Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Why We're Better With Some Threats Than Others (An Earth Month Re-Run) About this episode Earth Day https://www.earthday.org/ is coming on April 22, but the whole month is seen as an opportunity to think about environmental issues and what we as individuals can do to help out.
It seemed like a good time to rerun an episode we made with Harvard professor Dan Gilbert about why we humans are great at tackling immediate threats, but find it harder to motivate ourselves to address problems that seem a longer way off. It's why we often don't save for our retirements, and why we're finding it difficult to take action on climate change.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:47 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:50 Speaker 00 He's giving us a thumbs up. Okay.
1:51 Speaker 01 Thumbs up.
1:51 Speaker 00 So as usual, we just have you start by introducing yourself?
1:56 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Dan Gilchrist.
1:57 Laurie Santos? Dan Gilbert is a huge figure in happiness science. He's one of the field's most respected psychologists and an absolute whiz at explaining some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature. And that is going to be a big help, because the question I have for him is as confounding as it is serious. With Earth Month coming up in April, I wanted to reshare this episode with Dan that we originally released last year. For decades, we've been dealing with a host of disasters related to global heating: raging forest fires, devastating hurricanes, and retreating glaciers. Hearing about these things makes us feel pretty terrible. We feel anxious about our future and that of our children. We get anxious with ourselves and others for letting things get this bad, and we feel overwhelmed and pretty helpless in the face of such a big challenge.
2:42 Laurie Santos? I wanted Dan to help me answer a vexing psychological question. We've been talking about the catastrophic danger of global warming for several decades, but people are still debating whether it's a real crisis and how urgently we need to act to fix it. Which is kind of weird, because it seems like humans should be pretty good at dealing with life-threatening situations. I mean, we've had millions of years of evolution. Our brains should be amazing threat detectors. They should be good at noting when we're in danger and taking action. Why then do so many of us seem to be ignoring a threat big enough to wipe out our entire planet? The action comes from the fact that our brains are built to deal only with certain kinds of threats. If a saber-toothed tiger jumps out at you from a bush, you'd address that threat as best as you could right away.
3:26 Laurie Santos? But if I tell you you should probably change your diet or floss your teeth to reduce the risk of health problems developing decades from now, you might dither. It's why we're bad at putting money into our 401Ks and why we sometimes don't put in the work to make our happiness practices part of our daily lives. We're great at addressing the urgent problems, but we're not so hot when it comes to tackling other important ones. And when those important things do become urgent and messy, we wind up kicking ourselves for not acting sooner. And that's why I was so excited to talk with Harvard professor Dan Gilbert. He's been thinking about this mind bias for decades. He wondered why governments seem so bad at coordinating response to climate change, even though they're really good at urgent action following events like terrorist attacks.
4:10 Speaker 03 You know, everybody in America had a reaction to 9/11. And all of us had the reaction, this is terrible and thousands of people have died. But because I'm a psychologist, I also had another reaction, which is, why are we not equally concerned about all things that have killed even more people in our country? Ranging from climate change to the flu. Many more people have died. So why are we so concerned about one thing and willing to sacrifice everything from resources to personal liberty to fight it? But these other threats that are even greater in magnitude, arguably, were willing to do nothing about.
4:53 Speaker 03 That seemed to me a curious question that was ripe for a psychological answer.
4:59 Speaker 00 And you really applied that question directly to climate change, too. You'd think that if we knew the real threat, which a lot of people say that they do, we'd be freaked out and we'd be acting. But we're kind of not. And so talk to me a little bit why, evolutionarily, this might be the case.
5:14 Speaker 03 Well, you know, several hundred years ago, two very smart guys named Pascal and Fermat told us how we ought to think about threats. We ought to think about their likelihood and we ought to think about their magnitude. And those two things tell us whether a threat really warrants our attention. If it's really likely to happen and it's going to be a very, very bad outcome if it does, take action. If not, then don't. That's all logical, but it's not very psychological because human beings were not evolved to compute expected utility, if you will. Rather, we were evolved to respond to a small set of threats that were really big problems for our ancestors living in the African savanna.
5:54 Speaker 03 And unfortunately, climate change has none of the features that trigger this threat-response system in the human brain.
6:02 Speaker 00 And so let's talk about some of those four features. The first one that you've talked about is that threats have to be kind of agentic. They have to involve individuals. Why do we really care about threats that come from people?
