The Compassionate Instinct

Case in point: He contrasts the response to Hurricane Katrina with the response to September 11: “After Katrina, people started to pay more attention to strengthening the levies even though the information was available in advance. There was a short period of time when there was a heightened response; then it dampened.”

The response to September 11, in contrast, has been far more significant and long-lasting, even though, he says, “from a physical damage standpoint, 9/11 was relatively smaller.” The difference was that Katrina, which many scientists believe was fueled by human-driven global warming, seemed like an act of nature, and that failed to trigger our millennia-old fears of having our homes and lives invaded by a stranger—fears evoked by September 11.

REALITY VERSUS WORLDVIEW

A third obstacle that limits people’s response to global warming—and even their willingness to believe in it—is also one of the most intractable. In a series of recent studies, a group of scholars from Yale and other universities have been studying how cultural values shape our perceptions of risk. Based on the premise that Americans are culturally polarized on a range of societal risks, from global warming to gun control, Paul Slovic, Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, and others analyzed the results of surveys and experiments that matched the risk perceptions of some 5,000 Americans to the worldviews of those Americans. Their finding: People may simply reject evidence that clashes with their worldview.

“To a certain extent our attitude toward risk and behaviors are conditioned not just by the raw facts of the matter, but by the orientation that we have to the world,” says Slovic.

In the case of global warming, researchers found two general worldviews that seemed to have the most significant influence on perception and action. One group consists of egalitarians, or people who prefer a society where wealth, power, and opportunity are broadly distributed. Researchers called the other group the hierarchists, those who prefer a society that is linear in its structure, with leaders on top and followers below.

“What we’ve seen through this research is that egalitarians are generally more concerned about environmental risks over a range of hazards, including global warming. Hierarchists tend to be less concerned,” says Slovic. In fact, he says, when it comes to perceptions of risk, one’s worldview is vastly more influential than other individual characteristics, such as race or political ideology.

The researchers also found that when proposed solutions to global warming clash with people’s worldviews, those people are more likely to reject evidence of the problem altogether. For example, in one experiment, Kahan and his colleagues gave two groups of people two contrasting newspaper articles about global warming. Both reported the problem in similar terms: temperatures were rising, human behavior was the cause of climate change, and global warming could lead to disastrous environmental and economic consequences if left unaddressed. But the articles then went on to offer different solutions: one called for increased regulation of pollution emissions, while the other called for revitalization of nuclear power.

When people with a hierarchical worldview received the article that called for increased regulation—policies currently associated with a more egalitarian and liberal worldview—they were more likely to reject that global warming was a problem than when they received the article that called for a revitalization of nuclear power.

This research helps explain the attitudes and behaviors of global warming skeptics. Slovic says it also shows how difficult it is to communicate persuasively when people feel their worldview is challenged. “The truly disconcerting thing about this work is that it shows how difficult it is to change people’s views and behaviors with factual information,” says Slovic. “People spin the information to keep their worldview intact.” They do their best to hold onto their worldview, says Slovic, because so much of their personal identity and social networks are tied up in maintaining it.

FEARFUL FUTURES, HOPEFUL ACTIONS

With such significant obstacles to spurring action on global warming, what can social scientists recommend about how to inspire the necessary response?

First, communication about global warming needs to reach people’s emotions and trigger fear, and that means emphasizing the dramatic consequences to come. “It is only the potentially catastrophic nature of (rapid) climate change (of the kind graphically depicted in the 2004 film Day After Tomorrow) and the global dimension of adverse effects, which may create hardships for future generations, that have the potential for raising a visceral reaction to the risk,” Elke Weber writes in a recent paper on why global warming doesn’t scare us yet.