Good early afternoon.
My name is Peter Fonagy,
I'm the Head of the Division
of Psychology and Language Sciences
at University College London.
I have the honour and privilege
of chairing this meeting
by one of our most talented
and best known scholars,
Kate Jeffrey,
who is Professor of
Behavioural Neuroscience
at the Institute of Behavioural
Neuroscience
that she heads.
She is also a medical doctor,
but is primarily a neuroscientist
who's interested in trying to understand
how we navigate ourselves through space,
three dimensional space, in particular,
and how we get
a kind of internal sense of direction.
I want to stress
that she is
a remarkably accomplished academic,
who is a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Biology.
She's a Flow and currently
Vice President
of the Royal Institute of Navigation.
She holds a Wellcome Trust
investigators award
and she's also a supporter
of extinction rebellion.
I believe that she's one of
the rare academics
who was willing to use her skills
and professional knowledge,
to put her mind to what is probably
the most important issue for all of us,
how our planet will survive.
I know of no more important issue.
But I also know that this does involve
psychology,
of which she is a practitioner of
and I'm looking forward to hearing
your perspective on it.
Thank you very much for doing this.
Thank you.
Thank you. It's really great
to see such a turnout.
I'm hoping that that's a reflection
of how important
we're starting to realise this issue is.
I'm stepping slightly outside my usual
realm in talking about this
I normally study rat navigation,
not human psychology.
But in the last year or so I've started
to engage with this issue
which has been puzzling me
more and more,
which is why have I, scientifically
trained, knowing what I know,
why have I been so unconcerned
about the growing ecological crisis?
And as I look around,
I realised that I'm not the only person.
And that, nevertheless, suddenly we
start to be within the last year or two,
developing increasing recognition
of what's going on.
So I've been thinking quite a lot about
the psychology
of climate action and inaction
and putting together some thoughts
and I thought I would take this
opportunity to share them with you.
So I'm sure that you're aware
of the issue.
In terms of the history
of life on Earth,
we haven't been around for very long.
We only really evolved
a few million years ago.
But this is probably the biggest crisis
that we have ever faced.
And it's a crisis of our own making.
If we, with our scientific expertise,
measure the levels of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere,
we see that they are
absolutely skyrocketing.
So this is a graph
of the last 2,000 years.
Obviously, it's been estimated for much
of that time from various methods.
But you can see that
since the Industrial Revolution began,
where that blue arrow is,
we started burning fossil fuels,
greenhouse gases have massively
skyrocketed in the atmosphere,
and they are increasing
at an ever increasing rate.
And we now understand the physics
of that quite well.
And we know that greenhouse gases
trap heat,
and sure enough the Earth temperature
is increasing.
It's also exponential.
And it also has really started since the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
and is increasing exponentially.
Scientists who are studying
the consequences of this
have made pretty clear
and unequivocal predictions
that if we carry on doing this,
then within the lifetime
of our children,
we're going to have substantially
altered conditions on the planet
and made large amounts of it
much less habitable than they are.
This is something that affects everybody
on the planet.
It's a global problem.
Now, it's not just a climate problem,
we also are facing ecological collapse.
So people who are monitoring wildlife
populations and insect populations,
and how the surface of the Earth is
being deployed for use of living things,
and the oceans and so on,
are telling us that we are bringing
many, many species to extinction.
And that means irreversible loss
not only to those species,
but also again to our own welfare.
So, with these twin calamities
of climate change
and ecological collapse,
which are very, very interwoven,
we're really threatening our future,
our fairly near future.
Now, we've known about this
or several decades.
So in 1988, governments got together
and they formed the IPCC,
the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change,
and they said, this is really bad,
we have to do something.
So if you look at what happened
since 1988,
you'll see that precisely nothing
has happened
in terms of either our use
of fossil fuels,
which is driving
the greenhouse gas increase,
or the actual measured
greenhouse gases.
So despite the warnings,
and despite all of the efforts
that we've had to develop
green technologies,
and carbon drawdown methods,
and this and that,
and all of this frenzied activity,
we really haven't even made a dent
in the problem.
So those of us who are biologists
tend to think of humans
in terms of us being biological systems.
And so it's interesting and instructive
to look at what biologists tell us
about untrammelled growth,
which is basically what we have.
