Line up a dozen environmentalists, ask them to conjure up an image of the sort of scientist who might save the planet from global warming, and it’s a safe bet none of them will imagine somebody like Benjamin Ho.
For one thing, Ho worked for a time in the Bush White House. For another, he’s not even a climate scientist. He doesn’t study global sea rise or Arctic ice melt, and he doesn’t project temperature increases. Nor does he have suggestions for technological solutions to the problem.
And why would he? Ben Ho is an economist. His doctoral work at Stanford consisted of a “statistical examination of the role apologies play in medical malpractice lawsuits.” He also did some work on how fads and fashion are used to signal identity — there was nary a kilowatt- hour nor a molecule of carbon dioxide in sight. Nevertheless, Ho claimed at a conference last November that it was social scientists like himself who held the key to saving the world from climate change.
His claim might seem audacious, but let’s step back a moment to examine our situation. We know that climate change is caused by human activity. We know seas will rise by at least 17 centimeters in the next century. We know we can expect stronger hurricanes; we know we will face more droughts and heat waves; we know deadly diseases will spread to new regions. We know the climate demands action. We know all these things, and yet we do not act. Why? We don’t exactly know. And that makes climate change a question for social scientists like Ben Ho.
“Human beings’ decision-making processes, as individuals and collectively, are probably at least as complicated as the climate system itself,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Prize–winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has suggested that the time has come “to start looking at the social-science aspects” of climate change. “You really need to mobilize the community,” he says. “I really don’t think we’ve done enough.”
The idea isn’t wholly new — the 1980s saw the first efforts to bring social science to bear on climate change — but the field is nonetheless nascent, its impact on the mainstream minimal. The investigators themselves are still somewhat fragmented, and they come from a field that has long prized theory over action. A large portion of the public is skeptical, fatigued, and even in the best of times, can be difficult to motivate. But the newest efforts hold real promise, the researchers say. Clarion calls and wailing alarms have been of little use. Whether these newer, subtler methods will prove powerful enough to succeed, when so many environmental campaigns have failed, remains to be seen. What’s at stake, however, may be nothing less than survival — for all kinds of life, including humankind.
After finishing his PhD at Stanford in 2006, Ben Ho followed his professor, Edward Lazear, to the Bush administration. “When I got there, they asked me, ‘What do you know?’” Ho recalls. “I said, ‘I know about apology and fashion,’ and they said, ‘Well, that’s not helpful — how about energy?’” He emerged from the experience a year later with considerable expertise and interest in climate-change policy. Now, as an affiliated researcher at the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, he has begun applying the lessons of a particular field — behavioral economics — to the study of climate change.
If human beings were the perfectly rational creatures imagined by classical economists, we would have done something about climate change by now. But the central insight of behavioral economics — the once heretical but now ascendant paradigm in economics, particularly following the 2002 Nobel Prize awarded to one of its founders, Daniel Kahneman — is that humans aren’t fully rational. All sorts of cognitive limitations prevent us from being so, and behavioral economists have spent much of the past decades discovering, describing, and naming our many mental shortcuts and biases, and ascribing our various irrational tendencies to their effects. Ben Ho’s particular interest is in how people’s feelings of guilt and altruism can be leveraged to reduce their carbon footprint, and he presented his findings at the November conference in a talk he titled “Using Behavioral Economics to Save the World.”
Early in Ho’s presentation, he mentioned a book called Nudge, written by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and lawyer Cass Sunstein, his former colleague, now a professor at Harvard Law School and the Obama administration nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In their book, Thaler and Sunstein coin a term: choice architecture. They argue that because the way in which we are presented with information changes our response to it, the best choice architecture gently steers us into the salubrious behavior that more thoroughly rational beings would choose.
Ho’s own work has investigated how someone’s awareness of the carbon footprints of others influences that person’s carbon usage. Nudge describes a simple but astonishing experiment along such lines: Residents of a community were shown how their energy use measured up against the communal average. If they consumed more than the average, most reduced energy in the months ahead. If households saw that they consumed less energy than their peers, however, their energy use actually rose, except when the frugal households were given the merest of rewards: a smiley face on their bill. Nudge is full of other devices to help funnel us into more pro-environmental behavior, including glowing orbs that help make our energy use visible, and smart meters that can be programmed with precision. Rare is the engineer who would think of using them, however. It’s just not how engineers view the world, says Ho, who should know. He works with them regularly at Cornell, and is trained as one himself. “It’s a very top-down perspective: If you want to make this carbon-efficient, just put this power line here, this power line here, and bam, it’ll be fixed. But as an economist, I’m thinking, ‘You can’t just put things there.’” Engineers treat such issues more like a math problem, Ho says, than like something involving people making decisions.