6:13 Speaker 03 Well, we care about everything that comes from people and for good reason. People are the most significant source of rewards and punishments for an animal like us. We're the most social animal on planet Earth. So it's no wonder, and it's for good reason, that we care a lot about what other people do, what other people think and what other people say. With that said, climate change is not an attack by a mean group of people who are running at us with sticks. And that's what we're evolved to respond to. I mean, look what happened when the twin towers came down. And we went and invaded a country because they had murdered 3,000 people. Those 3,000 people had died from the flu. And by the way, it's 10 times that who die from the flu every year.
6:58 Speaker 03 We just kind of hum along and don't worry too much about it. So that's the tragedy of climate change is that it doesn't have a face. It seems like a non-agentic threat.
7:08 Speaker 00 It also seems to not have an intent. You made this quip in one of your articles, that if climate change was trying to kill us, then we'd take it very seriously. Talk about the power of intent and why that matters for our psychology.
7:19 Speaker 03 Well, we all know that if somebody pushes you in the street and goes, "Oh, excuse me, I tripped," you're not alarmed at all. But if they say, "Hey, take that," suddenly you rise up with full force. You call the police, you hit them back, you start yelling. So whether people intend to harm us or not is almost more important than the harm they inflict. We'll forgive almost anything that's an accident, and we will prosecute almost anything that isn't. Climate change isn't. Nobody's actually trying to make the climate warmer. Nobody's trying to melt the polar ice caps. People are doing it as a result of their activity, but it's pretty incidental to the activities that they're performing. You know, in a way, that's too bad.
7:59 Speaker 03 We can't get too excited about it because there's nobody who's meaning ill behind it.
8:05 Speaker 00 And I love when our psychology gets really tripped up by this. I remember one study where you had neuroscientists putting people in a scanner, and the subjects were getting shocked. And the shocks varied, whether they were just kind of random accidental shocks that were happening, or there was somebody sitting behind the thing who intended to shock you. And if you look at pain regions in the brain, we actually feel more pain when we're getting shocks that are intended, when somebody's trying to give them to us. And I think that's so powerful when we think about climate change, because the fact that nobody's trying to do it makes it just kind of like water off a duck's back when we think about it psychologically.
8:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a little less shocking, isn't it?
8:41 Speaker 00 Exactly. And so the next kind of thing you've talked about, the fact that our brains tend to respond a lot to threats that are immoral. And this one's kind of interesting because, you know, in some ways you could think that, you know, the destruction of a planet is actually causing harm, but moral harms tend to work a little bit differently. Talk a little bit about how moral harms work.
8:59 Speaker 03 You know, this is very intertwined with the first thing we talked about, with intentionality and agents, because moral harms are harms from agents, but they are, by moral harms, I guess I'm talking about things that are more like insults than injuries. And we are evolved to care a lot about insults, because insults to our honor, insults to our face, are in some sense reducing our, or threats to reduce our place in a social hierarchy. And so we're very, very concerned with our reputations, what would people think of us? You know, I could probably steal your pencil, or, you know, bump into your car, and you wouldn't get too upset about it, but if I called your mother a dirty name, you would
9:43 Speaker 03 rise up viciously and attack me. Why? There's really no harm done, is there? Well, the answer is yes, it's a moral harm. It violates your sense of what's fair and just and right. So we respond to moral harms with great power. And climate change isn't a moral harm, is it? I mean, it's going to ruin our air and our water, and it's going to make the world hot, but it's not insulting us. It's not attacking our religion.
10:06 Speaker 00 I mean, but it's incredible, right, that we're not getting freaked out about burning so much coal, but we are getting freaked out about, say, burning a single flag when somebody does that. Now, all of a sudden, our moral emotions are kind of going, going nuts, though.
10:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, they are, and it's easy to understand why we care so much about these things. And the question is whether we can subjugate this natural response and, you know, get on board with those two French guys, Pascal and Vermont, and say, you know what, flag burning, it isn't very nice, we don't much like it, but maybe we could worry about that tomorrow, after we've saved the planet?
10:39 Speaker 00 Your moral point is really important, because it suggests that climate change can make us scared, but it doesn't make us outraged. And it seems like outrage is a sort of special kind of emotion when it comes to causing us to take action.