And one of the most famous scientists
to think about this,
the person who kicked off the study of
population biology was Thomas Malthus,
who worked out what would happen
if you just allow a population to grow
free of predation and disease
and all of the things that would
normally limit population,
and what he showed was that
populations increase exponentially
much faster than food supplies.
Eventually what will happen is that
the population will increase
to the point where it's outgrown
its food supply, and it will collapse.
Other population biologists have been
kind of drawn in other factors as well.
So if populations are living within
limited environments,
then they start to accumulate toxins
in the environment,
so they degrade
their own environment.
These also limit growth.
So there are natural limits
to growth.
So if you provide lots and lots
of nutrients for growth,
you get this massive increase.
But the end result in a finite system
is always ultimately collapse.
And if you look at what's been
happening to human population
over the last few hundred
or indeed thousand years,
the picture is pretty similar.
You'll see that we are on a very
steep increase.
That's made some population biologists
speculate that we are going to,
at some point in the future,
outgrow our system as it were.
So we kind of know all of this,
we know that we're heading towards
a cliff, essentially.
So why are we just sitting here?
Not doing anything.
There's this really strong sense
that if we were being invaded
by aliens from outer space,
or if there was an asteroid
coming towards us,
and you could look up in the sky,
and each day, it was a little bigger,
we would be completely focused on that.
We'd be saying to our governments
do something about the asteroid.
Why is it that we don't seem to be
making our governments do something
about the ecological crisis?
Why are we just letting this happen?
And I have been thinking
about this a lot.
I think, to really understand why
we act the way we do,
we need to understand that we ourselves
are just the product of evolution,
the same as any other animal,
we are not computing machines.
We are creatures that have been designed
by natural selection
to exist within the conditions
that we've experienced
since we came into being,
so for the last 3 million years or so.
Those conditions that shaped us,
shape the way we think, and we act.
I'm going to show you some examples
of why this is case.
We are not computing machines that
take in all the information
and produce optimal behaviour
on our parts.
We are basically talking apes.
So, when we're thinking
about human psychology
and how this is interacting
with the climate crisis,
we can think of three broad categories
of psychology,
perception, cognition, and action.
So obviously, these are not
discrete categories.
They feed into each other
and there are also a lot of feedbacks.
But we can broadly think
of perception being
how we make sense of all the information
that's coming in through our senses.
Cognition being how we organise
that information,
to formulate internal representations
of the world
that will allow us to act
adaptively in the world,
and then our brains figure out
what's the best action
and convert that into behaviour.
So ultimately, we can kind of think of
psychology in those terms.
So let's look at perception and what
psychologists have learned
about how perception works.
So early views of perception,
thought of our perception as a little
bit like the technology of the times.
So when psychology was developing at the
beginning of the 19th century
and photography was coming along,
and there was this amazing ability
of cameras to capture images.
So visual psychologists tended to think
that what the brain does
when it's perceiving the outside world
is that it makes essentially something
like a photograph in your brain
somewhere on the retina
or in your brain.
It's taken a lot of decades of research
to understand that our vision
is really not like that at all.
For one thing, we don't actually
perceive the entire visual world
in front of us.
That's an illusion created by our
brains, at any one moment,
you are only looking at a tiny little
spot in your visual field.
But you are moving that spot all over
the place
and your brain stitches that together
and makes you think that you're looking
at a film screen, but you're really not.
Here's another really good example
of how vision deceives us.
If you look at the squares
labelled a and b,
probably you may well have seen this,
it's pretty famous by now.
But if you were just asked quickly to
say what colours they were,
you would say that A was black
and B was white.
But actually, if you take
the actual pixels,
they are exactly the same shade.
There's no difference between them.
It's really difficult to look at the
picture on the left
and convince yourself that that's true.
I've just cut and pasted
to make those squares on the right
so you can see that they
are really the same.
So what's happening is that our brain is
using other information
to interpret what the eyes are seeing.
So it's using information
that was partly selected by evolution.
And also partly learned as you are
developing
to make some assumptions
about the world.
And in this case, what it's doing is
it's assuming
that because of the way that the light
appears to be coming from one angle,
and the shade that's been cast
by that object,
the square labelled B is probably
lighter than the actual pixel luminance.
So your brain does its autocorrection.
Another really good example is this,
very obviously, white and gold dress,
which hit the internet a few years ago,
because the woman
who took the photograph
wanted to know if it was all right
to wear to a wedding.