The fact that most people would not choose the quantitatively soundest approach is something behavioral economics gets. “The only way to get anything done is a holistic approach,” says Ho. “We’re all speaking different languages, and that leads to conflicts. But that has to be the way forward.”
Nudges, however, will get us only so far. Even if behavioral economists could instantly revolutionize our energy choice architecture, it wouldn’t be enough — at best they could reduce our carbon emissions by just better than 10 percent. Thaler himself calls them “while we’re waiting” measures. “The first thing we should do is have a tax,” he says, ideally a plain carbon tax, but cap-andtrade measures could work too. “That’s politically difficult.” Tax-based mitigation requires legislative action and active popular support. And here’s where behavioral economics becomes less useful. Rather than duping people into mindlessly beneficial behavior, climate-change policy must also embrace what makes people behave mindfully. And that demands a wholly different psychological approach, like that of Elke Weber.
Weber, a professor of psychology and management at Columbia University and, in 2004, a cofounder of Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), asks not what can keep us from making bad climate decisions, but what keeps us from making good ones. In 2006 Weber published a paper that asked why global warming does not scare us. It is, she argues, because global warming occurs slowly; because it is often discussed abstractly and statistically; and because people perceive it as something that will happen far off in the future and in distant lands. The result is that for many people, global warming simply fails to evoke a visceral, emotional reaction. And without powerful emotions, there cannot be powerful responses.
Weber has a cheerful, somewhat melodious voice with gentle Germanic tinges, so it is a bit jarring to hear her state the implications of her research: “If you accept the fact that maybe people worry about it insufficiently, then the obvious conclusion would be: Let’s scare them more.” She doesn’t advocate anything drastic — no reeducation camps in the Arctic showcasing drowning polar bears — but simple, modest measures. For instance, American educators might emphasize the effects of climate change in the United States, rather than hoping to rouse empathy by describing what might happen to someone somewhere else. Colorado ski areas, for example, will suffer at the same time that Pacific islands will be swallowed whole by the sea. While it may seem silly or even perverse to play a violin for the projected melting on the ski slopes of Vail, the fact is that many more Americans will visit — and become emotionally attached to — Vail than they ever will Tuvalu. If Americans are to respond, it is best to hit them where it will hurt.
Not everyone, not even Weber’s own colleagues at Columbia, agrees. CRED is a place where anthropologists back from Brazil or the Swiss Alps might mingle with economists and climatologists, while the occasional historian passes through. With about 20 research projects, the center contains scientific multitudes, and sometimes they contradict each other.
David Krantz, also a psychologist and a codirector of the center, is a good example. While he agrees that many people need help making decisions, he argues that “repackaging the science so that it’s more dramatic and more short term” — so it’s scarier — won’t provide that help. What social scientists need, Krantz argues, is an understanding of the circumstances that enable people to consciously make the right choices. He has found, for example, that people are often freely willing to cooperate if they can identify with a group (through messages designed to, say, evoke civic responsibility); that people become much more serious about a problem if they have an active role in solving it, instead of being passive recipients of wisdom from above; and that people will think long term so long as they are primed to think that way at the right moment (as in the case of families who save for their children’s college education).
The important point is not that Krantz and Weber disagree; indeed, their core insights — that the key to enacting effective climate policies is to get people into the right mode of thought — are the same. It’s just that their lines of research have simply identified different preferred modes. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter terribly who is right. Even if the strategies are contradictory, it can’t hurt to try them all. What’s needed, many at CRED stress, is a “portfolio” of solutions. All too often, they say, we just try one thing and think we’ve fixed the problem. There is a phrase for this, current in decision science literature: “single-action bias.” Elke Weber coined it.
Anthony Leiserowitz, from Yale, has his own saying about single-action bias: “We often look for silver bullets instead of silver buckshot.” But it’s not just because no one’s certain what will work. It’s also because, Leiserowitz says, we’re dealing with multiple audiences. His argument is not particularly au courant. President Obama has said, to much applause, that “we are not a collection of Red States and Blue States — we are the United States of America.” It’s a nice notion, Leiserowitz suggests, but it wouldn’t get very far in a peer-reviewed journal of social psychology. He turns Obama’s unifying vision on its head, and then fragments it further. “‘American public’ is a misnomer. There’s no American public,” he says. “There are American publics.”