10:50 Speaker 03 It really is, isn't it? I mean, you don't have to spend too much time online to realize that it is the fundamental driver of most people's online behavior on platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, and others. It's about moral outrage.
11:07 Speaker 03 Now, we occasionally feel moral outrage about environmental disasters. If Exxon runs their tanker into an iceberg and thousands of gallons spill and penguins are dying, we all rise up and say, how can you do this? You have to clean it up, right? It's not like the domain of the environment is completely insulated from the moral domain. It's just that when we hear there are glaciers melting and the seas are rising and it's just getting warmer, we can't point to any particular agent who is doing this in order to harm us or insult us. And so it just doesn't get our blood pressure up in the same way that calling your mother a bad name does.
11:49 Speaker 00 And your Exxon example is great because I think it gets to the third feature that I think that gets our minds going, which is things that happen instantaneously. The Exxon disaster you described is oil pouring out right now. It's happening immediately. And these immediate threats seem to be ones that also really kind of get us going. You've described the mind as a sort of get out of the way machine. Talk a little bit about what you mean by that.
12:12 Speaker 03 We're very good at getting out of the way, aren't we? If I throw something at you, you will duck before you even know it's coming. Your brain responds so quickly to threats that appear immediately and instantly in your environment. Most environmental threats are not like that. I mean, occasionally they are. There's an oil spill. One day the water was clean, the next day it's dirty. But by and large, the temperature on Earth is not going to increase by 20 degrees tomorrow. It's going to increase by .000001 and then the same amount the next day. We're all familiar with the frog that never jumps out of the water because the water is being heated from room temperature to boiling very slowly.
12:53 Speaker 03 That's not a bad parable for the place we are right now with regard to the environment. These changes are going to be devastating, but not tomorrow and not instantly. Things will change at the speed at which we can adapt to them. And we are remarkable adapters.
13:12 Speaker 00 And so these instant changes are ones that we notice quickly, but it is the case that we have minds that can pay a little bit of attention to the future. But a lot of your work has shown how bad we are at doing that. It's this kind of cool thing that our species can do, but it's still a capacity that's a little bit in beta version.
13:28 Speaker 03 This is a remarkably, evolutionarily speaking, it's a remarkably new capacity. We shouldn't be surprised. That its reach is limited. I mean, we really should be surprised that we haven't at all because as far as we know, no other animal does, at least nothing, like our ability to look into the far future and reason about it. But with that said, every day we see people failing to use this capacity, at least as logic would have us. People don't save enough for retirement. People don't floss when they know that little act would save them a lot of dental pain down the road. People eat badly and say, "I'll diet tomorrow." Why?
14:11 Speaker 03 Well, because it's kind of hard to take actions that are difficult today in the service of someone you're going to be in the far future. Climate change? Well, you know, I could have just been describing it. So I should go spend a lot of money changing all my light bulbs because maybe someday that will help someone who isn't me? That's pretty hard for most people to do.
14:35 Speaker 00 Another thing that's hard for people to do is to deal with these threats when they're not instantaneous, when they're not happening really quickly, as you mentioned. And this seems to be kind of related to a different happiness bias that we've talked a lot of on this podcast, right? That we kind of get used to stuff over time. Because these changes are happening so slowly, it's not the kind of thing where the temperature changes so quickly and I tend to notice it. It tends to kind of go under the radar. And this is part and parcel of a bigger kind of problem for our happiness, right? This idea of adaptation. Tell me what adaptation is and why it's so problematic.
15:06 Speaker 03 Well, people do get used to things, of course, but they get used to them much better than they themselves predict. We are world champion habituators and adapters. And that's usually really good. That means when bad things happen in our lives, you know, we lose the use of a limb or our relationship status changes from married to divorced, or any of the normal slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that befall people every day, we get on board with the new program and we basically do just fine. But this remarkable ability to adapt can also be our enemy because it makes us not react to bad things that happen slowly enough for us to get used to them.
15:51 Speaker 03 My grandchildren don't think there's anything odd about a river or a stream that has a sign that says, "Don't swim." When I was a kid, that would have been a science fiction story. A stream or a river in which you can't swim, what happened to the water? Well, what happened to the water in America is it got more polluted a little bit every day. I got used to it. Whole generations are now being born who've never seen anything else. If tomorrow we were all told we could never go outside our homes again, what would we do? I mean, we would riot. We would elect a new government. We would protest in every possible way.