And actually the dress is blue
and black.
So I'm told,
but about 50% of people,
myself included,
see it as white and gold.
And this is a very, very interesting
example of the same thing
that our brains are not reporting
on reality.
They're reporting on what
reality probably is
given what you can see,
and all sorts of other things that
we've experienced during evolution
and during development.
So we're really not seeing
what we think we're seeing.
The other way that evolution
is shaping our perception
and in some ways limiting it,
is that we only perceive
some types of things.
We lived in a world that was
full of predators,
so we're very, very good
at seeing fast moving things.
We can catch a ball within milliseconds,
we can dodge a tiger,
but we're very, very insensitive
to slow change.
That's sometimes called
the parable of the boiling frog.
I looked this up on the internet,
It is actually a parable.
I think people have tried warming frogs
in a pan of hot water
and they do actually escape,
you will be pleased to know.
The parable is that if you put
a frog in hot water, it'll jump out.
But if you put a frog in cold water
and slowly warm it,
it won't notice that things are changing
and it will adapt to the
changing conditions
until at some point it realises,
I've left it too late and frog is gone.
How does this relate to climate change?
There's an obvious parallel
in this slow change insensitivity.
And that is that, because the effects
of climate change are so slow,
we don't really notice them.
And we are not very good
at being motivated to act about things
we don't really notice.
This is an example that might be
familiar to some of you
who are old enough to have remembered
that a few decades ago,
if you went driving down the road
for a couple of hours on holiday,
you would have to stop at
a service station every now and then
to scrape bugs off your windscreen.
What this video on the right shows
is a young driver who
just a few weeks ago posted on YouTube,
his excitement because he was driving
and a bug hit his windscreen.
That was such a significant event
he felt motivated to post a video
about it.
Young drivers never encountered the bugs
on windscreen phenomenon.
There's actually been a catastrophic
decline in insect populations
in the last few decades.
But collectively, we're not really aware
of that.
Here's another interesting example
that turned up in the ecological
literature a few years ago.
So a PhD student was interested in the
history of this little town of Florida
where they used to run fishing trips.
And people would pay money and they
would be taken on these tourist boats,
and they'd come back
with a catch of fish
and a photograph would be taken
with them next to their catch,
and the biggest fish would get a prize.
She dug out some old historical photos
of the company,
which had been operating for decades.
Here are some photos from the 1950s.
You can see people crouched
next to these extremely large fish.
Then she found some later photos.
These were from a couple of decades
later,
and you can see that the fish
are a little bit smaller now.
They're no longer bigger
than the people.
They're still quite large
by our standards,
but they're no longer bigger
than the people.
This is a photo from the 1980s.
You can see again,
they've gotten smaller,
and then she herself went on
one of these fishing trips
and that's what she caught there.
So this is a cultural insensitivity
to slow change.
People are still paying
the same amount of money,
and they still seem to be getting
the same enjoyment.
They're still taking the trophy photos
and all the rest of it.
Collectively, they're not realising that
what they're catching now
is really pathetically small.
So we've not noticed
what we've lost really.
Another difficulty that we have
in perception,
as well as with slow things
is that we're not very good
with magnitudes.
Now, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
have been warning us
that we are heading rapidly
towards a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius
of the global planetary temperature.
Now they tell us that that
will be really catastrophic,
we will have massive storms
or have wildfires,
we will have rising sea levels.
We're going to have this,
we're going to have that
and logically,
I think we all believe them.
But even I, thinking as much as I have
been about climate change recently,
I find it really hard to get worried
about 1.5 degrees Celsius.
I just don't know what that means.
I don't understand it viscerally.
I understand it intellectually.
So there's another way in which our
inability to grapple with magnitudes
is affecting how we think
about climate change.
And that is that when we think
about how we might deal with it,
what pops into mind very quickly
are concrete solutions.
So engineers will say,
I know let's build a machine that will
take carbon out of the air,
and give you plans for a machine
and tell you how it works.
People will say, let's plant trees,
and there are all sorts
of carbon offsetting schemes,
you can go and pay a few pounds
on top of your airline ticket,
and they'll plant a few trees for you
and you can feel happy
that your carbon emissions from your
flight are being taken care of.
And that's all well and good.
So we find it very easy
to imagine trees.
So when I say three trees,
you can imagine three trees.
