Part Two
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Joe: Welcome back to the second half of our conversation with Dr. Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University.
Where we broke off, Baruch, you had given a couple of different examples of how nonpersuasive communication can work to give people the information they need in order to make their own decisions about their behavior. This model incorporates an understanding of decision-making and of audience psychology into the science-communication equation, and it seems so useful . . .
Baruch: I think that this is an essential model in situations where people need to make choices. You probably don't need the decision risk analyst part if you're just trying to give people an appreciation of science. And then, you know, let the scientists talk about how they see the world and what fascinates them.
But don't think that that's going to facilitate people's making decisions. And, you know, I think one of things that perhaps encourages scientists to exaggerate their own ability to communicate is they do a really good job -- as long as they're talking about themselves. And then I think once you have decisions, then scientists are no better at intuiting the constraints on other people's lives than anybody else.
Joe: Thinking, you know, broadly about, uh, about climate change, do you consider the risks associated, uh, with it of a different…different in kind, or is it just simply different in degree from other kinds of en...uh, of environmental issues that we've faced, say over the last, uh, half century? I suppose that is the first part of the question. The second part is, does climate change pose a special kind of, uh, challenge for…for professionals, uh, who want to communicate about it?
Baruch: It different in terms of kind, I think, in terms of the scope and the complexity of the potential consequences and their irreversibility. You might think of it as having the sum of the properties of a threat of…from a nuclear war during the worst part of the Cold War, in which it was a very complicated system. We didn't know what the levers were and if things got out of control, there would be, in effect, unimaginable changes.
So, the price of climate change, you know, will not be exacted in a minute. There will be some chances for some systems to recover. But it is of that scope and that's really hard to get your mind around. So I think that climate change really is of a scale that it's hard for people to get their minds around, in a way like the entrance of a life threatening illness into somebody's life. Although, if you have a life threatening illness, you can talk to other people who've had the same thing happen to them. I don't know that anybody has…you know, in some sense people haven't lived in a world with the kind of destabilization that's possible with climate change. So that's different.
A second thing that's different and it's both some ways more complicated and more optimistic, is that it requires a mobilization of the sciences that we really haven't had before. I think a risk that we have is of people working a very complicated piece of the problem detached from the rest of the problem, and not realizing it.
So, we have people who are very enthusiastic about biofuels. And some of them are enthusiastic because it will bring them financial gain or political power, and there's votes and other reasons going on there. Other people who are concerned primarily about the environment view this as a kind of green power. And they're just discovering that these analyses didn't fully look at the energy balances. They didn't evolve ecologists who would tell us what would be the effects what's sometimes called marginal lands that are important to wildlife, but are not being used by industrial agriculture. That those could be made productive in order to produce fuels.
So, we could decide that we want to use these marginal lands and eliminate the habitat for the animals and plants that live there. But that ought to be a conscious decision. So, you'll find in the biofuels area, people who haven't done the complete energy balance, so they haven't even gotten the engineering complete.
And the ecologists have not been part of the problem [-solving] whatsoever. So, if I'm the social scientist trying to communicate the relevant elements of biofuels as a policy, I've got to challenge, if they're not doing the energy part right, and if the ecology is left out entirely, then we're not gonna have very sound decisions.
Joe: In a previous conversation, Tony Leiserowitz of Yale observed that when people assess risks, the assessment isn't just a deliberative process, but also draws on their emotions and, uh, and deep associations which we may hardly even be conscious of. How do communicators proceed with non-persuasive communication where we hope the recipient is processing information deliberatively, but the process may be affected by his emotions?
Baruch: If we're trying to be deliberate about our decision making, there’s research showing (and I've done a little bit of it, but there are people know it much better than I do) -- that shows that emotion has some predictable effects. They're not enormous effects but for example, if you make people angry, they become a little bit more optimistic. They're more likely to attribute problems to somebody as opposed to a complicated situation. So, emotion has some kind of predictable effects. They're not enormous affects on deliberative decision making.
Second, you have a kind of a emotion that is a product of deliberative decision making that isn't working. That is, if you can't figure things out, if you feel like you're being lied to, if nobody is giving you the information that you really need, or nobody's giving you a decent way to solve a problem, it's kind of human to be angry and maybe that anger pushes the decision-making to another level. A political one or it… it could also push it to denial. You could give up about it.