16:29 Speaker 03 But I assure you that if the number of days you have to stay indoors increases from zero to one next year, to two the following year, in 365 years, people will not think it strange that nobody ever can go outdoors.
16:47 Speaker 00 I think we even show this adaptation for things that happen even a little bit more quickly. I remember this year was the first year that I started noticing, you know, the skies were looking hazy because on the east coast where I live, there's so many fires happening in Canada. I think the first day was really hazy. You know, I remember my husband and I going outside and be like, wow, it's so hazy. But day three, day four, all of a sudden I'm like, no, it's just hazy again. I've sort of stopped remarking about it. So even some of these changes that feel like they're happening a little bit faster are ones that we don't seem to notice that much.
17:16 Speaker 03 We don't seem to notice and we, more importantly, we don't object. And one reason we don't object, of course, is because it's not just us. If you were the only person who couldn't go outside, you'd be forming an action group. You'd be writing to your senators. But it's everybody else too, and none of them are going out. And you know, what we think is normal is what everybody is doing. That's the definition of normal for most people. So as long as most people can't drink the water, can't easily breathe the air, as long as most people can't live south of Missouri anymore. Now, the other problem, of course, is even if people thought, darn, this is really bad. I need to do something. Most people don't know what they could do.
18:01 Speaker 03 They understand that climate change is far too big a threat for anything they do today to make a bit of difference. It requires mass action.
18:11 Laurie Santos? There's also lots of evidence that our actions, even though we often think of them as happening in isolation, they don't. So if I put solar panels up, that has an interesting effect on your psychology if you live next door to me. So talk about how that effect might actually allow for collective action out of individual action.
18:26 Speaker 03 Well, you're making a great point, which is that your action has direct effects on problems. So you put solar panels on your house and you have actually reduced the electrical usage in your city by an extremely small amount. But you've also created an example. As we mentioned earlier, human beings define normal by what they see done around them. And once solar panels are going up in the neighborhood, it suddenly seems like a thing a reasonable person could do. So there are these cascading effects. There are indirect effects of doing the right thing.
19:02 Laurie Santos? One of the things I love about human psychology is just how complicated it is. We have so many stubborn biases that prevent us from doing stuff that will directly benefit us and our planet. But there are also other biases that we can harness for good, like Dan's example of us wanting to emulate the environmental habits of our neighbors. So what other psychological hacks might help us deal more effectively with climate change? Dan will tell us more after the break.
19:31 Laurie Santos? There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere
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21:37 Laurie Santos? That's massmutual.com/wellness. Tragically, climate change isn't the kind of threat humans are good at dealing with. We swing into action if we're put in danger by something sudden or by some cruel person out to harm us. And Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says we're also more likely to take action if we think our individual behaviors will have a real effect on the problem. Unfortunately, we don't always feel like that's the case with an issue as huge as global heating.
22:10 Speaker 03 Do I pay for offsetting the carbon on my next airplane ride? Okay, I guess that would be good, but surely if I do that or don't, I can't imagine that the world will feel the effects of my tiny little action.
22:24 Laurie Santos? But don't despair, because our minds biases can be harnessed to help solve environmental problems in the blink of an eye, provided those problems are framed in the right way.
22:34 Speaker 03 There was a wonderful study by Bob Cialdini and his group. They just tried to find out if they could put signs in hotel rooms that would make the person who checked into that room a little more likely to reuse their bath towels. Evidently, having somebody wash your towel every day just because they will and it's free is pretty bad for the environment. So if you can get hotel guests to use their towels for a couple of days, as they probably do at home, it's a great thing for the environment. Will Cialdini and his team tried a number of things. You can threaten people, you can cajole people, you can reward people. But the single most effective sign that they put in the room
23:15 Speaker 03 was the one that simply said, "Most of the guests who stay in this room reuse their towels." Human beings want to be like most people. If everyone's doing it, it's probably the right thing, so I should do it too. And they played on this little piece of psychology to great effect. You see the same thing, most of us now, when we get an electric bill, it includes some little graph that shows us how much electricity we're using compared to our neighbors. Nobody did this 15 years ago, but the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, I believe, was the first to try this. And suddenly, people were embarrassed. "I'm using way too much electricity." Why? Because look how little other people are using. I want to be like them.