If I tell you that the global carbon
emissions for the planet
are 40 billion tonnes,
and that to offset those emissions,
we would need to plant 40 billion trees
and keep them alive for 40 years.
And at the end of their lives,
make sure that they were buried
and not allowed to decompose
and return back into the atmosphere
and they weren't allowed to catch fire,
so you had to protect these trees
for all of this time,
your brain probably doesn't know
what 40 billion trees looks like,
I can't imagine 40 billion trees.
40 million/ 40 billion,
doesn't matter to my brain.
I actually tried working it out.
40 billion trees, if you plant at
maximum planting density,
it's about 8x the size of Wales.
Tat's the best that I can do in
trying to understand that magnitude.
I don't really understand
how big Wales is
so that analogy doesn't work either.
I just simply cannot imagine
the size of the task that faces us
when we try to decarbonize
our atmosphere.
So the other way that we're not
very good at estimating things
is our estimation of risk.
We're quite good at doing things
like estimating
how likely is that person following me
in the street to be a mugger
or just somebody who happens to be
behind me?
Or you know,
that tiger coming towards me,
is it going to reach me?
Or is it going to go past?
We're very good at risk
for certain types of things.
But we're not very good at slow risks
and understanding those.
A really good example of this
is the differential responsiveness
between two very catastrophic events
that occurred a couple of decades ago.
One of them was the Twin Towers attack.
And that was an earth shattering event.
It was an event that completely altered
the geopolitical course that we were on
and the ramifications of that attack
still affect us today.
It permeates everything that we've done,
every time you take an aeroplane flight
and you have all this searching
and all of that kind of stuff, that all
came from the Twin Towers attack,
it's affected international relations.
3,000 people died in that attack.
A couple of years later,
a heat wave swept through Europe.
Some of you might remember that
even in the UK, it got pretty hot.
Estimates afterwards estimated somewhere
between 30 and 70 thousand people died
from that heat wave.
And yet, it made barely a dent
in our consciousness.
Most people barely remember
that heat wave.
That was 10 times
the size of the Twin Towers deaths.
And yet, because it was a slow
insidious event,
it really didn't touch us.
One of them was a predatory attack.
One of them was a slow
environmental change,
we reacted to one,
we didn't react to the other.
The literature is rife with examples
of how we're not very good
at calculating risk.
For example, risk calculations
show an interesting correlation
with demographics,
you probably can't see this very well.
But this is a study where they looked at
estimates of risk
for a whole bunch of fairly
commonplace events,
including cigarette smoking, drugs,
AIDS, stress, and so on.
Then they divided up the responses
as to how risky people
thought those things were
according to demographics,
male or female, and black or white.
They found that white males who are
the answers shown in red,
estimated all of those risks as being of
a smaller magnitude
than all of the other groups.
Now, there's all sorts
of possible reasons
why white males
may estimate risk differently.
But the point is, it shows us
that our estimate of risk
is not a simple function of actual risk.
It's bound up with
all sorts of other things.
Just out of interest, this is where
they put climate change and all of that.
So it's just above coal burning plants,
sorry, just above bacteria in food
and below coal burning plants,
so sort of somewhere in the middle,
not very risky.
Perceptions are not really reporting
on reality,
what about cognition, our beliefs
and our understanding.
So in the first half of last century,
the rational economists model
of thinking
was very, very prevalent
so this this kind of view of thinking
came about
just as computers were coming along.
And it's quite common in psychology,
and indeed other types of science
that we tend to appeal to the technology
of the time
when we're thinking
about how things might work.
So people started thinking of the human
brain as a bit like a computer.
And when you're trying to work out
what's going on in the world
and decide how you're going to act,
what you do is you take in
all the information,
you do sort of numerical calculations,
cost benefit analyses,
you work out what's going to have the
smallest cost and the biggest benefit
and you do that thing.
So the rational economists model
has driven a lot of economic thinking,
trying to get people to spend more money
on things like insurance and so on.
In the 1970s, and 80s,
that view was completely overturned
by a very famous set of studies
by Kahneman and Tversky,
and since then many other people.
What they showed was that if you
look at how people evaluate risks
and how they make decisions,
you find that they're not doing a
rational calculation of probabilities.
In fact, what they seem to be applying
is a whole bunch of what they call
heuristics and biases.
So you could think of those
as shortcuts,
quick ways of thinking about things that
don't require any calculations.
