Human dimensions of climate change
I. Perceptions and biases of energy consumption
II. Communicating Climate Change
Shahzeen Z. Attari
sattari@indiana.edu • http://mypage.iu.edu/~sattari
Indiana University Bloomington
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
1
Can we stabilize carbon dioxide
emissions?
2
“Humanity already possesses the fundamental
scientific, technical and industrial know-how to
solve the carbon and climate problem for the
next half-century.”
(Pacala and Socolow, Science, 2004)
3
Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem
for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies
Renewable electricity
CO2 capture and
storage
Efficiency and
conservation
Forests and soil
Fuel switching
Nuclear fission
(Pacala and Socolow, Science, 2004)
4
Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem
for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies
Renewable electricity
CO2 capture and
storage
Efficiency and
conservation
Forests and soil
Fuel switching
Nuclear fission
“Improvements in efficiency and conservation offer
the greatest potential to provide wedges”
5
Update: Since 2004…
(Socolow, 2011)
6
Why don’t Americans conserve energy
and adopt energy-efficient technologies?
7
On why people do not act
Information deficit
model
Don’t know how much I will save
Don’t know what to do
Don’t know how
…
Motivation deficit
model
Cost
Time
Effort
Social norms
…
8
Overview
work completed
Understand how people interact with technology and nature
Perceptions of energy consumption and savings
- Most effective behavior?
- Accuracy of perceptions?
- Factors that predict accuracy?
(Attari et al., PNAS, 2010)
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Behaviors deemed “most effective” by participants
12%
10
Behaviors deemed “most effective” by participants
Curtailment
Efficiency
11
Risk Perception
(Lichtenstein et al., 1978)
12
13
(Attari et al., 2010)
14
(Attari et al., 2010)
15
Laptops
overestimated
2x
(Attari et al., 2010)
16
Dishwashers
underestimated
800x
(Attari et al., 2010)
17
(Attari et al., 2010)
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Findings:
“In your opinion, what is the most effective thing that you
could do to conserve energy in your life?”
- Participants state:
55% “curtailment”
12% “efficiency”
Gardener and Stern (2008):
“efficiency saves more energy than
curtailment”
19
Findings:
Major misperceptions in energy consumption
- People have small overestimates for
low-energy behaviors and large underestimates
for high-energy behaviors
 many implications for technology,
education, and policy
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Overview
work completed
Understand how people interact with technology and nature
Perceptions of energy
consumption and savings
(Attari et al., 2010)
21
Overview
Current work
Understand how people interact with technology and nature
Perceptions of energy
consumption and savings
(Attari et al., 2010)
Biases in personal energy
consumption
(Attari et al., rnr)
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On why people do not act
Information deficit
model
Don’t know how much I will save
Don’t know what to do
Don’t know how
…
Motivation deficit
model
Cost
Time
Effort
Social norms
…
23
What you want to do
vs.
What others should do
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Research questions
• Would there be any systematic differences
in how people answer the following two
questions?
• “In your opinion, what is the single most
effective thing that you could do to use less
energy in your life?”
• “In your opinion, what is the most single most
effective thing that Americans could do to
use less energy in their lives?”