So, we often think about emotions as being the enemy of deliberative…as undermining deliberative decision making. Well, when deliberative decision making doesn’t work, it does evoke emotions.
A third role of emotions is that there are places in our lives that, you know, where we want emotions to have a legitimate role. There's a famous essay by Lawrence Tribe, the Constitutional scholar, a 1972 critique of cost/benefit analysis [in] which he says that the kind of analysis that many people do, like cost/benefit analysis, has a property of anesthetizing moral feeling.
You know, the government requires you to do cost benefit/analyses on many things. Generally speaking, the cost/benefit analyses, they hold when there's the political will to make the decisions. They’re brushed aside when there isn't the political will to make their decisions. But we have this elaborate ritual which organizes the economic facts of a decision. But it elevates these economic facts that economists have agreed upon, as though that's all that decisions are about. And, clearly, there are things in people's lives that they're not willing to compromise for economic grounds. They're the passions of their lives. They lead them to religious faith, a commitment to the environment [or] to sacrifice themselves for other people.
I think that one could call these emotions, but one could think of these as abiding commitments, as values, as fundamental principles that people want to see incorporated in their decisions.
Joe: In an article that you wrote for the New York Times back in 2005 entitled, "A Hero in Every Aisle Seat," you talk about how people responding to a plane crash were…contrary to false assumptions, not panicking, but just doing what people always seem to do. . . helping out in an emergency. And you went on to generalize that Homeland Security officials would be well advised to avoid predicting situations in which people would “panic” . . . avoid drumming the concept of panic into the public. If I could summarize crudely, your argument is that inaccurate terms, emotional terms, from public officials can really cause harm to public behavior. And you said, we should focus on ways to support public resiliency in an emergency. Is resiliency an appropriate focus for climate communication as well? If so, how might we go about encouraging it?
Baruch: I think that's an interesting analogy. Obviously, panic plays off in a very short period of time. You know, there are many more cases of panic in movies. The actual number of cases of panic, there are probably more in movies than there have been in real life. So it's an interesting question why people are confused about that. One is that movies have a certain reality. A second is that we all, probably to some extent, are unsure about our own behavior. You know, would we be heroes in a disaster? And it turns out that most people are heroes. Most rescues are by…when you have a disaster – a building fall or a fire – most rescues are by people at the scene. People who just happen to be there, rather than by first responders, although the first responders often, you know, do the last few rescues at great risk to themselves. We have, as you say, a loose use of language, so that…you know, we often feel panicky. But we don't actually panic in the sense of abandoning our social ties with one another.
I think one of the things that the social sciences can do is to help us to dissect the language to see what we're talking about. And also, to dissect the social phenomena so you can understand better what it is going on.
An example that I sometimes use is that…People remember the horrific pictures, you know, from September 11, of people running in the streets with the cloud about to envelope them. But the whole story there, of the ordinary people who happened to be there, is one of heroism. I mean, they were running in the street, but that was an incredibly effective evacuation. I know somebody who studies egress, who said that the initial calculation suggested that the evacuation from the World Trade Center exceeded the theoretical limit. People collaborated with one another in order to get out. You know, despite all the horrible things that were going out. So it's important to know how resilient people are in many situations.
I
think something that we haven't done enough of, which I think Susi Moser was
onto {in a previous podcast} is thinking about what other people really value
in their lives.
And,
what are the aesthetics, the values, the overriding principles that will resonate
for different people. So, you know, there are things that work for me
that may not work for you, but each of us has a community of people and what
we're seeing now, and one of the things that gives one hope, is we're seeing
different communities mobilizing around climate change and environmental affects. …and
looking for well considered solutions. And I think those will be different
things for different people.
One thing I think about is about twenty-five years ago I spent half a year in Sweden. And the Swedes had…oh gosh, probably still have, an aesthetic of having relatively few things made very well. We're seeing elements of this in…you know, in sort of locally grown and manufactured food and…and other things.
So for some people, an alternative aesthetic, vis-a-vis their consumption and their lifestyle, which is an enhancing one, not one of privation, one that creates ties between them and local craftspeople -- that will work for some people and might enable them to dramatically reduce their consumption. Swedes are not all that different from Americans. You know, one could imagine that aesthetic being one that would take over in the United States.
Joe: This has been a conversation with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That’s “s-e-a-grant”: one word, “dot,” “oregonstate” as one word, “dot, edu.” Thank you for listening.
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