This one is a good one, at least IMO. I may try to track down the actual book by the same author. There are a number of ramifications.
Understand faulty thinking to tackle climate changeThe amorphous nature of climate change creates the ideal conditions for human denial and cognitive bias to come to the fore
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is not hopeful. "I am very sorry," he told me, "but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change."
Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is "loss aversion", which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me.
Kahneman's views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: "A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis."
People from other disciplines also seem to view climate change as a "perfect" problem. Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change, describes it as the "perfect market failure". Philosopher Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington in Seattle says it is a "perfect moral storm". Everyone, it seems, shapes climate change in their own image.
Which points to the real problem: climate change is exceptionally amorphous. It provides us with no defining qualities that would give it a clear identity: no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause or solution and, critically, no obvious enemy. Our brains scan it for the usual cues that we use to process and evaluate information about the world, but find none. And so we impose our own. This is a perilous situation, leaving climate change wide open to another of Kahneman's biases – an "assimilation bias" that bends information to fit people's existing values and prejudices.
This interests me because it's pretty clear, to anyone who understands the science, that climate change is likely to result in cumulative strategic and humanitarian problems that dwarf those we currently regard as significant, yet it also an issue that most people can't or wont think about.
One titbit that is also relevant to other situations (that I am not going to specifically name) is this:
Our response to climate change is uncannily similar to an even more universal disavowal: unwillingness to face our own mortality, says neuroscientist Janis Dickinson of Cornell University in New York. She argues that overt images of death and decay along with the deeper implications of societal decline and collapse are powerful triggers for denial of mortality.
There is a great deal of research showing that people respond to reminders of death with aggressive assertion of their own group identity. Dickinson argues that political polarisation and angry denial found around climate change is consistent with this "terror management theory". Again, there is a complex relationship between our psychology and the narratives that we construct to make sense of climate change.
The italicised sentence indicates that the most likely reaction to lethal conflict is, you guessed it, more lethal conflict. Obviously this would be dressed up with suitable justifications, but may just stem from basic constraints of human psychology.
Topic: Random Science Posts