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Predictions
• If information deficits:
– Distribution of responses should be similar for both
questions
• If motivated cognition:
– Systematic differences in responses between
questions (e.g., listing an easy non-effective
behavior for self and a harder effective behavior for
others)
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Most effective behavior: Self vs. others
Behavior Categ o r y
Turn off light s
Drive less/public transit/carpool/bike/walk
Turn off appliances
Change setting on the thermostat
Sleep/relax more
Use appliances less
Unplug appliances
Conserve water/ener g y
Use energy efficient bulb s
Consume le s s
Other (each mentioned only once)
Use efficient cars/hybrid s
Use efficient applia n c e s
Change my lifestyle
Buy green ener g y
Buy green produc t s
Eat green
Recycle
Insulate my home/weatherize
There is no way/I don’t kno w
Awareness/education; more attention
Phase out inefficient technologies
Percentage of Answer s
Other
Self
Americans
19.5
13.0
19.3
31.8
10.8
7.7
9.0
4.6
7.5
4.6
5.4
4.6
5.0
2.8
4.7
4.5
2.8
3.6
2.6
4.1
2.4
1.8
2.2
2.2
1.8
2.9
1.8
2.5
1.3
3.2
1.1
1.0
1.0
1.0
0.7
1.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.1
1.4
0.1
0.4
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Most effective behavior: Self vs. others
Behavior Categ o r y
Turn off light s
Drive less/public transit/carpool/bike/walk
Turn off appliances
Change setting on the thermostat
Sleep/relax more
Use appliances less
Unplug appliances
Conserve water/ener g y
Use energy efficient bulb s
Consume le s s
Other (each mentioned only once)
Use efficient cars/hybrid s
Use efficient applia n c e s
Change my lifestyle
Buy green ener g y
Buy green produc t s
Eat green
Recycle
Insulate my home/weatherize
There is no way/I don’t kno w
Awareness/education; more attention
Phase out inefficient technologies
Percentage of Answer s
Other
Self
Americans
19.5
13.0
19.3
31.8
10.8
7.7
9.0
4.6
7.5
4.6
5.4
4.6
5.0
2.8
4.7
4.5
2.8
3.6
2.6
4.1
2.4
1.8
2.2
2.2
1.8
2.9
1.8
2.5
1.3
3.2
1.1
1.0
1.0
1.0
0.7
1.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.4
0.1
1.4
0.1
0.4
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Most effective action for self and other Americans
Other Americans
Turn off
Self
Drive less
Turn off
85
41
Drive less
6
92
Turn off (appliances and lights)
Drive less (drive less, carpool, use public transportation, bike,
and walk)
29
I’ll do the easy thing, you do the hard thing
Other Americans
Turn off
Self
Drive less
Turn off
85
41
Drive less
6
92
Individuals who choose the easier option for themselves
are likely to ask others to do the harder thing.
McNemar chi-square statistic for asymmetry 26.1, p < 0.0001
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Findings:
I’ll do the easy thing,
you do the hard thing
- People are motivated to list easier non-effective
behaviors for themselves (e.g., turning off the
light) and harder more effective behaviors for
others (e.g., carpooling, driving less).
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Questions so far?
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Part II : Communicating climate
change
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The Psychology of Climate
Change Communication
Study of individual and group decision
making under climate uncertainty and
decision making in the face of
environmental risk
Cognitive, affective, and social processes
by which people decide how to cope with
environmental uncertainty and change
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• Interdisciplinary (driven by social science, psychology)
agronomy
anthropology
climate science
ecology
economics
engineering
environmental science
geography
history
management
meteorology
oceanography
political science
psychology
Availability of information
More/better information
=
=
use of information
better decisions
37
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Scientific Information
• Increasingly present or sought in decision settings
• Often in the form of a probabilistic forecast
– seasonal-to-interannual, decadal, and long-term climate change
– natural hazards
• Or, technical information related to energy consumption
• Many barriers to its use by decision makers
• How can information be communicated and used more
effectively?
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Availability of information
More/better information
=
=
use of information
better decisions
Information deficit ?
Motivation deficit ?
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Decision makers
• are selective when attending to
information
• evaluate options using both cognitive and
affective processes
• are influenced by the context of the
decision
• are influenced by beliefs, goals, and prior
experience
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1 Know Your Audience
• Subjective perception of risk
– Different people worry about different things and two people may
Subjective
of orrisk
what
perceive theperceptions
same risk as more
lessinfluence
threatening and
people
pay attention
toworry
in complicated
manageable,
and therefore
about it to a different extent.
situations
and define how people approach and
– Subjective feelings of being at risk (affective risk dimensions)
solve
problems.
arephysical,
part ofand
a
influence
judgmentsRisk
of theperceptions
riskiness of material,
environmental
risks in
ways that go beyond their objective
person’s
mental
model.
consequences
– Perceptions matter, often more, than scientific facts.