Such a realization dawned slowly for him. After graduating from college in the early ’90s, he went to work at the Aspen Global Change Institute, helping organize conferences where top scientists met for two-week retreats to discuss pressing environmental problems. “They were wondeful people,” says Leiserowitz. “It completely changed my life.” Still, he came to feel that the talks weren’t getting at the root of the problem. “We were talking about climate change and extinction and so on, but what unites all those things is ultimately human beings and our decision making.”
Now, at Yale, Leiserowitz has taken to scrutinizing those “American publics.” He hopes to get a richer and broader composite picture, and to open up new lines of communication between these publics, researchers, and government. Working with researchers at CRED and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, Leiserowitz is designing a longitudinal survey system — he currently has 2,200 survey respondents — that will create a steady stream of data over a period of years.
If successful, Leiserowitz’s project should give a coordinated stride to communicating environmental information, which is often an awkward, limping process. The new model is more “a twoway street” of information flow, he explains: “It’s about building in a feedback system. It’s the difference between a teacher and a national campaign. A teacher can see immediately if a student gets it or not, and can even ask, ‘Did you understand?’”
Leiserowitz is also doing what advertisers and TV executives have been doing for decades: identifying niche markets. In his papers, he calls them “interpretive communities.” Each has its own tendencies and biases, its own preoccupations or blocks; different policies will suit each. “Naysayers” must be engaged differently from “alarmists,” and so forth. There’s also a sizable group that could be termed “the confused.” A 2002 Leiserowitz survey found that 88 percent of people thought that the ozone hole contributes directly to global warming, and 45 percent thought ozone depletion to be the primary contributor, far more than identified fossil fuels. It also resulted in this quote from a survey respondent: “The solution is simple. A huge amount of ozone should be created, then a team should fly it to Antarctica” to replace the missing ozone. Whether this particular respondent was having a bit of fun or not doesn’t matter, because this response wasn’t the only one of its kind. “Many people think the best thing you can do is to stop buying aerosol spray cans,” Leiserowitz says. “CFCs have been out of the cans since 1978. It’s okay to buy aerosol spray cans again.”
However dispiriting such findings might be, the wider environmental community is eager for the information. “This stuff is invaluable,” says Tom Bowman, the head of an eponymous design group with a green emphasis that has worked with groups ranging from Northrup Grumman to the US National Academy of Sciences. Bowman says that while environmental researchers have been using surveys for years, Leiserowitz and his colleagues are among the first to introduce the socialmarketing perspective that helps make messages resonate with different groups.
Bowman, who also writes professionally about the environment, thinks that environmental organizations traditionally have done a great job of communicating the problems, but not the solutions. One finding of some of the newer social science is that “to the extent people can’t solve a problem, they tend to ignore that problem,” Bowman says. It’s a finding that could change the whole tone of much environmental education and activism. “People like me are looking for all the insight we can gather into what has been missing in climate-change communication.”
The environmental NGO community is beginning to pay attention to such work as well. Thomas Dietz, director of Michigan State University’s Environmental Science and Policy Program, says that in December he briefed the Environmental Defense Fund staff on new directions they might take by incorporating social science into their work on climate change. The Environmental Defense Fund, already known for incorporating economic concerns in environmental decision making — doing trailblazing work, for example, by incorporating a market-based program for acid-rain prevention into 1990’s Clean Air Act — could galvanize environmental campaigners to pay attention to the rest of social science, too.
But is this too little, too late? Baruch Fischhoff, for one, is discouraged. Fischhoff, a decision scientist at Carnegie Mellon, plays something of the brooding cousin to the likes of Thaler, Weber, Ho, and Leiserowitz — who calls Fischhoff “one of the true pioneers in risk perception and decision making.” His is a discouragement born of a long era in the wilderness: After all, Fischhoff was one of the first to perceive social science’s potential role in combating global warming. He co-wrote a paper about it in 1983.
“I’ve been saying this for 30 years,” says Fischhoff. “I’ve struck out.”
Fischhoff admits that some good work is being done though. The folks at CRED are at the top of their professions, he says, and there are other scattered departments and groups whose names — Michigan’s “Environmental Psychology Lab,” Arizona’s “Decision Center for a Desert City” — hint at the modest fruits born of their social/environmental scientific collaboration. But these contributions, while increasingly strong, have been long in coming, and are not commensurate with the problem, says Fischhoff. Worse still, vital resources have been wasted, he says, “on a debate over whether climate change is happening and how bad it is. Basically, that battle was won 15 years ago,” but hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on it nonetheless.
