Wake up and smell the... disaster

By Camilla Cavendish; Why are we so cool about climate change?

From The Times.UK

A collective groan in the office when I mutter that I might write about the UN's “state of the planet” report. What a turn-off: gloomy stats about mankind changing the weather, and destroying species and forests.

Environmentalists may get off on climate porn, but most people just turn away. “If it was really so bad, they'd do something,” says one colleague, without specifying who “they” are. The human tendency to convince yourself that everything is OK, because no one else is worried, is deeply ingrained.

Psychologists studied this phenomenon after the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. She was repeatedly attacked, outside her New York flat, by a stranger over the space of half an hour. Witness to that event were 38 people who stood at their windows but did not even dial for help. They just peered into the dark, listening to her screams, until she died.

John Darley and Bibb Latané later ran a series of experiments that confirmed that the more people who witness an event the less responsible any one of them feels. We assume that someone else is better qualified to respond. We are afraid to be the only one to make a fuss. “Social etiquette” trumps common sense.

Our tendency to shrug off responsibility seems to hold true even when we ourselves are in danger. Darley and Latané asked a series of college students to sit in a room and fill out a questionnaire. When smoke started to pour into the room through a vent, the others, all actors, ignored it and went on writing calmly. Ninety per cent of subjects copied the actors, even when the smoke became so thick that they could barely see and were coughing. But subjects who were alone in the room, under the same conditions, almost all reported the smoke as an emergency. That is an astonishing finding - that the inaction of other people can make us underestimate threats to our own safety.

In the past few weeks we have been told, by reputable sources, that the oceans are warming faster than anyone predicted. That species are becoming extinct a hundred times faster than fossils record. That fresh water supplies, critical to food production, are under strain. That we are approaching tipping points that may make climate change irreversible. This stuff makes me feel pretty desperate. I would think that other people would worry too. But then I go to the office, and to friends' houses, and no one mentions it. Nor do the politicians.

I am not claiming that there is a conspiracy of silence about environmental issues. On the contrary, some people argue there is too much noise. In most British offices, as the wisps come up the vent, the influence of the media probably means that there is more than one person looking concerned. But not a critical mass. When Darley and Latané put three non-actors in the room, they were more likely to call for help. But still only a third did.

It is human nature to wait for someone else to go first. So despite the noise from green groups, we look for get-out clauses. We blame India and China, or big corporations. People who write cheques to save cute monkeys from extinction also buy soap and margarine made from palm oil, whose production is devastating the tropical forests where the monkeys live. People who buy cloth shopping bags to reduce waste then fill them with water in plastic bottles that are shipped to China to be burnt. The part of our brain that is programmed to imitate dominates the part cued to self-preservation — especially when the threats are complex and long-term.

Could we send the herd in the other direction? Maybe. Ten years after Darley and Latané defined the bystander effect, another professor taught his pupils to overcome it. Arthur Beaman showed students films of the smoke experiment. He explained the psychology. And in future those students were, apparently, almost twice as likely as others to react to help other people.

Given the importance that companies and governments apparently place on environmental issues, it is astonishing how little attention has been paid to the psychological aspects.

Two years ago a small study for the Sustainable Development Commission found that UK households that generated their own energy, through solar power, wind turbines or air source heat pumps, became more likely to conserve energy. They would buy A-rated appliances and turn things off.

This didn't just apply to rich eco-fanatics: it applied equally to social housing tenants. Irrespective of whether they had chosen it or not, the process of generating their own energy seems to have given many people an “emotional connection”, says the study. The visibility of the solar panels or wind turbines made them proud to be pioneers.

In January I counted a Toyota Prius hybrid car on almost every one of the rich streets in a part of London just east of my house. Yesterday I did another count. They seemed to have spawned into two or three. That is the power of imitation, for people who can afford it. But how do you get other people to imitate behaviour that is less visible: buying less, travelling less or changing their electricity supplier? The answers must surely lie in social etiquette. If we are programmed to act like lemmings, then we must give some people incentives to break out and publicise their activities. Opinion- formers need to make visible changes in their own behaviour, which they have notably failed to do.

But the smoke is coming up through the vent. If enough people start talking about the smoke, perhaps others will start to see it too. And if enough people act, the rest may follow. For that, it seems, is human nature.