Don’t Even Think About It

A book synopsis by Bill Miller

(available on Amazon)

BIAS TYPES

• Confirmation Bias: cherry picking evidence
• Biased Assimilation: modifying new information to fit our existing view
• Availability Bias: prioritizing most accessible evidence or local experience

INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES (Kahan: evidence science polluted by implied social meaning)

• Homo Credens (the convinced): Generally middle-age, college educated liberal Democrats.
• Homo Negator (unconvinced): Generally conservative, affluent men with power.
  • White Man Effect: Inability to accurately perceive risk.

People’s social identity has extraordinary hold over their behaviors and views

BYSTANDER EFFECT

• Power of social conformity.
• Strong, hardwired behavioral instinct.
• Only overcome by small number of vocal dissenters.

FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT

• Pluralistic Ignorance: Overestimating the size and power of the majority.
• Conditional Cooperation: Offering proof of positive social behavior to influence more of it. Tricky to implement; drawing too much attention to an undesirable norm can backfire.

“WE” IMPACT

• English cannot differentiate between the inclusive “we” (me, my group, your group) and the exclusive “we” (me, my group, NOT your group).
• Using “we” to inspire group action is tricky.

SELF CATEGORIZATION THEORY

• In Group: Seek to achieve closeness.
• Out Group: Seek to achieve difference/distance.
• Polar Effect: when one group moves one way the other moves the opposite.
• Sense of Shared Power: Empowers abusive behavior, even violence.
• Digital Anonymity: Empowers extreme bullying and violence.
• Inversionism: Adapting tactics from the other group

OBSTACLE NOT ENEMY

• There is no enemy.
• Everyone contributes emissions > everyone motivated to ignore the problem.
• Jung: the enemy is projecting our shadow onto others.
• “Enemy” is our fear, denial and struggle to accept our responsibility.
• We face obstacles not enemies.
• Find narratives featuring cooperation, mutual interests and common humanity, not enemies.

HOW BRAIN RESPONDS TO LIFE

• Personal: Detects friends, enemies, defectors and human agency.
• Abrupt: Detects sudden change, ignores gradual change.
• Immoral: Responds to indecent, impious, repulsive or disgusting.
• Now: Responds to immediate threats.
• Simple: Responds to singular threats.
• Envisioning/Planning: Unique among humans, but not instinctively activated.

TWO BRAINS +

• Rational: Logical, abstract, symbolic, words and numbers—slow and deliberative.
• Emotional: Discerns meanings and feelings, stories—automatic and impulsive.
• Amygdala: Dominates decision making in crisis.
• Dialog: Rational brain presents stories, emotional brain rationalizes choices.

RISK PERCEPTION

• Dread Risk: Feeling powerless in face of involuntary, catastrophic events.
• Unknown Risk: Uncertainty of new, unforeseeable dangers.
• Climate Risk: Does not trigger instinctive risk perception.
• Status Quo: Assumed normal, unchangeable; requires far higher level of threat to activate risk perception. Even superstorms considered part of status quo.
• Imagination: Slowly-evolving climate devastation unnatural for most people to imagine, unlike terrorist attacts. Imagination must be willed to go there.

THINKING FAST AND SLOW

• Climate change lacks salience: Does not demand attention like threats that are concrete, immediate and indisputable.
• Cost/benefits too abstract: Demands people accept short term costs to mitigate higher but uncertain future benefits.
• Uncertain risk: People unwilling to act without intuitive sense of certainty.
• Research:
  • People more averse to risk for losses than gains.
  • More averse to short-term costs than long-term costs.
  • More averse to uncertainty.
• Conclusion: Extremely difficult to overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living.

CLIMATE FUTURE RESEARCH

• Two-thirds believe it will not affect them.
• Two-thirds believe it will affect future generations.
• Optimism Bias: People assume they face lower risks than others.
• Uncertain Deadline: Any sense of urgency feels manufactured.
• Hyperbolic Discounting: People avoid smaller, short-term decline in living standards while willing to risk far higher costs in future
• Anticipation Effect: Can motivate action, but tricky as can also trigger dread and reframing, leading to inaction.

FRAMING INFORMED CHOICE

• If situation unavoidable: People become resigned to it.
• If an active, informed choice: People will shoulder a burden provided they share a common purpose and are rewarded with a greater sense of social belonging.

