The Compassionate Instinct

For example, in a recent paper on how emotion shapes risk perception, Weber cites the growing number of parents who choose to forego having their children vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. To most physicians, this is a highly irrational decision, since vaccinations help prevent serious illnesses and pose very slight risks. So why do parents make such decisions? Because when they learn that roughly one child out of 1,000 will suffer from high fever and one out of 14,000 will suffer seizures as a result of vaccinations, their emotions lead them to imagine that their child will be the one to suffer.

“If I feel scared,” says Weber, “that overshadows any amount of pallid statistical information.”

And, perhaps most importantly, emotions, more than anything else, are what motivate us to act. As decades of behavioral decision research has shown, most people have to feel a risk before they do something about it.

In this way, our limited response to global warming is similar to our limited response to mass murder or genocide, according to Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit that studies human judgment, decision making, and risk.

In a series of research papers, Slovic has explored why reports of genocide so often fail to stir us to action. These reports, he writes, usually stress the thousands or even millions of people who have been killed. In doing so, they speak to our analytical abilities but not our feelings. Slovic has found that people are much more likely to donate money to a cause after reading the story of a single victim than after reading a statistic citing a million victims.

Like genocide, the long-term consequences of global warming are so enormous that we can’t wrap our heads around them. Scientists predict in 40 years global warming will displace 20 million people from Beijing, 40 million from Shanghai and surrounding areas, and 60 million from Calcutta and Bangladesh. These statistics are daunting, but they’re abstract; they don’t inspire us to feel for the one individual whose life will be put at risk. As a result, we fail to take appropriate action.

And as with others, so with ourselves: it is emotions, such as fear or worry, that motivate us to protect ourselves from risk. With global warming, this presents an even more challenging situation because, says Weber, our emotions are shaped by two forms of past experience: either direct personal experience or evolutionary experience that still guides human behavior.

We feel the hairs stand up on the back of our necks if someone in a dark alley appears dangerous. This happens because, from an evolutionary perspective, deep in our psyches we know what it feels like to have another human being physically threaten us. There’s also the chance that we’ve been threatened or assaulted personally.

But we have no innate experience of global warming that tells us, from personal or evolutionary experience, that when we burn too many fossil fuels, it causes the buildup of greenhouse gases that trap warm air within the earth’s atmosphere, which in turn melts ice caps and glaciers, raises ocean levels, and causes hurricanes to intensify, floods to worsen, droughts to increase, lakes and water supplies to disappear, and, as in any such dire and threatening circumstances, famine and warfare to spread. As dramatic as these scenarios are, we can’t feel them because we haven’t experienced them (yet). Human-driven climate change is simply unprecedented.

“Global warming doesn’t make evolutionary sense to us,” says Weber. “Our minds haven’t adjusted to the much more complex technological risks that are removed in space and time.”

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Our lack of past experience with global warming is also exacerbated by the fact that global warming is not a clear and present danger but, rather, something that is projected to reveal its most dramatic consequences decades from now.

“It’s a very well established fact about human behavior,” says Slovic, “that we discount future negative outcomes a great deal, especially if it means having to postpone some immediate positive benefit, such as the convenience of driving our car.” He likens our attitudes toward the future risks of global warming to how teenagers discount the risk of smoking, despite abundant evidence of its risks.

“Young people tend not to be quite clear about whether there will be consequences from their smoking, what they would be, and what it would be like for them,” he says. “The future risk is not imaginable, and that tends to make people more complacent.”

The fact that global warming appears to represent a hazard of nature also leads people to underestimate the risk. “People don’t respect nature and what it can do,” says Slovic. “They feel nature is benign, even though it really isn’t.”