The Psychology of Climate Change

The Psychology of Everything

by Geoffrey Beattie, Laura McGuire

What explains our attitudes towards the environment? Why do so many climate change initiatives fail? How can we do more to prevent humans damaging the environment? The Psychology of Climate Change explores the evidence for our changing environment, and suggests that there are significant cognitive biases in how we think about, and act on climate change. The authors examine how organisations have attempted to mobilise the public in the fight against climate change, but these initiatives have often failed due to the public’s unwillingness to adapt their behaviour. The book also explores why some people deny climate change altogether, and the influence that these climate change deniers can have on global action to mitigate further damage. By analysing our attitudes to the environment, The Psychology of Climate Change argues that we must think differently about climate change to protect our planet, as a matter of great urgency.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Science, Climate Change

112 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2018

Reviews

[Tammam Aloudat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why do we not, as a society, understand what is coming to us in catastrophe and destruction as a result of the climate emergency?

Well, it seems that there are many ways we dilute ourselves: Affect heuristic, confirmation bias, false consensus, availability heuristic, optimism bias, ... and we very poorly understand that when designing climate change campaigns that they end up being ineffective.

This is a short, fairly simple, book that touches the matter. One thing I didn't like about it is too much self-referencing by the lead author, Beattie. It might be an indication of scarcity of literature but it does feel awkward.

[Jb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understand so much more where the inertia to save ourselves comes from. There are obvious better ways to talk about climate than what most campaign do right now.

[Ria · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a psychology student, I found this pretty boring - applied most of the concepts in my degree to climate change. I thought the content may have been more engaging. Recommend for those not heavily involved in psych.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Psychology of Climate Change (2018) by Geoffrey Beattie and Laura McGuire is a hard book to read because it's about the hardest problem facing humans today - and a problem running on its own rapid and non-negotiable schedule. I give the book five stars mainly for topic importance, and to combat the problem of climate silence. I advise everyone else who wants to prevent mass suicide to upvote this book and other books like it too. When your house is on fire, don't downvote the fire hose.

Few topics can be more important than climate change, but the vast majority of books ignore it. And of the books that do consider climate change, most do so from a physical science standpoint, or a policy standpoint, when climate change is also a psychological problem, as it results from billions of individual behavioral choices. See for example the paper:

* Gifford, Robert (2008). "Psychology’s essential role in alleviating the impacts of climate change" (PDF). Canadian Psychology 49 (4): 273-280. doi:10.1037/a0013234. Archived from the original on 2011-04-09.

Abstract:
Climate change is occurring: where is psychology? The conventional wisdom is that amelioration of the impacts of climate change is a matter for earth and ocean science, economics, technology, and policy-making. This article presents the basis for psychological science as a key part of the solution to the problem and describes the challenges to this from both within psychology and from other points of view. Minimising the personal and environmental damage caused by climate change necessarily is a multidisciplinary task, but one to which psychology not only should, but must contribute more than it has so far.

The problem, of course, is that psychology and climate science are two complex disciplines each with their own histories and communities. Not many people have the expertise in both fields to tackle their intersection.

That shows up to some degree in this book, written by authors who are clearly psychologists with a side interest in the physical science and technology side of climate change. For example, they focus on a tiny subset of the problem, the relativey tiny adjustments to an individual's carbon footprint possible by purchasing choices in the kinds of consumer products marketed by Unilever. That's important work, but the authors don't much address the big sources of individual emissions: transport, heating, cooling, and food. (And the biggest and most fraught one of all: childbearing.) The authors don't cite an introduction to personal carbon footprinting, such as How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything (2010) by Mike Berners-Lee. A quote from that book which sums up the problem:

A friend recently asked me how he should best dry his hands to reduce his carbon footprint - with a paper towel or with an electric hand drier. The same person flies across the Atlantic literally dozens of times a year. A sense of scale is required here. The flying is tens of thousands of times more important than the hand drying. So my friend was simply distracting himself from the issue. I want to help you get a feel for roughly how much carbon is at stake when you make simple choices - where you travel, how you get there, whether to buy something, whether to leave the TV on standby, and so on.

As Berners-Lee explains, a frequent flying habit is tens of thousands of times more destructive than how you dry your hands. And the kinds of purchasing choices studied in Beattie and McGuire's book - such as which brand of detergent to buy - are similarly down in the decimals by comparison. Multiplied by millions of consumers, little things add up - but not to a solution, if we ignore the most destructive individual choices, like flying and driving.

But you have to start somewhere, so I don't fault Beattie and McGuire for their choice of starting point. It's hardly their fault that the whole intersection of psychology and climate change is being criminally neglected. We need thousands upon thousands of psychologists to read up on climate change and start carving out parts of the problem to work on. Perhaps collaborating with some climate scientists would help too. Until that happens at the necessary scale, I'm giving five stars to anyone who gets in the game.

Another excellent book to read, not cited by the authors, is Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (2008) by David J.C. MacKay. MacKay mentions climate change, but is more interested in energy supply. I especially like his clear exposition of the energy problem in terms of individual (per capita) consumption. That way he avoids incomprehensibly large numbers along with vague adjectives. Applied to the psychology of climate change, the framing should start with an inventory of the individual's carbon footprint, and the psychological barriers to reducing it.

See for example this article (and its household carbon footprint diagrams):

When it comes to carbon footprints, location and lifestyle matter, April 13, 2011, By: Robert Sanders, Media Relations

As the diagrams clearly show, the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions can vary greatly by household. The largest reductions in emissions can come from attacking the largest personal emitters. Thus the job for psychology is to understand and break the psychological barriers that maintain the individual's most destructive behaviors. You can also see from the carbon footprint diagrams that the "personal care" and "household goods" categories are comparatively minor sources of household greehouse gas emissions, at least for typical American families.

And as this book came out in 2018, it predates awareness of the current AI boom. So there's no mention of AI's potential for helping people overcome the psychological barriers to behavior change. In particular, Beattie and McGuire discuss Daniel Kahneman's dual-process theory as it relates to human responses to climate change messaging. But they only discuss unaided attempts to override irrational System 1 thinking with deliberate System 2 thinking. Now that AI LLMs are here, they have at least the potential to help people respond rationally to climate change. Psychologists could make a real impact here.

[User · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will say that I did enjoy the book. What I took overall from the message is how, as a community of individuals that care about the Earth, how we can promote this message in the best way possible. Because there can definitely be toxic people involved in the messaging that we're trying to promote to the point where it's counter productive. Because what is actual effective marketing? And I think that this book is able to talk about that effectively. I don't want to say too much about this book, because I think it's best to go in blind. But if you're interested in this topic I would highly recommend this book. It may even upset some people when reading it. Not me because I could already feel some of these things in the community myself, but again it's best to read the book yourself rather than me trying to explain it to you in a couple of sentences haha.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting for those interested in climate change - especially if interested in design and marketing/advertising design. Wel worth a read, quite accessible.

[Cassidy B · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would honestly give this a 2.5 star rating if that was an option. The book definitely makes some good points and poses some thoughtful things to consider in reframing the discussion around climate change, but it otherwise falls short of expectations. It is not a very interesting or engaging read, and in several cases there were opportunities to make a worthwhile point but the arguments were lacking substance. I agree with the opinions of some of the other reviewers, but I couldn’t justify a 3 star rating.

[Oscar Pichel Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

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