Did you attend the Grand Seminar on “Exploring the complexities and potentials of environmental communication”, organised by LU Sustainability Forum, BECC and MERGE? If not, you definitely missed out on a lot of interesting input and a great opportunity to connect with passionate people that want to explore environmental communication!
All presentations were very interesting in their own right, but to give you a taste of what you missed, I am only writing about my personal highlight: Nina Wormbs speaking on
“Legitimising non-action”.
There are so many decisions we make every single day, regarding our carbon footprint, but also healthy eating habits, screen time, and many more, where we know the right thing to do, yet we manage to find ways to do something else that seem justified to us, so we can do things we know to be bad without feeling bad about them. So how does that work? That is where Nina Wormbs research comes in: She is investigating the different ways people argue for why they act against their own better judgement on questions of sustainability.
But let’s take a step back. Looking at all the examples mentioned above and many more (smoking? Social media? Exercising?), knowing better does not mean doing better. A lot of effort in science communication goes into trying to make people “listen to science”, but in that context “science” most often means STEM, and just telling people is clearly ineffective — the information deficit is not the problem. There are many reasons for non-acting, both in the biology of the brain AND in how people function as social beings in a culture. If we want people to change how people act, we, the researchers and communicators, need to ourselves listen to other disciplines. STEM might tell us that we need to act, but not how. And the how very easily becomes ideological and political. There are, of course, climate / science deniers, but while we need to understand what is going on with them, they are not the majority. The majority of people do accept science, want to act, but find themselves acting against their knowledge and intentions.
Wormbs presents a study where people self-report in survey, responding to the prompt “Describe an experience of doing what you know you shouldn’t do. How do you deal with the cognitive dissonance? How did you legitimise it in your head to make it “ok”?” They had about 400 respondents, and many respondents gave more than one reason. The most common reasons were
- Account thinking. In this line of argumentation, people balance what they do against what they don’t do, for example “I want to fly. I know I should not, but I bike to work and don’t eat meat, so overall flying is ok”. The problem with that is that there cannot be a balance, since there isn’t a budget that is “ok” to use; everything we do emits CO2 that shouldn’t get into the atmosphere, so balancing isn’t a valid approach. Also, most often the proportions are off between actions that people are trying to balance, between the “good” and “less-good” deeds. If people put more effort into something, it tends to counts more in their imagined balance, even if the actual effect is minimal.
- Comparison. There are always people who do worse than us and in comparison to them, what we do is really not so bad or maybe even pretty good; or if we are comparing with ourselves, we are at least doing a bit better than we did years ago. There is a lot of “what-about-ism” happening.
- Limitations. People argue for example that they need to take the car to work, even thought the wouldn’t want to, there is no other possibility. There are a lot of goal conflicts in these kinds of arguments. For example, if we want women to be able to be bosses, maybe they need to dive a car to bring their kids to daycare and pick them up again (was the example she mentioned). Or if you live far away from your family, seeing them is valued very highly and emitting seems justified.
- “I am only human”. Here, people say things like “I cannot save the planet by myself” or “I had a tough week, I needed and deserved to do this”.
- “Tiny me”. This is when people argue that their contribution is so tiny, it shouldn’t count in comparison to Amazon or China. However, in democracy, we don’t argue that way, we argue that every vote counts.
- Technology is going to solve it! This is a very common line of arguments in politics, but surprisingly only surfaced a handful of times from the 400 people!
In this survey, people were asked how they justify things to themselves. But there is always an audience, even for internal arguments, since we are social beings. Our arguments need to not only “work” on us, but they also need to work on people that matter to us (even if only in the conversations that we have about it in our own head). If someone who matters to us questions our arguments, we might rethink it and either find better arguments or potentially realize that the argument does not hold, and in order to find approval with the people who matter to us, change behaviour.
In a second study, Wormbs investigated how people argue that DO change stuff, e.g. stop flying. Typically they’ve known for a long time that they should change, but then suddenly had a realisation that they need to act, that they cannot escape. Typical triggers for this realisation are reported as
- Fear! For example, all of Fridays for Future is built on fear. Fear can convert knowledge into action!
- Having children or grandchildren or some other important child in their life. A child adds another 30 years or so of relevant timeline beyond our own projected lifetime, so suddenly the longer-term future matters more.
- Children bring knowledge home from school, and take action like not eating meat any more. Parents or other carers need to relate to that, often leading to a change in behavior for them, too (even just because it is easier to just cook vegetarian for everybody than preparing two parallel meals)
- Comparison (remember above? There is always someone who behaves worse than us) changes and now is not with a neighbour with a bigger house and more cars and frequent flying any more, but with other places in the world where emissions are much lower but the standard of living needs to be built up
- Responsibility. Here, people think “If not me, then who?” They develop the will to act in accordance with convictions. “If it all goes down the drain, I want to be able to look my kid in the eye and say I did all I could”
But now the question remains: How do we reach people who want to change? How can we have the meaningful conversations? What we all have to go through is an emotional, painful change and potentially an existential crisis. How do we do it well?
In the discussion following the presentation, the point was brought up on whether we aren’t putting too much responsibility on the individual. What about the system? And here, Wormbs pointed out that there are not just those two levels. Individuals can affect a group (their family, a sports club, their neighbours), a municipality, an enterprise, …, all the way up to national and international governance. And I find that a very hopeful framing! We are going to disagree talking about sustainability, even with people who are generally on the same page as us, but we need to have the discussions. We need more, and better, conversations. As I wrote recently: The process is the point.
If you are interested in discussing Teaching for Sustainability, you are very welcome to get in touch with us!
P.S.: If you are interested, you can read my summary of some of the other presentations on my personal blog.