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1 Know Your Audience
• Subjective perception of risk
--
• Mental models
– represent a person’s thought process of how something works,
understanding of the surrounding world
– based on often-incomplete facts, past experiences, intuitive
perceptions
– include relevant knowledge and beliefs that help people interpret
new information in order to reach conclusions
– especially when hearing about risk, people refer to known related
phenomena and associations from their past to decide if they find
the risk threatening or manageable
– often serve as filter for search and uptake of information
• confirmation bias
44
Illustration by Ian Webster, 2009
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1 Know Your Audience
• Subjective perception of risk
• Mental models
– Confirmation bias
• Cultural values
– Worldview, political orientation
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2 Get Your Audience’s
Attention
• Spatial and temporal distance
– Bring the message close to home
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2 Get your audience’s
attention
• Spatial and temporal distance
– Bring the message close to home
• Framing matters
– Different strokes for different folks
• CC, health, national security
– Loss vs. gain: losses loom larger
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Ground Meat
85% lean
15% fat
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Temporal Discounting
• $60 now
vs.
$60 tomorrow
• $50 now
vs.
$60 in 1 month
• $50 in 12 months
months
vs. $60 in 13
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2 Get your audience’s
attention
• Spatial and temporal distance
– Bring the message close to home
• Framing matters
– Different strokes for different folks
• CC, health, national security
– Loss vs. gain: losses loom larger
• Tailored information
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3 Translate Scientific Data Into
Concrete Experience
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Two Mental Processing Systems
Rational/analytic system
• Analytic
• Logical
• Deliberative
Emotional/affective
system
• Holistic
• Intuitive
• Affective
– fear, dread, anxiety represent
risks as feelings
(Loewenstein, Weber, et. al, 2001)
• Abstract
– encodes reality in abstract
symbols, words, numbers
– rules and algorithms need to be
learned
– system needs to be cued; does
not operate automatically
• Vivid
– encodes reality in concrete
images and narratives, linked in
associative networks
– operates automatically and
without any training
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55
Illustration
Webster,
2009
Illustration
by by
IanIan
Webster,
2009
Rational and Affective System
– Operate in parallel
• Affective system is faster, delivers output earlier
• No visceral reaction – no motivation
– When the outputs of the two systems are in conflict,
behavior is typically determined by the affective
processing system (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001)
– Personal experience or anecdotal accounts of the
experience of others trumps statistical evidence
• Because past experiences often evoke strong feelings,
making them memorable and therefore often dominant in
processing (Slovic et al., 2002; Loewenstein et al, 2001)
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Recency Effect
• Experiential processing gives a lot of weight to
recent observations
– Since rare events have generally not occurred
recently, they are underweighted
• Neglect of flood control infrastructure
– However, recency weighting also predicts that, if the
statistically rare event has occurred in the very
recent past, people will overreact to it
Description-based decision
Experience-based decision
• Decide on taking a drug based on
drug package insert information
• Decision to back up computer’s
hard drive
• Invest in a mutual fund based on
the information in its prospectus
• Invest in a system to irrigate
crops based on personal memory
When small-probability (rare)
events are involved, people choose
as if they over-weigh the probability
of the rare event
People choose as if they underweigh the probability of the rare
event … unless the statistically
rare event occurred in the very
recent past (recency effect)
(Kahnemann and Tversky, 1979)
(Hertwig, Baron, Weber, Erev, 2004, 2006)
• Likelihood predictions based on
availability and ease of recall
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Dogs on a leash vs. cats on a leash
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• In your opinion, which is a more likely cause of
death in the US:
– Falling airplane parts
– Sharks
• In your opinion which, is the cause of death that is
more common in the US:
– Car accidents
– Stomach cancer
• In your opinion, which is the cause of death that is
more common in the US:
– Tornado
– Lightning
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Availability Heuristic
•
•
•
•
Allows people to make likelihood predictions based on what they
remember, how easily these memories are retrieved, and how
readily available those memories are
Ease of recall serves as indicator of likelihood
– Probability of a blizzard: greater for October or January?
