Cognitive dissonance

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Cognitive Dissonance and the Lack of Action towards the climate crisis


In the past weeks I have noticed that there is a strange phenomenon among many people. This became more clear to me during the project Loes and I were working on. In this project we wrote over a hundred letters about climate worries to people we didn’t know and this resulted in quite some replies. What struck me most was that there were replies from people who are very aware about the climate change, but are not really acting on it. And this is something that they sometimes are aware of themselves:

“The difficulty lies in the abstraction, yes it is getting warmer, yes the rain can be extreme, but the direct relationship between one choice and the other consequence is absent.” - Anonymous writer of a letter 1

Something doesn't seem right when we consider that almost everyone sees the sustainability crisis as one of the biggest threats, while at the same time they are just acting like they did before. It is very inconvenient to see this happening and it made me question: What causes this cognitive dissonance? Is this cognitive dissonance the main reason for the lack of action to remedy the climate crisis?

Cognitive dissonance is not something new. The psychologist Per Espen Stoknes for example, talks about this in a TED radio hour. Stoknes investigates what holds us back from facing the threats of climate change. He explains that our brain starts coming up with justifications to get rid of the discomfort that comes with the knowledge of global warming that conflicts with our daily actions in the form of 5 inner defenses.2

An example of such a justification for someone to feel better about themselves is to tell yourself that changing your diet is not going to help if you are the only one to do it. Also the abstract numbers about global warming are not helping with this. We can’t directly see the link between our actions and these digits.

“Denial doesn't really come from lack of intelligence or knowledge. No, denial is a state of mind in which I may be aware of some troubling knowledge, but I live and act as if I don't know. And often, this is reinforced by others” – Stoknes 3

This reinforcement by others, Stoknes talks about, is one of the reasons why denial is maintained. Your social environment plays a role here. When you are raised with a worldview based on limitedness, I can imagine that this will affect the way you act and deal with confronting climate messages.

Kari Marie Norgaard 4 writes about this in her book Living in Denial. How we think is part of culture and shows our participation in community. Cognitive traditions and thought communities shape how and whether people think about climate change and whether they perceive the topic as relevant for everyday life.

In The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life by Professor Zerubavel he mentions this. 5 He calls this social shaping of our awareness, memories, and thought patterns the “social organization of denial. He describes how also political pressures influence what you see, hear and talk about. Power enables people to control the amount of information that is conveyed to them.

I think another reason for people to turn a blind eye is because of all the reports about global warming from news and media. We tend to change the channel or click past it. The credibility of many news channels is also declining because the amount of fake news that is increasing on the internet. With this, the large amount of input we get from different media channels can be overwhelming and can cause a ‘freezing’ effect wherein you stop dealing with the content and get numb for the problems that you are seeing. We try to protect ourselves a little bit in this way.

As Naomi Klein mentions in This Changes Everything, you can easily tell yourself a different story to make yourself feel better about it. She, for example told herself in the past that the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were dealing with it, while she continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with her lifestyle. Many people engage in this kind of climate denial. We look, but we tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. 

"The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly – whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially.”- Naomi Klein 6

In Norgaard’s book I read about the American author and psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton who speaks of this numbing effect as well. The degree of numbing of everyday life necessary for individual comfort is parallel to the degree of anxiety that accompanies the awareness necessary for collective survival. The absurdity of the double life is the condition he writes about in Indefensible Weapons:

“We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this. Lifton calls this condition the absurdity of the double life.” – Lifton 7

This absurdity of the double life makes me think about The Ostrich Problem. This is a cognitive bias that describes how people often avoid negative information. Instead of dealing with the situation, you bury your head in the sand. The overwhelming reports and complexity of the climate problems are easier for people to just ignore.8

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard looks at the reason for people to not respond to the mounting evidence of the impacts of climate change from this more neurological level. Human brains aren’t wired to respond easily to large, slow-moving threats. He also mentions the term ‘Loss aversion’ which means that humans are more afraid of losing what we want in the short-term than obstacles in the distance. We tend to seek out information not for the sake of gaining knowledge for its own sake, but to support our already established viewpoints.9

From the research I did about climate denial, I can conclude that cognitive dissonance is something that is not only caused by human psychological defense mechanisms, but also by our own direct environments that we live in. The thought communities are one of the determining factors for how people think about climate change and if they perceive the topic as relevant for their lives.

So there are both individual/psychological as political/systemic reasons why climate denial is being maintained and results in lack of action. As individuals this can make it hard for us to steer away from climate denial. But I do think that you can affect each other as individuals too. Humans are social beings, so maybe abstract numbers about sea rise levels won’t affect somebody, but when you talk about it to each other in different ways like the smaller actions you can implement in your life that are tied to climate change, it feels less abstract and far away from you. So a personal approach is something that does have value when it comes to this problem.

This is also what I noticed when writing with strangers and having conversations with people about this topic. You can influence each other with small gestures and be more emotionally involved. In our project, we approached mainly people that were unknown to us. By picking out a completely random audience for this, I felt more freedom to start any conversation about any topic with someone without any prejudices. Eventually this is what is most important when trying to confront someone in a supportive way. The next step is to find out more about how to make the action happen. Loes elaborates on this in her research document, because now that we have more knowledge on the source of the problem, we can take action!


References

  1. A fragment from a letter we received in Leeszaal West Rotterdam. The full letter:

“Hello, What can you change? Yourself. Faced with this serious challenge, we need to take good care of ourselves. Which choices have we made and which choices are we making now? If we look closely at our choices, we discover, as well, that it is difficult to be completely honest, or better, completely transparent. What can we ask of ourselves? Or the question is already, what should we ask of ourselves? The difficulty lies in the abstraction, yes it is getting warmer, yes the rain can be extreme, but the direct relationship between one choice and the other consequence is absent. I suspect the hopeless situation requires us, now more than ever, to see us as part of a whole. I don't know who this belongs to: “To kill a person is to kill all people, the choice of a person is the choice for all people.”

  1. Stoknes, P. E., & Raz, G. (2019, 7th june). Per Espen Stoknes: What Holds Us Back From Facing The Threats Of Climate Change? From https://www.npr.org/transcripts/730404276
  2. Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in Denial (1st edition). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
  3. Jensen, D., & McMillan, S. (2011). As the World Burns. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
  4. Zerubavel, E. (2007). The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  5. Bayley, M. (2015). Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate. Thousand Oaks, Canada: SAGE Publications.
  6. Lifton, R. J., & Falk, R. A. (1991). Indefensible Weapons. Amsterdam, Nederland: Adfo Books.
  7. The Decision Lab. (2020, 24th november). Ostrich Effect - Biases & Heuristics. From https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ostrich-effect/
  8. Harman, G. (2018, 14th februari). Your brain on climate change: why the threat produces apathy, not action. From https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/nov/10/brain-climate-change-science-psychology-environment-elections
  9. Climate Change Denial - Morten Morland. From https://www.debutart.com/artist/morten-morland/climate-change-denial