Part One
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Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, journalists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today’s conversation is with Dr. Edward Maibach, [May-back] a professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University, and also the Director of a new research center there called the Center of Excellence in Climate Change Communication Research.
Joe: Thanks for making the time to speak with us, Ed. Your work focuses on communicating about climate change; tell us a bit about your professional background that brought you to this point.
Ed: Well, I have a doctoral degree in communication research. And I sought that degree because I'm extremely interested in the potential to use mass communication and other forms of communication to influence people's behavior at the population level. Not…And meaning not one-on-one, not along the lines of, say a clinical encounter, but… really sort of mass mobilization of people in the population. And I also have training in public health. I hold a master’s in public health degree. I also have on-the-job training in a discipline called social marketing, which sort of, simply put, is using commercial marketing techniques to influence people's behavior in populations. But rather than doing it for commercial profit, it's doing it for the benefit of society and for the benefit of the individuals whose behavior is changing.
Joe: A good deal of our understanding about behavior change seems to come from social science research about personal health changes -- stopping smoking, for instance. Broadly speaking, in what ways is this research about highly consequential private choices applicable to changing public behavior about climate?
Ed: I think we have learned a lot about how to influence people's health behaviors from the field of public health -- and both from the research as well as from practical applications. If I could simplify it for a moment, I would say that the most important thing we've learned is that common sense ain't necessarily true. I think most people's common sense is that we know certain things and as we learn new things we change our attitudes accordingly. And then as our attitudes shift, we change our behavior. It's, sort of in the field of health education where this came from. They call it the knowledge, attitude, behavior change continuum. As it turns out, that's really not the case. It's a very poor way to describe and to even conceptualize people's decision processes, both conscious and unconscious, that shape what they do.
I'm not sure that the distinction between personal consequences and other consequences is necessarily a meaningful distinction to draw. You know, the consequences are in the eye of the beholder. While I may be very concerned about a personal health threat, I may be equally concerned about a threat to our environment, a threat to the economy of our nation, or a threat to virtually anything else that I care about. So, sort of demarcating personal threats from threats to something else external to us, I don’t think is an appropriate way to think about it.
Instead, I think that what we have learned is that people do think and feel in ways that influence their behavior. And we know quite a lot about that. A lot of that work comes from the field of psychology or health psychology. But we also know that interpersonal networks, the relationships that people have with other people, are terribly consequential in shaping our behavior.
So, for example, when we have people in our lives who model new behaviors, new behaviors that are perhaps consistent with a societal objective, climate change prevention, for example, we're much more likely to be open to trying those new behaviors ourselves because we've seen the modeling up close and personal by people that we care about and respect.
We also know there's one other sort of level of analysis in which the attributes of people have a very, very potent influence on population behavior. And I like to think of those as community level variables. Things like social norms and social cohesion. Those are variables that influence all of us in a given community to a greater or lesser degree, but what we sometimes fail to appreciate is how very powerful they are. So, social norms, for example, will absolutely reinforce certain behaviors and absolutely discourage other behaviors.
Joe: Is there a behavioral model or framework that you use to guide your own work?
Ed: Actually, I have been myself writing, developing a model and publishing it to try to get other people's ideas on this model. I call it the People and Places Framework. The idea is really quite simple. In essence, what I am saying is that we know a lot about the attributes of people that shape population behavior. So, a moment ago I talked about the attributes of individuals and the attributes of social networks and the attributes of communities. But all of those are attributes of people. And, there's a flip side of the coin. Another major influence on population behavior are the attributes of place. By place I mean the community around us. And, there are four major attributes of place that have been shown to be very, very influential in shaping the behavior of people in those populations.
And those four attributes are the availability of products and services. So for example, when products and services that help us save energy are more available and cheaper, we tend to be more likely to take advantage of those. Whereas, as was the case until quite recently where those products are less available and more costly, we tend not to take advantage of them.
The other three attributes of place that are terribly influential are the actual physical structures of our communities, the social structures of our communities; and by that I mean the laws and the policies that govern our communities and the degree to which we enforce them. And then finally the cultural and media messages that are prevalent in our communities.
Joe: What are the most important research questions relating to communicating about climate that we still have? What are you focusing on at George Mason?
Ed: I would say the single biggest research question is . . . you know, I've laid out the factors in the people and places framework for you, and the question is, we really don’t know very much about which of those factors are currently the most important impediments to population behavior change. Do they lay at the individual level? Is it what people believe about climate change? Do we, as Americans, and people of the world somehow lack a belief that is undermining our motivation? Or, is it something, or a variety of things, at the place level? Is it simply that it's too difficult -- that the products and services that will allow us to reduce our carbon footprint are still not sufficiently available, or they are still overly costly for them to be attractive to us in pursuing our own self-interest.
Joe: Let’s talk about your report released in February: “What are Americans thinking and doing about global warming: the results of a national household survey.” What were your most important findings, and which of them were new or unexpected?