CLIMATE SILENCE

• Inattention: Unintentionally ignoring a subject (that is not relevant or charged).
• Disattention: Deliberately ignoring a subject (that is charged).
• Meta-silence: Deliberately ignoring a charged subject and any reference to our avoidance.
• Detached Reality: Perceiving an unpleasant reality but living as if it weren’t present.
• Norms of Attention: Social rules defining what is or is not acceptable to talk about.
• Sociology of Ignorance: Choosing to not know too much to maintain cultural identity.
• Knowledge-Ignorance Paradox: the more we know, the more we don’t know.
• Political Window: Frames what can be discussed at any given time; always moving (or being moved)
• Anxiety Avoidance: Psychologically, denial and anxiety are closely linked.

“PERFECT” FRAMING ELUSIVE

• Perfect Market Failure: Economist Lord Stern
• Perfect Moral Storm: Philosopher Stephen Gardiner
• Perfect Problem: Yale conference.
• Perfect Framing: Triggers powerlessness, hopelessness and denial. Not helpful or true.
• Redirection: Shifting the focus of anxiety from its cause to another target.

CLIMATE COMPLEXITY

• Multivalent: Multiple meanings and interpretations.
• Complex Identity: No deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause, no single solution, no clear enemy.
• Uncanny Condition: When something familiar becomes threatening. E.g.: when comfortable, high-carbon lifestyles become menacing.

PROBLEM TYPES

• Tame Problems: Even if complex, have defined causes, objectives and solutions.
• Wicked Problems: Multifaceted, incomplete, contradictory and constantly changing. They demand a continuous process of evaluation and redefinition. Must be grappled with, but every attempted solution creates unanticipated consequences and problems
• Climate Problem Framings:
  • Economic
  • Technological
  • Moral
  • Human Rights
  • Energy
  • Social Justice
  • Governance
  • Ideological
  • Each framing generates a different response
• Fundamental Rule: Wicked problems must not be handled like tame problems. They refuse to fit any structure of cause and effect. It’s never clear.

STORIES

• How the emotional brain makes sense of the data in the rational brain.
• People make decisions on the quality of the story, not the quality of the information it contains.
• People believe compelling stories even if they know they are fiction.
• Unengaging factual narratives cannot compete with compelling stories based on lies.
• Rules for compelling stories:
  • Focus on an individual or distinct group (easily identified with)
  • Protagonist and antagonist/s
  • Challenge/conflict
  • Simplicity of cause and effect
  • Positive outcome
  • Brevity
  • Credibility
  • Comprehension
  • Consistency
  • Repetition, repetition, repetition

POWER WORDS

• “Carbon” is a dead word.
• “High” intuitively means good, “low” means bad. Hence, “high carbon lifestyle” creates a confusing jumble of messages.
• “Carbon Pollution” is weak. CO2 is part of life cycle. Hard to frame as a poison.
• “Clean energy” is strong.
• “Renewable energy” is medium strength.
• Warning: all framing of climate change is problematic because it is a wicked problem with no one simple solution.

MESSAGE/MESSENGER

• The messenger, if well known, is often more important than the message. If viewed negatively, the message will be resisted.
• Find new messengers, real people, who are believable.

SCIENCE and DENIAL

• Denial is due to a surplus of culture rather than a deficit of information.
• Abstract rational language of probability needs to cross into the emotional language of threat.
• Science must be translated into story to move people.

ENVRONMENTALIST BUBBLE

• Protecting, saving, banning and stopping things are environmentalist frames that:
  • Are identified universally as environmentalist jargon.
  • Work poorly outside the environmentalist world.
• Climate change is not exclusively an environmental issue. Framing it as such is a losing proposition.

DOOMSDAY is DEADLY

• When threatened, people adapt strategies to diminish their fear (maladaptation).
  • Denial
  • Doubt/uncertainty
  • Fatalism
  • Anger at messenger
• Turns off people who assume world is just, orderly and stable .
• Discarded with failed apocalyptic prophecies (nuclear war, Y2K, overpopulation, etc.)
• Sensationalized media hype of events (not causes) turns people off.
• Perception of risk formed by norms within social groups; must respond to these values.

