Tony: Risk underlies all the important decisions we make in our lives. And it's not just environmental risks; it's technological risks, it's health risks, it's the financial risks we take – do I invest in this stock or this stock? [Wedding music and video] Relationship risks – do I get married to this person or not, that's a risk. The important decisions are the ones where you don't really know what's going to happen and you have to try to judge. What's the likelihood and…and consequences of the action I'm gonna take, for good or for bad?

[How Do Reason and Emotion Influence Our Decision Making?]

Where we have great trouble as society and as individuals making decisions is on those things that we're not really sure what's going to happen and we have to somehow reach a conclusion. Now, that doesn't mean, however, that we do that in a quote/unquote "rational deliberate fashion." There's a lot of different ways that we make decisions, ranging from evacuation behavior in a hurricane to decisions about what kinds of policies we want to support for climate change to what kinds of decisions…who are you gonna vote for, for president. All of these are…are calculated decisions.

You know, if you're trying to talk and educate people about a hazard, then it's obviously very important that you understand what they currently understand about that hazard. And that isn't just simply the knowledge that they have about that hazard, but how do they feel about that hazard. Um, what kinds of images come to their mind when they think about that hazard? Because in most cases, for most hazards that we deal with, people's actual factual knowledge about them is relatively limited. And so they're drawing on other sources of information that they hold in their minds, as well as from around…the people around them. [Images of hazardous situations]

So, we also draw great cues from people around us. And a great example of that is we've all had the experience of, say, wanting to buy a new car, , and doing lots and lots of research and looking at all the consumer reports and gas mileage and features, and so on and so on. And, thinking that you've got the…the exact vehicle you want, then asking your cousin saying, oh, I’m thinking about buying this car. And they say, oh gosh! You know, a friend of mine bought one of those and it was a lemon. And suddenly all that research often gets thrown out the window because you've gotten an anecdote from somebody else and…presumably somebody you trust. That's also a hugely important factor.

So it's not just the psychological aspects, uh, that are just simply knowledge, but also these feelings and images that we…that we carry about the issue, it's also what our social networks have to say about the risk as well that become very important. And, in fact, you know, our…our own closest friends and family and neighbors are often far more trusted, uh, as sources of information than unknown government officials, uh, or risk communicators who I've never met before.

What is social science now telling us about how the human mind actually processes information, um, and to what extent does this shear factual knowledge, uh, influence it? Well, over the past say fifty years my own field, which is, uh, called judgment and decision making, has largely focused its attention on how people make rational, logical, deliberate decisions. And in particular how do people make mistakes when they…Even when they're trying to be rational, how do they often make mistakes, through heuristics or shortcuts and so on?

Only in the past ten to fifteen years, however, have we come to realize that there's a whole ‘nother way that human beings process information and make decisions. There's this one side is what we call the analytic system, and it's what we learn to do in university setting or in school. We're trained very hard how to think. The other side is this experiential side, which is the realm of feeling and emotion, imagery, values, narrative, etcetera. And when you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, that system is far, far older and is, uh, incredibly important to the survival of our species of over many, many, millions of years [film trailer, 10,000 BC]

The ability to do rational logical thought is very difficult. It takes a lot of energy. And most of us are what we call “cognitive misers.” We try to use or try to think intensively as little as possible, because it takes a lot of time and energy. So that's why habit and routine become so important. You'll spend a lot of time thinking about something when you're just about to adopt a new behavior, but then you want to rout… routinize it. You want to make it habitual. You don't want to have to think about it anymore. We all go through this process.

And, in my field, what we have just come to realize is that this experiential side, which again is feelings, emotions. It's often drawn from experience. It's not logical chains of thought as much as associations, leaps of associations. It turns out to be incredibly important, and my own work has found that in some ways it's far more important in terms of how people deal with climate change and how they think about climate change. Because, again, overall factual knowledge in, say, climate literacy is quite low among the American public. And so in a situation where people don't really know very much about that issue or any other scientific issue that you happen to be concerned with, they're going to rely on these other impressions, feelings, images, et cetera, that they have.

[What Are Useful Ways to Think About Climate Uncertainty?]

But in terms of our day-to-day lives and changing certainly our day to day behavior, that's out of sight is out of mind. And, most of us are very focused on the local level. And so, uh, it's a real challenge now and it's increasingly being, uh, technically capa…uh, possible for us to start talking about, what are the regional impacts of climate change going to be? What are the local impacts going to be? And how may my community be at risk? And what kinds of things should we be thinking about?

We need to think of issues like climate change as an insurance problem. We don't know, and we will never know exactly what the impacts are going to be. We know…have some very good understandings of the likely directions and some of the broad scale kinds of problems we may encounter. We also know that there will be surprises, because this is a highly complex, interrelated, positive feed…and negative feedback system. There is a level of uncertainty in it that is just inherent in the problem. I'm talking about the climate system of the planet. So, we will never have absolute certainty, but we've never required absolute certainty for so many of the other things that we make decisions about, including financial risk, and again, including relationship risk. I mean, we all make decisions in our everyday lives that don't require absolute certainty before acting.