Can Neuroscience Help Market Global Warming?

I recently drove to the Garrison Institute, a retreat centre just a few miles down the Hudson River from my home, to attend a fascinating symposium on “Climate, Mind and Behaviour.”

As a brochure put it, the symposium brought together 75 “thought leaders and practitioners from the fields of neuro, behavioural and evolutionary economics, psychology, policy, investing and social media to explore how to integrate emerging knowledge on the key drivers of behaviour into solutions for solving the world’s most pressing problem: climate change.”

Basically, this was a brainstorming session on how to market “solutions” to global warming more effectively. One proposal at the meeting made sense to me, and another didn’t.

Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent environmental group, offered the sensible proposal. “The NRDC hopes to persuade individuals that they can help reduce fossil-fuel emissions with some simple steps. These include eliminating unwanted catalog subscriptions, turning off cars rather than letting them idle for long periods, setting computers to hibernate mode rather than leaving them on when not in use, eating chicken in place of red meat and flying a little less often.”

If broadly adopted, these and other changes could reduce US carbon emissions by one billion metric tonnes, Lehrer claimed.

The unsensible proposal involved seeking marketing guidance from neuroscience and other fields that probe the physiological underpinnings of human belief and behaviour.

John Gowdy, an economist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, noted that the new field of “neuroeconomics” is challenging the conventional economics view of humans as “utility maximisers” who make choices based on self-interest and reason.

Magnetic-resonance imaging shows that we assess risks and rewards with brain regions that underpin fear, suspicion, empathy and other emotions, Gowdy explained, and we make choices very differently depending on how they are framed.

The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel of UCLA proposed that we all possess two innate, brain-based “maps” for responding to the world. One is a “me-map” that underpins our obsession with our own interests, but we also have a “we-map” corresponding to our concern for others.

The implications of these presentations were spelled out over lunch for me and other journalists by Jonathan Rose, founder of the Garrison Institute and the meeting’s chief sponsor and organiser. Environmentalists must frame issues to appeal to peoples’ “we-maps,” asserted Rose, a green New York real-estate mogul.

Rebecca Henderson, co-director of the Harvard Business School's Business and Environmental Initiative, was also excited by the presentations of Gowdy, Siegel and others.

“The new research points out how our decisions are driven not only by self-interest and the dynamics of the market but also by our emotions, by our commitments to the communities of which we are part, and by our innate sense of fairness,” she said.

“I think this work has the potential to help us design and implement large-scale behavioral changes, not only on the individual level, but in organisations, policies and markets.”

I share the belief of those at the symposium that global warming is bad and we should do something about it. But I oppose turning to neuroscience and similar fields to find ways to influence the global-warming debate.

Many people already view environmentalists as self-righteous and manipulative.

By employing techniques from neuroeconomics — which is already being used to market candy, wine, cars and other products — environmentalists send the message that they need to go to extraordinary lengths to get the ignorant, irrational public to see the world in the same enlightened way that environmentalists do.

Not all global-warming sceptics are ignorant and irrational. I teach at an engineering school, and about one third of my students identify themselves as global-warming sceptics. Some are very smart and well-informed about global warming, more so than others who accept it as a fact.

As naïve as this may sound, I believe environmentalists should try to influence public opinion by laying out the facts as clearly and honestly as possible and refraining from rhetorical trickery.

Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was a framing masterpiece. But Gore’s linkage of global warming to Katrina, however qualified, has made it easier for sceptics to claim that individual weather events, such as the blizzards that struck Washington, DC, this winter, disprove global warming.

Climategate, the scandal that erupted recently when hackers published email exchanges between prominent climate scientists, showed that some of these scientists have become so obsessed with framing that they have harmed their credibility.

Probing peoples’ brains won’t help their cause.

Email the writer: j.horgan@alrroya.com