Ed: We were actually asking sort of a single question. And the question in part comes from Susi Moser and other people's writing in which they are wondering whether or not people are already sufficiently alarmed about climate change, because we've had something of a tendency to be fear-mongering in our communication. And whether, in fact, what they really need is a greater sense of efficacy or personal belief that they --that my actions can make a difference and that our collective actions can make a difference.
So we asked people in a very large survey – we had almost twelve thousand adult respondents and almost a thousand of their kids respond -- we asked our respondents to answer questions about their perceptions about global warming as a threat and their perceptions about their personal efficacy to make a difference, as well as our collective efficacy to make a difference. What we think we're finding, and what we published in our initial report, is that both of those beliefs turn out to be quite influential in shaping people's subsequent behavior.
By that I mean, people who both perceive global warming to be a threat and who perceive a high degree of efficacy that our actions can make a difference to stop global warming, were performing more specific environmental actions that have either direct or indirectly beneficial consequences in stopping or slowing climate change.
Joe: The survey found that roughly a third of American adults were still undecided as to the dangers posed by global warming and our ability to combat it. Were you surprised by that?
Ed: No, I wasn't surprised, actually. That was exactly what we anticipated finding, but because their seems to be a bit of a dialogue, if not a debate, in the community about whether or not we should back off on fear messages. I thought it was a question well worth asking. And my conclusion from it is, no, I actually don't think we should be backing off fear messages. But I think at the same time we can't only be communicating fear, communicating things that worry people about climate change. But we also have to be very, very aggressive in communicating solutions. Concrete, specific solutions that people can move on; whether that is in the context of their own lives, such as buying energy efficient appliances or insulating their home more aggressively. Or whether it has to do with the kind of public official we put in office and what we hold them accountable to do on our behalf.
So we allowed. . . in assessing people's sense of global warming as a threat, we read them a series of questions, or they were presented with a series of questions, and they were allowed to say whether or not they strongly agreed with the statement, whether they agreed, whether they neither agreed nor disagreed, whether they disagreed or strongly disagreed. And what we found, as you said Joe, is that a very significant number of people just didn't have an opinion. They were right on the fence; neither agree nor disagree.
Which… of course, means, I believe, from a communication perspective, that they are an audience waiting for more information. And we would be very wise to do all we can to figure out exactly what information would be of most… they would perceive to be of most value to them so that they can go ahead and make up their mind and begin to have an opinion one way or the other.
Baruch Fischhoff, my close friend and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he makes the point, very clearly, very cogently, that we often, in our public communication efforts, tell people what they already know and we ignore what they don't know. And that's really a terrible formula for effective communication. Instead, what we need to do, and actually what we are planning to do, is spend time investigating, well, what is it that these people don't know? Of the many things that they don't know that climate change experts do know, which small subset of those…that information deficit, as you said earlier, which small subset of pieces of information would actually have maximum value in helping these people understand the threat of climate change in more or less the same manner that experts do, and would also help them understand what their personal and our societal options are for taking action to slow or stop climate change.
Joe: I noticed that you didn’t just ask about opinions in this survey; you also asked about their feelings, particularly feelings of efficacy. What exactly is efficacy and what did you find?
Ed: Well, efficacy is a term that…Self-efficacy, actually, is a term that…that comes from the psychological literature. Albert Bandura, a psychologist at Stanford University, was the coiner of that term. And self-efficacy essentially means the degree that we believe in our own ability to do something. So, for example, one of our efficacy statements was, “I can take actions that will help reduce global warming.” And, what we know from the psychology literature – and there are thousands and thousands of studies that support this contention – is that when people feel a strong sense of belief in their ability, they are much more likely to try the behavior and they are much more likely to stick with the behavior when they encounter difficulties in its performance. Conversely, people who have a low sense of efficacy, are much less likely to try the behavior in question. If they do try it, they are much less likely to stick with it.
Drawing sort of an example from my old life, if you will allow me to: smokers’ efficacy in quitting smoking. Because smoking is a very powerful addiction, is a very difficult thing to do. And, when smokers have a high sense of efficacy, they are dramatically more likely to try to quit and to succeed in their quit effort. Versus those people who quit with a low sense of efficacy more often than not abandon their efforts very, very early on. So the fundamental concept is that when we believe in ourselves, when we believe in our specific ability to do something, we're dramatically more likely to do it over time.
Joe: Communication can promote a sense of efficacy, of “I can do this.”
Ed: Yes, it can. It absolutely is one of the things that communication does best. Fortunately, we human beings don't have to learn everything through direct trial and error. We're quite adept at learning by watching other people. It's called observational learning. And one of the things that we learn by watching other people try new behaviors is we get a better sense of our ability to perform. Our ability or our inability to perform the behavior. And as it…you know, as it turns out, video or television or movies, or virtually any form of communication is a very, very effective way of modeling the behaviors that we're trying to promote, and thereby improving people's sense of self-efficacy.
Joe: This is a conversation with Ed Maibach of George Mason University, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, and we’re going to take a pause here in the conversation, to keep the audio file from becoming too large. Please join us for the rest of this conversation in the file labelled as part two.