You're My Hero

I’ve talked pretty extensively about framing, and how it helps to tailor messages to the individual. Capturing a particular message on climate change which attracts specific attention and can help make the problem understandable. Now the issue with framing is that given the multiplicity of the public you can end up with hundreds of different frames, and should a person encounter more than one in a short space of time this could be confusing or overwhelming. So is there a frame that can reach everyone?

Jones 2014 has used a message as old as civilization itself. Stories, that is a tale with a setting, plot, characters (both good and bad) and a moral or solution have been successful in various fields but especially advertising (Matilla 2000). Just take a look at the Christmas adverts this year with John Lewis’ Monty the Penguin or Sainsbury’s war time fable.

Across the entire political spectrum, turning climate change into a story had a great impact on understanding and willingness to act. However it was not the setting, nor the moral or even the bad guys. The biggest factor in inspiring change; The Heroes of the story. In nearly every case respondents identified with the heroes of the story, be them concerned NGOs, Individualistic Capitalists, or scientists. Even more interesting was the control group, who were left to interpret the IPCC executive summary without any framing.

Leonardo DiCaprio helps narrate this video by Green World Rising. Will his contribution help reach more people, greater influence those it does reach, or both? Is his lavish lifestyle hypocritical. Role model involvement in climate change poses numerous ethical and logistical questions.

Putting climate change into a media that humans have always used has the potential to be beneficial across politics and beliefs. We identify with those we believe to be good or knowledgeable but only when speaking in a medium we understand. This explains why respondents scored higher when scientists were heroes in the story rather than the people behind a bland IPCC report. I think the issue of heroes has even more leg room, celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio have become increasingly involved in the climate change movement, both narrating for NGOs and speaking directly to the UN. Ignoring his use of numerous private jets for a moment, his ability to play the hero both on an off screen has great potential for reaching wider audiences but also helping them to engage with the topic. Even if he is used to speak pure science people are more likely to respond than coming from a face they cannot recognize as a force for good.

Rewiring the Brain - George Marshall speaks to UCL

Last night the UCL school of Public Policy hosted a talk by George Marshall, author of Don’t even think about it: Are our brains wired to ignore climate change, and founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN). His role is not as a climate scientist but to explore the way Climate Change is communicated. He raised a number of interesting points all of which can be found in his book; whether climate change needs an enemy, the moral license of companies and individuals, and the social narratives through which climate change exists and should/will continue to prevail.

The section that most stood out for me was how the balance of our left and right brain, a deep survival instinct, plays against action to mitigate climate change. The left side of our brains is where we evaluate risk using rationale and analytic reasoning. The right draws on proximity, social values and past experience to then prioritize threats. This explains why when people are asked ‘are you concerned about climate change’ they answer predominantly yes (Leiserowitz et al 2014), but when asked ‘list your top 5 concerns’ climate change very rarely takes centre stage. The left side recognizes climate change as a risk but the right gives it low prioritization. Marshall explains this is why threats such as ISIS or Ebola are much more prominent, they are immediate, they play into cultural fears and are easily identifiable.

So how do we change our narrative to combat this in the climate sphere. Firstly climate change impacts do exist here, rather than narratives of stranded polar bears western countries need to be shown evidence of flooding, storms, heatwaves and so on, which while not necessarily directly attributable to anthropogenic warming can elucidate on the impacts. Whilst impacts are hitting the developed world more power needs to be given to the voices of those worst hit in places such as the Pacific Isles. Recent contributions from to the Green Climate Fund by major nations is a great way to start this, I worry though about the rhetoric of people seeing this as protecting others ahead of themselves. The public (and even parliament) need to be shown that reducing emissions worldwide is self-preservation as well as aid. Prioritization makes the human race naturally cost averse, and from an economics point of view discounting prevents ever seeing climate change as worth paying for now. The idea of insurance, and insurance companies, need to get on board and get the message to the public of certainty. People insure their homes and cars for massively more uncertain odds and it’s this risk that needs to be demonstrated in clear numbers to the public.

Marshall presents climate change as the perfect problem from wherever you view it, be economics and market failure, cognitive and self-preservation or cultural and racial. He notes though that often we reframe climate change to make it the perfect problem, putting it in the distance and future to avoid it. The talk, and book, are truly fascinating and I’d urge all interested in how we communicate climate science to take heed.

Framing: Making science pretty, or at least understandable

Brulle et al (2011) conducted an empirical analysis on the fluctuations in climate perceptions. Finding that media presentation, climate statements and voting patterns by politicians, and business cycles all had a strong effect on the way people engage with science. Framing is a phenomenon from the social marketing being moved into climate science by academics such as Dan Kahan. It involves orientating an argument based on social factors such as the problems perception, the audience or the speaker. Framing is evident in the way media and politicians talk but is distinctly lacking from science.

Corner et al (2014) explore the idea of tailoring communications based on audience values. They argue that intrinsic values are stable across adult life and thus issues such as climate change should be tailored to reach individual values. Climate science has long been associated in terms of guilt, that the public are being told off for behaving badly. My very first post highlighted how arguing about animal welfare or social justice can exclude certain populations. The public should be targeted in distinct groups with the message of climate change tailored to each one. Kahan et al (2007) split the public along 2 lines individualistic-communitarian and egalitarian-hierarchical. This then evolved into the Yale Climate Groups 6 Americas project. An economic argument for climate adaption may be more suited to an individualist with hierarchical views, whilst morality and social justice may work better for a communitarian.

I’m currently reading Oreskes and Conway 2008 book on how individuals have used media influence and uncertainty to affect arguments and action in science. Science needs to take a leaf out of their book and see that objective presentation of an argument isn’t always effective. Oreskes has even argued in a recent interview with the New York Times, that now the science is settled the IPCC should be disbanded handing the problem to social scientists in order to better engage the public. I personally wouldn’t go this far, but it is true that the IPCC could repurpose a lot of its resources to tackling the biggest problem facing climate science.