Harms
Insults or violations of fairness, justice, or honor, which humans respond to with great power. These harms are often intertwined with agentic and intentional threats, as they challenge our social standing or sense of right and wrong, even if no physical injury occurs.
Adaptation/Habituation
The human ability to get used to things, both good and bad, often better than we predict. While generally beneficial for coping with life's challenges, this capacity can be detrimental when it causes us to not react to negative changes that unfold slowly enough for us to gradually adjust to them.
Affective Forecasting
The process of predicting how future events or choices will make us feel, including the type, intensity, and duration of emotions. People frequently make errors in affective forecasting, often overestimating the negative aspects of change and underestimating the positive feelings that might arise.
Illusion of Uniqueness
The belief that one is fundamentally different from others, leading individuals to discount the experiences and feelings of other people when predicting their own future. This bias causes people to place undue stock in their own imagination rather than valuing the actual experiences of those who have already made similar changes.
9 Questions Answered
Humans are evolved to respond to specific types of threats—those that are agentic, intentional, instantaneous, and moral—which were critical for survival in ancestral environments. Climate change, lacking these features, does not trigger our innate threat response system effectively.
Our brains are most responsive to threats that are agentic (involve people), intentional (someone means to harm us), moral (insults or injustices), and instantaneous (happen immediately).
Neuroscience studies indicate that pain regions in the brain show greater activity when harm is perceived as intentional, suggesting that the intent behind an action significantly amplifies our experience of pain and alarm.
Our remarkable ability to adapt to new circumstances, even negative ones, means that slow, gradual changes like rising temperatures or pollution levels often go unnoticed or are accepted as normal, preventing us from reacting or objecting to them.
Yes, individual actions not only have a direct, albeit small, impact but also serve as social examples. When people see others adopting pro-environmental behaviors (like installing solar panels), it normalizes these actions and encourages others to follow suit, creating cascading effects.
By framing environmental issues in ways that appeal to existing human biases, such as the desire to conform to social norms (e.g., 'most guests reuse towels') or appealing to pride and outrage (e.g., 'Don't Mess with Texas'), significant behavioral changes can be achieved.
It is challenging for people to take difficult actions today for the benefit of a future self or future generations because our capacity to look into the far future and reason about it is an evolutionarily new and limited ability, often overshadowed by immediate gratification.
People often make errors in predicting their future feelings, overestimating the pain or difficulty of adopting sustainable behaviors (like getting an electric vehicle) and underestimating the potential positive feelings or ease associated with them, thus hindering action.
While individual actions play a role, systemic change through government policy and voting is considered more impactful. This approach addresses the underlying structures and economic investments that drive climate problems, rather than solely relying on individuals to defy their natural biases.
10 Actionable Insights
1. Vote for Systemic Climate Action
To make significant change for the climate, vote for a government that will change the system in which people function, rather than asking individuals to defy their own nature. This is because systemic changes, like stopping fossil fuel use, require political action.
2. Institutionalize Positive Behaviors
For widespread adoption of beneficial actions, institutionalize them within systems, similar to how retirement savings are automatically withheld by employers. This helps overcome individual flaws in consistent action.
3. Ensure Easy Access to Good Choices
To encourage positive behaviors, make them physically easy and accessible for people, such as ensuring grocery stores with produce are within a mile of their home. This removes barriers and makes it simpler for individuals to make beneficial choices.
4. Promote Positive Future Outcomes
When addressing large problems, use ‘carrot’ messages that highlight attractive opportunities, job creation, and a vibrant new economy. This is a very effective way to get people to do the right thing by showing them attractive future possibilities.
5. Leverage Social Norms for Change
Encourage desired behaviors by showing people that ‘most people’ are already doing it, or by comparing their actions to neighbors. Humans want to be like others, making this an effective lever for change.
6. Consult Experienced Others for Forecasts
To make accurate predictions about future feelings or experiences, see how people who have already done it actually feel, as their testimony is better than personal imagination. People often have an illusion of uniqueness, but human experiences are more alike than expected.
7. Craft Messages for Specific Audiences
Design messages that appeal to the specific pride, identity, or biases of a target demographic to achieve significant behavioral change. This leverages existing psychological traits for impact, as seen with the ‘Don’t Mess with Texas’ campaign.
8. Prioritize Existential Over Moral Threats
Subjugate natural responses to moral insults and prioritize addressing existential threats like climate change. This shifts focus to truly impactful problems over things that cause outrage but less real harm.
9. Logically Evaluate Threat Likelihood & Magnitude
Assess threats based on their likelihood and magnitude to determine if action is warranted. This rational approach, proposed by Pascal and Fermat, helps decide which problems truly deserve attention.
10. Assign Agency to Problems (Limited Effect)
Attempt to find a ‘face’ or an agent for a problem to potentially rile people up more, though its effectiveness for issues like climate change is questioned. This taps into the human tendency to respond to threats from individuals.
7 Key Quotes
Climate change has none of the features that trigger this threat response system in the human brain.
Dan Gilbert
Whether people intend to harm us or not is almost more important than the harm they inflict.
Dan Gilbert
We're all familiar with the frog that, you know, never jumps out of the water because the water is being heated from room temperature to boiling very slowly. That's not a bad parable for the place we are right now with regard to the environment.
Dan Gilbert
We are world champion habituators and adapters... But this remarkable ability to adapt can also be our enemy because it makes us not react to bad things that happen slowly enough for us to get used to them.
Dan Gilbert
Human beings want to be like most people. If everyone's doing it, it's probably the right thing, so I should do it too.
Dan Gilbert
The problem is this was the kind of threat you needed to respond to before it arrived. Once it has arrived it's too late.
Dan Gilbert
If you really care about the climate instead of changing your light bulbs or worrying about carbon offsets and you should vote.
Dan Gilbert