24:00 Speaker 03 So this is a lever we can push for the good of the world, but whether it comes to climate change or anything else. When I lived in Texas in the 1980s, there was a massive litter problem. And studies showed that a lot of highway litter was being thrown out of the windows of pickup trucks by men between the ages of 18 and 32. And somebody, somewhere, deep in the bowels of government, somebody who deserves a Nobel Prize, in my opinion, had the idea of coming up with a slogan that would appeal to this particular demographic. And it was now the now famous, don't mess with Texas.
24:42 Speaker 03 Seventy-two percent reduction in litter due to four really well-placed words. Now, in some sense, the person who came up with those four words was appealing to a bias. They were appealing to the fact that the litterers were young men with great pride in their state, who didn't want to be messed with in any way. There was kind of a macho element, and this message was crafted so that it appealed to these people. I just think it's a masterful example of how you can do very, very small things to make a very big difference.
25:23 Speaker 00 And those small things were powerful in part because they played on this idea of our moral violations. They caused people to see litter as outrageous, rather than just kind of annoying or dirty. It kind of played into our moral emotions.
25:36 Speaker 03 They did, indeed. So throwing something out the window of a pickup truck is not only a moral violation, but it's a moral violation by somebody. Somebody, somebody is messing with Texas. Well, we can't let that happen, can we?
25:50 Speaker 00 And this seems to be a strategy that climate change activists are using a little bit more often. I'm not sure what's happening at Harvard, but a lot of our climate activists on campus are calling out the president and saying, because Yale is investing in fossil fuels, you, you know, President Peter Salovey are causing this problem. And so talk about how this is activating our psychology in a way that might get people to sort of respond more than the normal techniques.
26:14 Speaker 03 Well, I do think that if you can find a face for the problem, you have some chance of getting people more riled up about it. But I'm not sure it's worked so far. I'm not sure naming the CEO of Exxon makes people any more angry at Exxon than it just being a company they feel angry about. I understand the psychology behind the attempt. Let's blame somebody. If we can get everybody upset at this particular guy, then they'll take action. Maybe there are data out there showing they have, but it sure doesn't look like it to me. It just sounds like they're chanting a name and they're holding somebody liable for the problems. My guess is, most of the public thinks this person isn't the evil actor, who if only
26:57 Speaker 03 we could assassinate them, everything would go back to normal.
27:01 Laurie Santos? The holidays have a way of putting time into perspective. Another year around the table, another chance to hear a favorite story, another memory with the people who matter most. It's about making the most of the years ahead, surrounded by the people, traditions, and experiences that truly count. That's why MassMutual takes a broader view of planning ahead, one that includes physical, mental, and financial wellness. MassMutual's Living Well Rider is now included with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance as part of their commitment to policy owners. It offers wellness benefits at no additional cost to support a more holistic approach that can help people prioritize their total well-being. And when people have more ways to live well,
27:43 Laurie Santos? it could lead to a fuller, richer, more meaningful future. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness. With the holidays coming up, I've been thinking a lot about how to make my new sabbatical place feel a little more like home and a little more festive for hosting friends and family. So after recently getting an awesome new living room rug from Wayfair, I wanted to pull the whole look together. I found these gorgeous round ruched velvet pillows on Wayfair and bought them in a bunch of different colors to complement the rug. They're soft, they add a fun pop of color, and they make my apartment feel so much more pulled together and ready for the holidays. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high-quality, customer-trusted products for your home, so you can host and celebrate without the stress.
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28:58 Speaker 00 Another lover we can push is turning to recognize that climate change is a little bit more immediate, which, for better or for worse, since you actually started talking about this, we have started recognizing just because the problem has felt more immediate. There's more fires, there's more terrible storms, and so on. So you first started talking about this almost 20 years ago. I don't know, what does that make you feel? Like, we've known about these biases for a while, but we haven't taken action.
29:21 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, 20 years ago, I was telling people, you know, one of the reasons we're not doing anything is we don't see the effects of climate change yet. Well, They're here. They've arrived. And I do think there's been an uptick in response to it because suddenly people are going, "The reason it's too hot for me to go outside, the reason planes can't land in Phoenix today, the reason we're running out of water, the reason the hurricanes have gotten worse is climate change." So finally, the damage is arriving and we are paying more attention. The problem is, this was the kind of threat you needed to respond to before it arrived. Once it has arrived, it's too late.
