The Burning Question by Duncan Clark

Author:Duncan Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Social inertia

Part of the answer, perhaps, is that humans are social creatures and the ways we act are significantly determined by what everyone else is doing. As social psychologists like to point out, when a fire alarm goes off, we don’t look for smoke to determine whether to evacuate; instead, we look to see whether anyone else is running for the door. (One remarkable experiment showed that even when there is billowing smoke, people take ages to respond if their peers aren’t already doing so.30) So when most people, politicians, businesses and others aren’t doing anything significant about climate change, we feel a natural reluctance to be the first to jump – even if we think it’s a good idea in principle.

This social inertia plays out at many different levels. On the micro scale, few of us are keen to be the family member who suggests cut back on flying or the colleague who suggests boycotting a useful supplier on the grounds that it has been named and shamed for lobbying against progress on climate change. Taking such stances leads to social tension that we could do without. The risks are even larger in the all-important communities where climate change science is rejected. As one researcher put it recently:

Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina. Is it a good idea for him to implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action. Positions on climate change have come to signify the kind of person one is. People whose beliefs are at odds with those of the people with whom they share their basic cultural commitments risk being labelled as weird and obnoxious in the eyes of those on whom they depend for social and financial support.31

The barrier of social norms also plays out through the media. Research by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed people tend to assign undue relevance and weight to issues they are exposed to a lot.32 They found, unsurprisingly, that people ‘tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media’. At the moment, most of us hear relatively little about climate change, even if our choice of media accepts the mainstream science. One recent study compared American media coverage of reality TV show The Kardashians with media coverage of ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions, which threatens to radically alter marine life with huge implications for life on earth. The Kardashians received fifty times more coverage in US newspapers and 270 times more coverage on television news. Editors would presumably justify this by arguing that they’re just reflecting the interests of their audience, but therein lies a vicious circle because the media coverage unquestionably helps determine what the audience is interested in.

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