1 Human dimensions of climate change I. Perceptions and biases of energy consumption II. Communicating Climate Change Shahzeen Z. Attari [email protected]

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Human dimensions of climate change

I. Perceptions and biases of energy consumptionII. Communicating Climate Change

Shahzeen Z. [email protected] • http://mypage.iu.edu/~sattari

Indiana University BloomingtonSchool of Public and Environmental Affairs

Can we stabilize carbon dioxide emissions?

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“Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century.”

(Pacala and Socolow, Science, 2004)

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Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current

Technologies

(Pacala and Socolow, Science, 2004)

Efficiency and conservation

Fuel switching

Nuclear fission

Renewable electricityCO2 capture and

storage

Forests and soil

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“Improvements in efficiency and conservation offer the greatest potential to provide wedges”

Efficiency and conservation

Fuel switching

Nuclear fission

Renewable electricityCO2 capture and

storage

Forests and soil

Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current

Technologies

Update: Since 2004…

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Why don’t Americans conserve energy and adopt energy-efficient technologies?

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On why people do not act

Information deficit model

Motivation deficit model

Don’t know how much I will saveDon’t know what to do

Don’t know how…

CostTimeEffort

Social norms…

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Understand how people interact with technology and nature

Perceptions of energy consumption and savings- Most effective behavior?

- Accuracy of perceptions? - Factors that predict accuracy?

(Attari et al., PNAS, 2010)

Overviewwork completed

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Behaviors deemed “most effective” by participants

12%

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Behaviors deemed “most effective” by participants

Curtailment

Efficiency

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Risk Perception

(Lichtenstein et al., 1978)

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14(Attari et al., 2010)


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Laptops overestimated 2x

(Attari et al., 2010)

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Dishwashers underestimated 800x

(Attari et al., 2010)


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Findings: “In your opinion, what is the most effective thing that

you could do to conserve energy in your life?”

- Participants state:

55% “curtailment”

12% “efficiency”

Gardener and Stern (2008):

“efficiency saves more energy than curtailment”

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- People have small overestimates for low-energy behaviors and large underestimates for high-energy behaviors

many implications for technology,

education, and policy

Findings: Major misperceptions in energy consumption

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Perceptions of energy consumption and

savings(Attari et al., 2010)

Overviewwork completed

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OverviewCurrent work

Biases in personal energy consumption

(Attari et al., rnr)

Perceptions of energy consumption and

savings(Attari et al., 2010)

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On why people do not act

Information deficit model

Motivation deficit model

Don’t know how much I will saveDon’t know what to do

Don’t know how…

CostTimeEffort

Social norms…

What you want to do vs.

What others should do

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Research questions• Would there be any systematic differences

in how people answer the following two questions?

• “In your opinion, what is the single most effective thing that you could do to use less energy in your life?”

• “In your opinion, what is the most single most effective thing that Americans could do to use less energy in their lives?”

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Predictions

• If information deficits: – Distribution of responses should be similar for

both questions

• If motivated cognition:– Systematic differences in responses between

questions (e.g., listing an easy non-effective behavior for self and a harder effective behavior for others)

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Most effective behavior: Self vs. others

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Most effective behavior: Self vs. others

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Most effective action for self and other Americans

Turn off (appliances and lights)Drive less (drive less, carpool, use public transportation, bike, and walk)

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I’ll do the easy thing, you do the hard thing

Individuals who choose the easier option for themselves are likely to ask others to do the harder

thing.

McNemar chi-square statistic for asymmetry 26.1, p < 0.0001

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Findings: I’ll do the easy thing, you do the hard thing

- People are motivated to list easier non-effective behaviors for themselves (e.g., turning off the light) and harder more effective behaviors for others (e.g., carpooling, driving less).

Questions so far?