And there's a whole raft of things, and
I haven't got time to go into them all.
But one very good example
is loss aversion.
So we have an instinctive aversion
to losing something that we have,
to the extent that we will work harder
not to lose the thing that we have
than to gain something of equal
or greater value.
So once we've got something,
we really, really want to hang on to it.
So you can think of it as like the bird
in the hand with two in the bush.
That's what this means down here.
People show very strong loss aversion,
and that means that when you're
evaluating the costs and benefits
of particular actions,
it's very difficult to imagine giving up
something that you have
and I think we see this a lot
with climate decisions.
People think, I know that we should be
giving up our cars and so on.
But I have my car, I like my car,
I don't want to give my car up,
even though I know that's going to be
good for the planet in the long run.
Related to loss aversion
is temporal discounting,
where we tend to value immediate rewards
more than delayed rewards,
even if the delayed rewards are bigger.
And a really classic example of this
is the very famous marshmallow test,
which is sometimes used
as a way of studying
how children learn to assess immediate
versus delayed rewards
and to sort of categorise people,
children and adults
according to their propensity
to do that.
So in the marshmallow test, a child
is left alone with a marshmallow
for some amount of time.
Then they're told if they can last
without eating that marshmallow
for the few minutes while the
experimenter is out of the room,
when they come back
they can have two marshmallows.
And famously, very young children
really struggled to do this
and as children get older
and more mature,
and also depending on personality,
they get better and better at it.
But this temporal discounting,
as it's called,
this discounting of the value of things
that are further away in time
actually runs through adult thinking
as well.
It's a basic facet of human thinking.
It makes a certain amount
of adaptive sense
because if you are waiting for a reward
in an uncertain world,
there's always the possibility that even
though the reward is potentially bigger,
it may not eventuate at all.
We have the sort of tendency that
we're willing to forego
a larger distant reward for the safety
of a more immediate one.
You cant think of it like that.
We see these types of things,
loss aversion and temporal discounting
in people's reactions to the loss
that they might incur
when we take climate action.
We saw this very clearly
when President Macron
tried to raise fuel taxes in France.
In theory, this is something that would
be very beneficial for the climate,
but for the people on the ground
and particularly people who are feeling
economically deprive,
they could really mostly see that that
was a loss to them.
And they rebelled.
And there was a big outcry
which is still going on.
Now, it's not just individuals that show
this type of thing.
Society as a whole, is very reluctant
to forego immediate gains
for the benefit of longer term gains.
And that's partly because governments
are made of human beings, I think,
and also for the sort of practical
reason that governments know
that human beings are voting for them.
Voters show loss aversion and
temporal discounting,
so the government can say,
we're going to make things bad
for the next few years,
it's gonna be hard,
fuel prices are going to go up,
food prices are going to go up, but it
will all be better in the long run.
They know that they
won't get voted back in.
There are other types of rationality.
So a very, very prevalent one
is confirmation bias.
So this happens when we're trying
to evaluate hypotheses.
Now this is a very famous test
called the Wason test,
where people are told a hypothesis.
If a card is even on one face,
it will be red on the other,
which two cards would you need
to turn over
to test the truth of that hypothesis?
I always have to struggle.
I'm trained in hypothesis testing.
But I always have to sort of stop
and think hard about this one.
The answer that people give
is typically not the one that's correct.
The correct answer is that you want
to turn over these two cards,
you want to turn over the even card,
and the not-red card.
The reason is that you want to turn over
the even card to see if it's red.
You can turn over the red card to see
if it's even on the other side.
But it doesn't really matter,
because that's not the question.
The question is, if it's even on one
side, it will be red on the other,
not, if it's red on one side,
will it be even on the other?
So what you need to do
is to turn over the brown.
In other words, you need to try
and falsify your hypothesis.
We don't naturally do that,
we naturally look for evidence
that confirms our hypotheses.
So we tend not to look
for disconfirming evidence
and we see this in climate change
discussions all the time,
where we tend to be presented
with a piece of information
that might be a scientific study.
And if you're somebody who believes the
science and believes in climate change,
you'll see that the scientific study
is confirming your belief
in climate change.
If you're somebody
who is mistrustful of scientists,
you'll see the study is confirming
your belief
that scientists are always trying
to muddy the water with uncertain data
or something like that.