– Rule of thumb works fairly well; common events are easier to
remember than uncommon ones
– Yet not all easily-recalled events are very likely, but rather
• may have taken place more recently (recency effect)
• may have been distorted by the media,
• are associated with strong emotions (affect heuristic)
Plays a role in judging the probabilities of extreme climate events
Makes us assume that the future will be similar to what we have
experienced so far
4 Beware the Overuse of
Emotional Appeals
• Finite Pool of Worry (Linville and Fischer 1991)
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Illustration by Ian Webster, 2009
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Illustration by Ian Webster, 2009
Single Action Bias
(Weber 1997)
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5
Dealing with Uncertainty
• Uncertainty is uncomfortable
• Interpersonal uncertainty when engaging
in mitigation and adaptation behavior
– Post-decision regret /Fear of isolation
– Drop in the bucket
– Free riders
• Benefits of group discussion
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6 Tap Into Social Identities
and Affiliations
• People’s goals matter
– Short-term self-interest vs. longer-term benefits to
society or the environment
Tragedy of the commons (G. Hardin 1968, based on W. Lloyd (1833)
A situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and
solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately
deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in
anyone's long-term interest for this to happen
Cooperation leads to greater benefits for all group members
Defection leads to greater benefits for the individual
– Multiple (often conflicting) goals
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6 Benefits of Group
Participation and Social Context
• Early engagement of all relevant groups
• Participation in problem identification and
brainstorming of solutions
• Social context alters the ways in which people
acquire, learn, engage with, and act on new
information (Orlove et al. 2007, Peterson et al. 2011)
• Activation of social goals (Arora et al. 2012)
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8 Make Behavior Change
Easier
• The power of default effects
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Example: Organ Donation
Effective consent rates, by country – gold: opt-in; blue: opt-out
Source: Johnson/Goldstein (2007) Do Defaults Save Lives? Science, vol. 302, issue 5649, p. 1338-1339.
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The 2009 BECC Low-Carbon Lunch Experiment
ACEEE
Conference
Standard
Meat-Based
Lunch
90-95%
Vegetarian Lunch
5-10%
ACEEE = American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
BECC = Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change Conference,
www.BECCConference.org
Source: Karen L. Ehrhardt-Martinez, Director, Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, Garrison Institute
The 2009 BECC Low-Carbon Lunch Experiment
ACEEE
Conference
Standard
Meat-Based
Lunch
90-95%
Vegetarian Lunch
5-10%
BECC
2007
ACEEE = American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
BECC = Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change Conference,
www.BECCConference.org
•
•
Meat production is responsible for 18% of the global greenhouse gas
emissions (Pew Commission 2008)
Omnivores contribute 7 times the GHG emissions than vegans
Source: Karen L. Ehrhardt-Martinez, Director, Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, Garrison Institute
The 2009 BECC Low-Carbon Lunch Experiment
ACEEE
Conference
Standard
BECC
2007
Meat-Based
Lunch
90-95%
83%
Vegetarian Lunch
5-10%
17%
ACEEE = American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
BECC = Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change Conference,
www.BECCConference.org
•
•
Meat production is responsible for 18% of the global greenhouse gas
emissions (Pew Commission 2008)
Omnivores contribute 7 times the GHG emissions than vegans
Source: Karen L. Ehrhardt-Martinez, Director, Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, Garrison Institute
The 2009 BECC Low-Carbon Lunch Experiment
ACEEE
Conference
Standard
BECC
2007
BECC
2009
Meat-Based
Lunch
90-95%
83%
20%
Vegetarian Lunch
5-10%
17%
80%
ACEEE = American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
BECC = Behavior, Energy, & Climate Change Conference,
www.BECCConference.org
•
•
Meat production is responsible for 18% of the global greenhouse gas
emissions (Pew Commission 2008)
Omnivores contribute 7 times the GHG emissions than vegans
Source: Karen L. Ehrhardt-Martinez, Director, Climate, Mind and Behavior Program, Garrison Institute
Conclusions: How to Approach the
Motivation Deficit
• Risk communication CAN be improved
• Keep multiple goals in mind, look for co-benefits
• No “one-size-fits-all” approach
– Combinations of affective/experience-based
and analytic information
– Participatory processes to tailor information
• Group decision context primes collective
interests
• Awareness of need for individual actions also
builds awareness of need for collective action
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www.cred.columbia.edu/guide/
Funding : NSF-SES 0345840, NSF-SES 0951516,
Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation
Plug
If you are interested in learning more:
E401/555 Human Behavior and Energy
Consumption
@ 2:30-3:45pm SPEA in Spring 2014
Contact:
Shahzeen Attari
Email: sattari@indiana.edu
77