30:06 Speaker 03 We need a much bigger response to get much less of an outcome today than we did 20 years ago. But it is upon us, and I think most people see it and recognize it and now accept it. Remember, 20 years ago, we had an entire wing of our democracy saying, "There is no such thing as climate change. It isn't getting warmer, and if it is, it's only an act of God. It has nothing to do with our use of resources." So 20 years, we've been fighting against people who didn't even want to acknowledge it was happening, much less ask the question about what should we do about it. I think those people are finally in a minority, even in the Republican Party. Most Republicans are saying, "Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, we probably should do something about it."
30:51 Speaker 03 And the discussion is only about, "What does something mean?"
30:54 Speaker 00 And I think this figuring out what something means actually gets back to another part of your work that I think is so relevant for the climate discussion, which is this idea that we have these brains that can imagine different futures. A lot of times when we imagine the climate future, we imagine the doom and gloom version of it, right? You know, the seas are going to rise and Lower Manhattan's going to be flooded and all these terrible things are going to happen. But talk about the possibility of imagining positive futures and what that might do to kind of help our actions on climate change.
31:22 Speaker 03 Well, human beings respond to carrots and they respond to sticks. And we've known for a very long time that the response to sticks is more immediate and stronger. But it's not very effective if people don't know what to do to avoid getting hit with the stick. There's very old work in social psychology by a Yale professor, in fact, named Irv Janis, who showed that fear messages can be effective if they're accompanied by a clear indicator of what you do to avoid being afraid. But if you just tell people it's all bad and it's getting worse, and you can't tell them exactly what they should do to make it better, they basically tune out. So carrots are very effective in this regard. And we do need carrots and we have them.
32:05 Speaker 03 But they're not carrots like, let's look on the bright side of climate change. You'll be able to sail in Vermont. Won't that be wonderful? No, no, the messages, I think, are actually economic. And they're messages that are now coming through loud and clear that we're not doing these things necessarily to solve a problem. We're doing it because it's going to create jobs. It's going to create a vibrant new economy. Look at, you know, what we're going to be able to do with electric cars. I think that's actually a very effective way to get people to do the right thing, by showing them how attractive the opportunities are in this new world we're trying to create, rather than just scaring them about how bad it is if they don't do it.
32:44 Speaker 00 When we think about the kinds of actions we need to take to fix climate change, I think this is another spot where our biases mess us up. Because when I try to simulate how I'll feel, you know, making the sorts of sacrifices that might be required to kind of fix climate, I can sometimes think that those things are going to hurt me much more than they could, right? I simulate, I don't have an EV right now. Very embarrassing, you know, from the sort of social comparison thing. But when I simulate getting an EV, I'm like, oh, it's going to be a pain to figure out where I'm going to plug it in, or kind of mapping out my drive so I can find a charger. But in practice, when I actually do that, it might not be as bad as we think. This gets back to another bias that I know you've studied in detail, this bias of affective forecasting. You know, explain what affective forecasting is and why changing our behavior to be a little bit more sustainable might not be as bad as we think.
33:29 Speaker 03 Well, affective forecasting is just a mouthful of words. That means looking into the future and figuring out what'll make you happy, if it'll make you happy, how long that happiness will last. It's just a prediction about what will be good and what will be bad for you. And you're right, that people make errors when they try to do that kind of work. And you're imagining that getting an EV will be very difficult to plug it in. It will be hard. And you're probably right about some of those things. But you're also failing to imagine a number of things. You're failing to imagine how good you're going to feel every time you get in it, drive down the street and show all those other drivers that you mean business when it comes to climate change, on and on and on. You'll imagine some of the things about this, but you'll fail to imagine others.
34:11 Speaker 03 So your imagination turns out not to be a great guide as to how good you will feel. Well, what should you do instead if you, if your imagination is going to not serve you well? Well, one easy way to find out how you'll feel if you buy an EV is to see how people who have already done it actually do feel. And what you'll find is that Tesla owners are among the most satisfied humans on earth. They love their cars and they love having bought them. Is there any reason you don't think you would join their ranks?
34:40 Speaker 00 It's funny, I just had a conversation at a dinner party yesterday with an EV owner who is evangelical about their EV and they're like, oh, my gosh, it's so easy and it's so fun and it's so much faster than you think. And it really was one of these cases of getting testimony. That person's testimony as an owner of an EV is so much better than my simulation is ever going to be about what it's like.