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Part II : Communicating climate change

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The Psychology of Climate Change Communication

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Study of individual and group decision individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental riskenvironmental risk

Cognitive, affective, and social processesCognitive, affective, and social processes by which people decide how to cope with environmental uncertainty and change

• Interdisciplinary (driven by social science, psychology)

agronomyanthropologyanthropologyclimate scienceecologyeconomicsengineeringenvironmental science geographyhistorymanagementmeteorologyoceanographypolitical sciencepsychologypsychology

Availability of information = use of information

More/better information = better decisions

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Scientific Information• Increasingly present or sought in decision settings

• Often in the form of a probabilistic forecast– seasonal-to-interannual, decadal, and long-term climate change

– natural hazards

• Or, technical information related to energy consumption

• Many barriers to its use by decision makers

• How can information be communicated and used more effectively?

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Availability of information = use of information

More/better information = better decisions

Information deficit ?

Motivation deficit ?

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Decision makers • are selective when attending to information• evaluate options using both cognitive and

affective processes• are influenced by the context of the

decision• are influenced by beliefs, goals, and prior

experience

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1 Know Your Audience• Subjective perception of risk

– Different people worry about different things and two people may perceive the same risk as more or less threatening and manageable, and therefore worry about it to a different extent.

– Subjective feelings of being at risk (affective risk dimensions) influence judgments of the riskiness of material, physical, and environmental risks in ways that go beyond their objective consequences

– Perceptions matter, often more, than scientific facts.

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Subjective perceptions of risk influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations and define how people approach and solve problems. Risk perceptions are part of a person’s mental model.

1 Know Your Audience• Subjective perception of risk

--

• Mental models– represent a person’s thought process of how something works,

understanding of the surrounding world

– based on often-incomplete facts, past experiences, intuitive perceptions

– include relevant knowledge and beliefs that help people interpret new information in order to reach conclusions

– especially when hearing about risk, people refer to known related phenomena and associations from their past to decide if they find the risk threatening or manageable

– often serve as filter for search and uptake of information

• confirmation bias44

45Illustration by Ian Webster, 2009

1 Know Your Audience

• Subjective perception of risk

• Mental models– Confirmation bias

• Cultural values – Worldview, political orientation

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2 Get Your Audience’s Attention

• Spatial and temporal distance– Bring the message close to home

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2 Get your audience’s attention


• Framing matters– Different strokes for different folks

• CC, health, national security

– Loss vs. gain: losses loom larger

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Ground Meat

85% lean 15% fat

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Temporal Discounting

• $60 now vs. $60 tomorrow

• $50 now vs. $60 in 1 month

• $50 in 12 months vs. $60 in 13 months

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2 Get your audience’s attention


• Framing matters– Different strokes for different folks

• CC, health, national security

– Loss vs. gain: losses loom larger

• Tailored information

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3 Translate Scientific Data Into Concrete Experience

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Rational/analytic system Emotional/affective system

• Analytic

• Logical

• Deliberative

• Abstract– encodes reality in abstract symbols, words, numbers– rules and algorithms need to be learned– system needs to be cued; does not operate automatically

• Holistic

• Intuitive

• Affective– fear, dread, anxiety represent risks as feelings (Loewenstein, Weber, et. al, 2001)

• Vivid– encodes reality in concrete images and narratives, linked in associative networks– operates automatically and without any training

Two Mental Processing Systems

Illustration by Ian Webster, 200955


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Rational and Affective System

– Operate in parallel• Affective system is faster, delivers output earlier

• No visceral reaction – no motivation

– When the outputs of the two systems are in conflict, behavior is typically determined by the affective processing system (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001)

– Personal experience or anecdotal accounts of the experience of others trumps statistical evidence

• Because past experiences often evoke strong feelings, making them memorable and therefore often dominant in

processing (Slovic et al., 2002; Loewenstein et al, 2001)

Recency Effect

• Experiential processing gives a lot of weight to recent observations– Since rare events have generally not occurred

recently, they are underweighted

• Neglect of flood control infrastructure

– However, recency weighting also predicts that, if the statistically rare event has occurred in the very recent past, people will overreact to it

• Likelihood predictions based on availability and ease of recall

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Dogs on a leash vs. cats on a leash

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• In your opinion, which is a more likely cause of death in the US:

– Falling airplane parts

– Sharks

• In your opinion which, is the cause of death that is more common in the US: – Car accidents – Stomach cancer

• In your opinion, which is the cause of death that is more common in the US:

– Tornado

– Lightning

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Availability Heuristic• Allows people to make likelihood predictions based on what they

remember, how easily these memories are retrieved, and how readily available those memories are

• Ease of recall serves as indicator of likelihood

– Probability of a blizzard: greater for October or January?