So confirmation bias is
a very, very strong determinant
of how we form our beliefs.
Now, if we're not basing our beliefs
on logic,
what are we basing them on?
Of course, we do partly use logic,
but a very strong determinant
of what we base our beliefs on,
are the beliefs of the people
in our trusted circle.
A good example of this I think we can
probably look into ourselves and see
is during the Brexit referendum
that we had a few years ago.
I will put my hand up and say that when
I was deciding how to vote in that
referendum,
I did not sit down with all the
spreadsheets
and all of the various things
that were going to happen
with option A and option B.
I looked at the people around me
who were my demographic,
and they all seemed to be thinking
the same thing, so I thought that too.
Then every piece of information that
came along that supported my decision,
I'm not going to tell you what it was,
but you could probably guess
because of my demographic.
Every piece of information
that came along
that supported what we all thought
we latched onto.
I just didn't even read the newspapers.
So you know, I and every other human,
we tend to form
many, or maybe even most of our beliefs,
according to those
of the people around us.
It's heuristic. It's quick, it's worked
for evolution really, really well.
Why sit down over every minor belief
and have to really evaluate the evidence
when you can just kind of go along
with the crowd.
That's not to say
that we're complete robots,
but is a strong determinant
of how we think
and so we tend to form groups of people
that we feel bonded to.
Now during evolutionary history,
this maybe would have been tribe,
maybe a small group
of neighbouring tribes
if they're on friendly relationships,
and maybe our immediate family.
So there are these various sort
of levels of bonding.
But we have this strong tendency to
form what are called in-groups
of people that we feel part of,
and out-groups,
of people that we don't feel part of,
they're the kind of the other people.
We tend to align our beliefs with those
of our in-group
and set them apart from
those of the out-group.
And of course, the parallels
with climate change denial,
are very, very obvious.
Now one of the interesting things about
the strength of our social processing
is this test that I told you about,
the Wason test,
if I present it to you
as a social problem,
if you want to test the truth
of the rule,
if you're drinking alcohol,
then you must be over 18,
what cards would you have to look at,
to know that whether
the rule was being followed.
And pretty much everybody gets that you
need to turn over these two cards.
Now that's exactly the same problem
as the one I showed you before.
But people sort of understand
when it's a social situation,
that you want to look to see whether the
rule is being broken.
So when it's just a value free
hypothesis,
you don't look
for disconfirming evidence.
But if it's a rule you do,
it's like we have kind of mistrust
built into us.
So we're really, really social beings.
We have sort of social constructions
of climate change, too.
So climate change in and of itself
is not a political issue,
but it has become one,
because if you look,
and there are a lot of studies,
but the US ones are the ones
with the biggest samples,
if you look at people's beliefs
about climate change,
and whether they tend to be aligned with
Democrat or Republican kind of ideology,
you find that there's a big difference
in climate change belief or denial.
So it's become politicised,
even though it's really kind of
ultimately a factual issue.
So a lot of this kind of stuff has made
us understand that
when people are not acting
on climate change,
it's not because they don't have
the facts.
So it's not a matter of pouring
enough facts into somebody,
and then they will stop denying
climate change and start acting.
People's beliefs about climate
are much more nuanced
and much more complexly
constructed
than simply evaluating facts.
So then finally, let's look at action.
So the rational economists view
that I mentioned
suggests that people
kind of compute costs and benefits,
and just do the action
that has the highest value for them.
Now, that does explain
some kinds of behaviour
and one of the kinds of behaviour
it explains
is a very famous scenario called the
Tragedy of the Commons,
which has been very well known
for a long time,
but it was really brought
to public consciousness
by this famous paper by Garrett Hardin,
called the Tragedy of the Commons.
It was published in the 1960s.
He laid out this hypothetical situation
of a village common,
where the local herders
are grazing their cattle
or in this picture,
it's actually sheep.
The problem is that there are too many
animals on the common
and the common is becoming degraded
and eventually, it's not going to have
any grass
and all of the sheep or cattle
are going to die.
Now what's the rational thing
for each herdsmen to do?
What Hardin did was work through
the rational arguments,
and realised that the rational thing for
each herdsman to do
is to add another animal,
because from the point of view
of each individual,
adding another animal
produces big benefit for that person
and a small cost
which is distributed among everybody.
So the benefits outweigh the costs.
So each person is motivated
to add more animals.