BRIGHT-SIDING

• Deadly opposite of doomsday: driven by subconscious insecurity requiring constant effort to repress unpleasant possibilities (negative thoughts) by overlaying them with baseless cheerful assumptions.
• A regressive “enjoy today” narrative that validates existing hierarchies; promotes high-consumption lifestyle while ignoring inevitable inequalities, pollution and waste.
• Encourages apathy; insists systems will self-correct with no change or sacrifice on their part.

CONFUSING ANALOGIES

• Successful global efforts that confuse the public on the simplicity of climate crisis solutions
  • 1970s Ozone Crisis: resembles climate crisis:
    • Theoretical/abstract/invisible.
    • Causal CFCs also a greenhouse gas.
    • Initially opposed by large corporations and libertarian think tanks.
    • 1992 science realized problem was less severe than predicted (a bad precedent for climate change).
    • Solved by business-led tech innovations and market-based emissions permits enforced by treaties (another bad precedent for climate change which is not a single source problem and does not have a simple solution with a negligible impact on the economy).
    • Confused public that identifies ozone with climate change (75% of Americans still think spray cans cause global warming).
  • 1980s Acid Rain Crisis:
    • Market-based policies successfully reduced sulfur dioxide pollution.
    • Emissions-trading utilized free market to reward innovation and protect powerful interests.
    • Emissions-trading was also a byzantine, remote system that abstracted then removed any connection between personal behavior and moral responsibility—that didn’t even work (but established a standard).
  • Why these models do not resemble climate change:
    • The number of actors (people/businesses) was very small.
    • The economic impacts were minimal and contained.
    • The damage caused was reversed within a generation.
  • Led to framing atmospheric pollution problem as exclusively about gases, not structural, behavioral and/or moral issues.

WELLHEAD v TAILPIPE

• “Wellhead” includes oilwells, fracking, mines.
• Traditional Gov/Policy focus on dealing with tailpipe emissions not wellhead sources.
• Creates fundamental disconnect, allows paradoxical policies to reduce emissions while boosting oil production.
• A conspiracy of convenience:
  • Scientists naturally focused on emissions.
  • Policymakers focused on emissions naively believing technology could solve and not cause disruption to status quo.

OIL FACTS

• Only ten companies control 2/3rds of oil production.
• 380 million metric tons of CO2 dumped into the sky every year.
• To survive, we need to leave 60 – 80% of known oil reserves in the ground. (Carbon Tracker Institute)
• Carbon Capture & Storage installations (CCS).
  • Eight currently running (2014).
  • Eight under construction.
  • Need 16,000 to deal with current emissions.
  • Plus 1,000 more each year to deal with increased emissions.
  • Currently costs $150/metric ton.
  • Viable at $25/metric ton.
• Oil industry remains “the most extraordinary wealth-generating machine ever invented by man.” (Steve Kertzmann/founder Oil Change International).
• It is not going to willingly go out of business.

DIFFUSING RESPONSIBILITY

• Politicians instinctively create multiple stages between themselves and responsibility.
• Climate change is an ethical issue, hence any ethical discussion is forbidden.
• Intentionality key to moral responsibility.
• If climate change becomes intentionally harmful only when people know they are causing it, is it any surprise people avoid learning about it or accepting it exists?
• Two key challenges defining consumption reductions as fair:
  • Status quo: much harder to lose something we already have.
  • People extremely sensitive to fair distribution of losses
  • Everyone wants the gain of exploitation; no one wants the loss of constraint.
• Collective Moral Pollution: benefitting ourselves at the expense of future generations .

WHY CHILDREN DON’T MATTER

• Guilt: Parents 60% more likely to claim climate change not happening.
• Avoidance of responsibility: Choosing to have children skews risk/reward scale away from future risk.
• Distraction: Easy for parents to hyper-focus on daily routine; block out future considerations
• Self-interest: Each generation bears burden of previous inaction but will derive no future benefit from their own action (Stephen Gardiner).
• Summary: Parents not influenced by their children’s climate futures; only thing that works is peer pressure, trusted communicators, social norms and in-group loyalty.

PERSONAL GUILT AND BLAME

• Climate change unique because individual contributions can be measured to the last ounce.
• Creates delusion that it is the individual’s personal fault.
• Responsibility > blame > resentment > retaliation. People retreat to their tribes and do battle against opposing tribes.
• Willingness to make personal sacrifice is bound with our sense of social identity. Outsiders do not matter.
• Single action bias: we are hardwired to make one sacrifice to solve a problem, not multiple sacrifices.
• Moral License: that one sacrifice gives license for other indulgences in same realm. Even climate scientists do this.
• Reframing: A coherent framework providing contract for shared participation where personal actions are recognized and rewarded alongside contributions from government, business and energy companies.