– Rule of thumb works fairly well; common events are easier to remember than uncommon ones

– Yet not all easily-recalled events are very likely, but rather

• may have taken place more recently (recency effect)

• may have been distorted by the media,

• are associated with strong emotions (affect heuristic)

• Plays a role in judging the probabilities of extreme climate events

• Makes us assume that the future will be similar to what we have experienced so far

• Finite Pool of Worry (Linville and Fischer 1991)

4 Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals

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65Single Action Bias (Weber 1997)


• Uncertainty is uncomfortable

• Interpersonal uncertainty when engaging in mitigation and adaptation behavior– Post-decision regret /Fear of isolation

– Drop in the bucket

– Free riders

• Benefits of group discussion

5 Dealing with Uncertainty

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• People’s goals matter– Short-term self-interest vs. longer-term benefits to

society or the environmentTragedy of the commons (G. Hardin 1968, based on W. Lloyd (1833)

A situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen

Cooperation leads to greater benefits for all group members

Defection leads to greater benefits for the individual

– Multiple (often conflicting) goals

6 Tap Into Social Identities and Affiliations

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• Early engagement of all relevant groups• Participation in problem identification and

brainstorming of solutions• Social context alters the ways in which people

acquire, learn, engage with, and act on new information (Orlove et al. 2007, Peterson et al. 2011)

• Activation of social goals (Arora et al. 2012)

6 Benefits of Group Participation and Social Context

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• The power of default effects

8 Make Behavior Change Easier

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Effective consent rates, by country – goldgold: opt-in; blueblue: opt-out Source: Johnson/Goldstein (2007) Do Defaults Save Lives? Science, vol. 302, issue 5649, p. 1338-1339.

Example: Organ Donation

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The 2009 BECC Low-Carbon Lunch Experiment

ACEEE Conference Standard

Meat-Based Lunch

90-95%

Vegetarian Lunch 5-10%

ACEEE = American Council for an Energy Efficient EconomyBECC = Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change Conference, www.BECCConference.org

Source: Karen L. Ehrhardt-Martinez, Director, Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, Garrison Institute



BECC 2007

Meat-Based Lunch

90-95%

Vegetarian Lunch 5-10%


• Meat production is responsible for 18% of the global greenhouse gas emissions (Pew Commission 2008)

• Omnivores contribute 7 times the GHG emissions than vegans




BECC 2007

Meat-Based Lunch

90-95% 83%

Vegetarian Lunch 5-10% 17%







BECC 2007

BECC 2009

Meat-Based Lunch

90-95% 83% 20%

Vegetarian Lunch 5-10% 17% 80%





Conclusions: How to Approach the Motivation Deficit

• Risk communication CAN be improved

• Keep multiple goals in mind, look for co-benefits

• No “one-size-fits-all” approach– Combinations of affective/experience-based and

analytic information– Participatory processes to tailor information • Group decision context primes collective interests

• Awareness of need for individual actions also builds awareness of need for collective action

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www.cred.columbia.edu/guide/

Funding : NSF-SES 0345840, NSF-SES 0951516,Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation

Plug

If you are interested in learning more:

E401/555 Human Behavior and Energy Consumption @ 2:30-3:45pm SPEA in Spring 2014

Contact: Shahzeen Attari Email: [email protected]

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Documents

1 Human dimensions of climate change I. Perceptions and biases of energy consumption II. Communicating Climate Change Shahzeen Z. Attari [email protected]