Ironically, the very problems these social scientists are identifying plague the scientific and policy communities themselves. That includes poor communication. Economists and psychologists “don’t talk as much as we should,” Ho confesses, when first hearing of Leiserowitz’s research. And Leiserowitz, for his part, says that the socialscience community has put together “nothing as sophisticated or coordinated as what the natural scientists have done.” Natural scientists have the IPCC, but the social scientists occasionally have conferences Leiserowitz calls “one-off, singleafternoon kind of things.”
And there’s a second thing social scientists might learn from their own research: how to market themselves to a particularly stubborn audience. Social science may be able to save the world from climate change, but only if there’s a change of heart — not just among the public, but among natural scientists and engineers. “I see more social scientists interested in public-policy issues and a growing awareness by natural scientists that it cannot be improvised.” But, Fischhoff says of natural scientists, “many of them do not believe in the social sciences. They grudgingly see that people matter, but they are not willing to share power with social sciences, or to entertain the thought that their own message is not the right one and that you need to include the social scientists in a strategic way.” (Thomas Dietz, one of those social scientists, says it is his impression that “holdouts” among the natural scientists of the sort Fischhoff identifies are “increasingly rare and anachronistic.”)
“One needs social science at the absolute center of the strategic decisions being made in this area. It has to be on an equal footing with the natural sciences, with engineering, with economic analyses,” Fischhoff argues. “If it’s at the end, then it’s too late to shape the policies in ways that will have any meaningful impact.” To fix this, Fischhoff envisions an NIH-like social-science corps, a “substantial institution that would provide social-sciences resources for people willing to take these issues seriously.” If legitimate and properly funded, it could finally attract more top scientists, the kind of people who are “more concerned with making this work than publishing another limited disciplinary paper,” as he puts it.
Though it’s too early to tell, the sleeping giant of government funding may be stirring. Social scientists increasingly play a role in projects funded by NOAA, and a major forthcoming National Academies study called “America’s Climate Choices” will be led, in part, by social scientists. A recent report from the National Research Council observed that the US Climate Change Science Program “is hindered by its limited research into the social sciences,” as a press release mildly put it, “…and the separation of natural and social sciences research.” Social science spending has never risen above 3 percent of the program’s budget.
The international scene is no cheerier. Roland Scholz, for instance, at the Institute for Environmental Decisions in Zurich, says that “social sciences are not seen as an important contributor” to solutions in Switzerland, a situation they sometimes invite, since so many social scientists are “overly theory oriented and avoid coping with real-world problems.” He counts Fischhoff and Weber among “the few exceptions” to this rule.
Lorraine Whitmarsh, a social scientist with the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says that the situation is not much different in England. Granted, she says, natural science may be more expensive to conduct than social science in general, but the wild funding disparity also seems symptomatic of a greater public faith in the natural sciences, which generate “techno-fixes as solutions,” she says. The Tyndall Centre, which has received considerable government funding, is something of an exception — fully half its researchers, Whitmarsh estimates, are social scientists. But Whitmarsh says that a recent committee assembled to advise the government on climate-change legislation has no sociologists or psychologists. A sort of British Leiserowitz, Whitmarsh focuses on social psychology and has demonstrated that the British public suffers from many of the same points of confusion as its American counterpart.
Nicholas Pidgeon, a professor of psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, finds patchy support for social climate science as well, though institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the London School of Economics do provide support. But it is not enough, he says, particularly regarding efforts to change behavior. At the recent UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, Pidgeon says, the physical scientists acknowledged that social science is needed for mitigation and adaptation, but such thinking is still not mainstream.
Lack of money and respect are not the only things hampering social science as it seeks to save the world. Fischhoff also assigns blame to the field itself: Too much of the psychological literature has cast the public in the role of the fool, he says, and the “public is not given credibility for its inherent competence.” He confesses to having contributed, at times, to this sort of literature himself. “Biases are intriguing; they make great stories,” he says. “But people generally do reasonable things if they’re given half the chance.”
One of Leiserowitz’s central findings confirms some of the “inherent competence” of the public that Fischhoff sees. For all the public’s shortcuts and biases, for all its psychological barriers to action, and for all its points of confusion, one fact remains: Most Americans are, in fact, worried about climate change. “A very large majority of the American public thinks global warming is happening, that it’s a serious problem, and they want somebody to do something about it,” says Leiserowitz. “They just don’t know what that something is.” If natural scientists know what we should be doing, only social scientists can determine how we’ll get it done.