But of course, the tragedy is that
because everybody is optimising
their own returns on investment
that everybody loses out in the end.
Now we see this kind of
commons thinking as you could call it,
in a very, very common, as it were,
remark that people make to me
when I start talking about
what we need to do globally
to try and deal with
the climate problem.
We need to stop emissions.
Very, very common remark is
well, what about China?
What's the point of the UK
curbing its emissions
when we've got China or Australia
or the US or, you know,
all of these other emitting countries.
So that's exactly the same reasoning as
the sheep on the green.
It is not in our own best interest to do
things that harm our economy.
Because our economy benefits us,
whereas the harms from all of those
fossil fuels
get distributed around the whole planet.
So exactly the same reasoning.
But with actions as with beliefs,
it's also the case
that we don't always act rationally.
I should say before I show you
some of the irrationality
is that some of our climate inaction
is also occurring because our actions
are often determines not by
personal cost benefit calculations,
but by just looking at people around us,
and taking our cues from them,
and what tends to happen,
I think with climate,
is that we look around and we see that
everybody's living life as normal.
So there doesn't seem to be much
of a problem.
If you're sitting in a cinema theatre
and you smell smoke,
if you were by yourself, you'd probably
leap to your feet and go,
where's the smoke,
but if you're sitting there,
and there's others around you,
and nobody's moving,
you'll sit and think,
maybe I'm imagining it,
nobody else seems to be doing anything.
So, actions are often
socially determined.
So, in very many ways,
our perceptions, our cognitions
and our actions,
we are not really rational.
And that is leading us into trouble.
And so the question is,
is that going to be it,
are we just bacteria
and have we just grown to the
edge of our petri dish,
and we're going to just run out of
resources and poison ourselves
and then we're going to have a big crash
or might we be able to actually
capitalise on our irrationality?
Because there are other ways in which
our actions are irrationally determined,
that might be beneficial.
Now remember that when we evolved,
we did so because evolution
selected behaviours
that selected themselves as it were,
it's all very, very circular.
One of the behaviours
that evolution has selected in us
is that we are irrationally social.
So if you look at most social species,
they are species where the individuals
are quite highly related to one another.
So bees and ants, for example,
are very strongly related to each other.
Colonies of voles and so on.
Most social species
are quite highly related.
Humans on the other hand,
there are seven and a half billion of us
on the planet.
We have this vast capacity to act
cooperatively with people
with whom we have no genetic
relationship other than the random one.
So how did that come about in evolution?
Well, one of the sort of possibilities
that I think explains a lot of this
is that we have something that no other
species has, which is language.
When we evolved language,
we evolved the ability to transfer
costs and benefits among ourselves.
So we could say things like,
look, if we get together,
and we both agree that we're not going
to put our cows on the commons,
then we'll both benefit,
should we do that.
Because we have language, we can take
the idea that was in one person's head
and transplant it into another person's
head and get agreement on that.
Because we've been able to cooperate
in this way,
we've been able to build
a lot of very interesting
and important social edifices.
So about 12,000 years ago,
we discovered agriculture,
how to work together to marshal animals
in one place and keep them there
and that meant that
we could stop hunting them
and start to build cities
and build religions
which are organised systems
of moral kind of codes and social rules
and all of this kind of stuff.
We also were able to invent money.
That means that I can take a loss
or gain scenario here in England,
and I can apply that to somebody
in China.
I can say, you know, if I give you this,
will you give me that.
So language has meant that we can
achieve cooperative feats
that no other animal has ever
been able to achieve.
This has been able to get us further
than any other animal has got off
the planet, for example.
So it feels to me that we stand at an
evolutionary crossroads to some extent.
So there's two ways of looking
at our future.
Maybe we are just another bacterium,
and we're going to get to the edge
of our petri dish,
and we're going to die.
Or maybe, because we have
this unique feature,
this ability to cooperate,
this ability to reason,
and the ability to get beyond
the biases and heuristics
and all of those things
and actually think what is going to
maximise our survival.
It's something that we've never had to
deal with in evolution before.
Maybe we can get ourselves
off this planet
and become more than
just bacteria in a petri dish.
It seems to me that the choice is ours
and the moment is now.
So thank you.
Thank you.
That was absolutely brilliant.
Very, very persuasive.
I hope you feel as responsible as I do.
Let me open the floor to questions.