THE END OF THE FUTURE

• In 1950s, a positive vision extended far into the future.
• Research shows people’s perception of the future now extends no more than 15 years (Bruce Tonn/U of Tennessee)
• Almost half would not like to be born in the future; believe humanity will go extinct from an environmental collapse.
• 500 pre-teens: one-third believe world will not exist when they are adults.
• A defense mechanism that bypasses moral responsibility?
• Terror Management Theory: That a profound, subconscious fear of death lies at the center of all human belief—religion, ritual, culture (Ernest Becker).
• Many standard responses to climate change (denial, rationalization, distancing) correspond with fear of death behaviors (Janis Dickinson/Cornell University).
• Mortality Threats cause:
  • Elevation of social group status.
  • Increased dependence on status, money and self-image.
  • Heightened social/political polarization.
  • Ironically compels people to increase status-driven, high-carbon lifestyles!
• Anticipatory Future Grief: We used to believe our life was contributing to something larger that would survive us. Now even that has been taken away (Bill McKibben).

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

• Scientific evidence could become the basis of a life-changing moral philosophy (Tim Nicholson)
• Belief: Carries religious frame that suggest false polarity between rational and emotional brain
• Conviction: A rational opinion reached through evaluation of evidence.
• Traditional Faith: Hard to incorporated climate change into existing worldview.
• False Division: No clear dividing line between rational and emotion brains.
• Paradox: while all major religions urge material constraint, personal responsibility and long-term thinking, few practitioners apply those standards to the environment.

WHAT ACTIVISM CAN LEARN FROM RELIGION

• Of 10,000 world religions, most popular are Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Why?
• WEIRD (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) tends to ignore religion and thus becomes hopeless people will sacrifice.
• Religions contain sacred values so fundamental they are nonnegotiable.
• Scans prove we have a moral center in our brains that religion utilize.
• Can climate preservation become a sacred value?
• How religious practice can be copied by activists:
  • Belief is held socially, shared through testimony shared with peers and community.
  • People are brought to commitment at a moment of choice (altar call) where new people can be identified, welcomed and supported.
  • Climate realization can be experienced as a personal epiphany, which can be supported and nurtured by group.
• Climate activism currently offers no mechanism for forgiveness; no process for transforming ongoing destructive feelings of guilt, blame and anger into empathy, renewal and reconstruction.

HOW TO INSPIRE ACTION

• Engaging emotional brain essential.
• Activate our capacity for pro-social, supportive, altruistic behavior.
• Engage innate capacity to anticipate future threats with narrative and cultural form that activates emotional brain under following conditions:
  • Supported by culture of shared conviction.
  • Reinforced through social norms.
  • Conveyed in “sacred values” narratives.

OVERVIEW

• Climate change a scientific fact.
• Hardwired psychological resistance also a fact.
• Emphasize urgency: climate change happening NOW.
• Frame as opportunity to restore past loss.
• Climate change is a process, not an event
• Recognize moments of proximity to create symbolic moments/events.
• Focus on long-term preparedness; often evades toxic polarization.
• Create narratives of positive change.
• Resist simple framings and never accept opponent’s framing.
• Be open to new meanings and solutions.
• “Enemy” narratives create division and polarization, heroic quest better narrative form.
• Cooperation (not unity) narrative goal.
• Accept spectrum of approaches/solutions.
• Be honest about danger (must come from trusted source).
• Encourage positive visions.
• Tie solutions to happiness, emphasize action leading to personal/cultural pride.
• Build communities of shared conviction.
• Keep open mind, beware of personal bias.
• Learn from religions:
  • Journey of conviction
  • Moment of choice
  • Nonnegotiable sacred values
  • Testimony/personal stories
  • Emotional honesty/vulnerability
  • Confession/redemption model encourages truth-telling, personal responsibility, and forgiveness.
  • Recognize, explore and help resolve feelings of grief, anxiety and hopelessness.
• Avoid climate jargon.
• Find ways of reaching others who are not like you.
• Mourn what is lost, value what remains.