There are two roving mics.
Any questions to Kate?
Right at the front here.
Thank you. So it's about for example,
the protests planned as a result for
more policies towards climate change.
I still do believe that if we have to
change something,
it has to be in politics.
But as we see too many counter examples
of politicians not being able to do
these policies,
because they're not going to
be re-elected,
because people don't like this,
we are kind of in a deadlock scenario.
So is there any way
to do something here?
That's a really good question.
I'm going to put my Extinction
Rebellion hat on for a moment.
Because this is a real problem
that a democratically elected government
that's beholden
to short electoral cycles,
really their hands are tied
in what they can do.
But the idea is being put forward
that the way to get around that
is to just to have a citizens assembly
which has a group of ordinary people
who are not beholden to voters
because they're not elected.
And they're not beholden to big business
because they're not being paid
and their job is to represent the good
of the ordinary people as it were,
and to sit down.
So the idea is that they get together,
they are kind of selected to be
representative of the population
put in a room together
for several weeks.
They do a lot of research,
they do a lot of discussion,
they make recommendations
to governments,
and then they can go to the governments
and say, this is what you need to do.
I know it looks like it's going to be
unpopular,
but because we the people have said that
this is what we need to do,
the voters will trust us.
This has been used in other situations
before and it's worked quite well.
So that is one possibility,
where you can at the same time,
respect democracy,
but also get beyond
the short term voting cycle problem.
But there's no doubt that this problem
is going to require cooperation
above the level
of individual governments,
it is a big problem.
But in this case, how do you incentivize
these people
to actually do something good
for the people,
how would they actually
represent good views?
Well, I think the incentive comes
from the fact that we as humans,
care about the future.
I think the hope is that enough people
care about the future,
that there will be a tipping point
in agreeing
that collective action is needed.
So that's the hope,
whether we can do it, I don't know.
We've never really faced a situation
like this before.
That's why I feel like we are at
something of a crossroads.
But I do think in theory,
with our intelligence and our resources
and our technology,
we might be able to.
When I'm having an optimistic day,
I think we can do it.
It's coming to you,
just hold on one second.
Do you have a psychological explanation
for what perhaps isn't the best term
but malign climate change denial.
We hear stories of people
who accept the science,
know the science,
know that it's real.
And in positions of power
choose not to do anything about it.
While I'm just putting my popular
psychology hat on,
you may have a deeper insight,
but I think in that case,
it's mainly self interest,
that the people who are able to do that,
have a lot of money and a lot of power
and can insulate themselves.
They've got their bunkers in
New Zealand and all the rest of it.
So it's in their own self interest
to continue to make the money
and they won't have to pay
the consequences.
There may also be elements of denial.
I mean, I think even malign denial
might actually have elements
of they themselves haven't really taken
on board that this is serious
and maybe they don't fully believe it.
Helpful distinction there between malign
denial and our ordinary incompetence.
Any further questions up there?
I don't have any background
in psychology or anything.
But I'm curious if there's a movement
in the field
to maybe proactively counteract some of
the cognitive biases that you mentioned,
and if research is being done in that
way in the name of climate change?
That's a good question.
There is quite a bit of research
going on.
I'm not sure how much it's translated
into action yet.
But there's quite a lot of research
looking at climate communication,
what types of messages
are going to get through to people
because it's becoming very apparent
that the deficit model is not right.
The problem is not that people
aren't informed.
I mean, some people really just lack
information,
but I think much more it's that people
are not willing to take on board
the information
for all of the complex reasons
that I mentioned.
So then there's this thinking about
how to get past that,
how to make people
trust the information.
I don't know of any large scale
formal ways that this is happening.
But I think one of the things
that is happening
is the grassroots movement.
Very much things like
Extinction Rebellion and other groups
who are just going out to communities
and talking to people one on one and not
trying to batter them down with facts,
but are trying to kind of understand
their point of view
and trying to win hearts and minds
as it were.
But yes, I think we need definitely
to be thinking
much more along the psychological
dimensions that we have.
You know, we've given a lot of thought
that to the technology,
how do we build renewable energy?
We've not really thought enough
about the psychology
and how do we carry the citizens of the
earth along with us in this thing.
I'm afraid there are other people
going to come in to the lecture
and even more important some people from
here will have to go to their lecture.
It remains for me to thank you
very warmly.
It was a fantastic talk.