34:58 Speaker 03 There's no doubt it's better in helping you make an accurate forecast. But we also know people don't trust it as much. People place undue stock in their own imaginations and they don't properly value the experiences of others because they say, yeah, but that's Fred. I'm not Fred. Fred is different than I am. Actually, in most ways Fred isn't different than you are. Human beings are much more alike than they expect. They have an illusion of uniqueness that makes them think that there's no way anybody else can tell me about my future. Yes, actually, if everybody who's a lawyer is miserable, you're almost surely going to be a miserable lawyer too.
35:35 Speaker 00 So the last thing we can do to try to promote better climate behaviors is to recognize what helps us get that sort of future planning going a little bit. Because as you've mentioned, like we can simulate the future, but it's kind of hard. We can save for retirement, but it's hard. Talk about the things that help us get our future planning going and how we might be able to harness those same kinds of things to help with climate change.
35:55 Speaker 03 You know, I think there are two paths that we can take. One is the path that most psychologists like you and me are tempted to take, which is to think about the things we could do to get everyday people to take different actions in their everyday lives. But the fact is that all of that is not going to add up to a lot, and most people aren't going to do it. And I think it was Al Gore who said, if you really care about the climate, instead of changing your light bulbs or worrying about carbon offsets, you should vote. I mean, if you really want to make change, you make change to the system in which people function, rather than asking individuals to please defy their own nature a little bit differently.
36:38 Speaker 03 Retirement savings is a great example. If we were to just cajole people, convince them, tempt them, amuse them into saving for retirement, no one in America would be doing it, right? Just like they don't floss. We wouldn't do those things. But we've managed to institutionalize retirement savings. So now your employer says to you, I will be withholding some of your salary. I will be putting it away for you for retirement because I know you are just too flawed to do it on your own. And as a result, a lot of Americans now have retirement savings. One of your colleagues, Kelly Brownell, once told me, he said, you know, if you want to get people to eat better, you can try a million different things. Almost none of them work. But the best thing you can do is make sure there's a grocery store that has produce within one mile of their home.
37:23 Speaker 03 I think the same thing is true for climate change. We have to stop saying to people, it's on you to change your light bulb. That's going to fix the problem. No, we have to stop using fossil fuels. There are a lot of people who are deeply economically invested in making sure we keep using fossil fuels. You have to vote for a government that will tell them no. Until we do that, everything else is just working around the margins. So I'm sorry to say as a psychologist that I think there's a lot less psychology to fixing this problem than there is just politics.
37:56 Speaker 00 But I think it actually comes from understanding our psychology. There's things we can do with our own psychology that might not require as much government intervention. Like, you know, if somebody burns a flag, we don't need a politician to tell us, like, yeah, you get upset about that. But with these things that don't activate our evolutionary biases, we do need the system. And that is coming from psychology. That's understanding our psychology to know when we need help and when we don't.
38:18 Speaker 03 Well, I like the fact that you have given us credit for something, even if we don't deserve it. I'll take it. You're right, it's all psychology.
38:26 Speaker 00 I'll take it.
38:27 Speaker 03 With that said, so I don't want to seem like I'm saying there's no room for changing the behavior of individuals so that they contribute less to the problem and more to the solution. There is. I think there's a large role, maybe even the largest role, is for government to change the behavior of nations. But with that said, I'm all for anything that gets human beings to do what is better for the climate. And I think psychologists are there to help you with a whole host of tricks that can get at least some percentage of individuals to do better in their everyday lives. I mean, here's the good news about climate change. There aren't many people who are going,
39:11 Speaker 03 no, I don't want to fix this problem. I really think it's great. I'm so glad there are more wildfires in California and that Arizonans won't have water to drink. Right? We're kind of all, almost all of us at least, almost all of us are on the same side of this problem. And we're only talking about how do we solve it? If you think of the most of the problems that face us, we're arguing about whether there is a problem and what the problem is. We all agree about all of this now. And we just have to get on board with what we're going to do to solve it. I think that gives us at least a good head start.
39:47 Laurie Santos? That was a second chance to hear my conversation with Dan Gilbert. This Earth month, I hope you have time to think about the small ways you can contribute to taking on the big problems facing our planet. Every little step leads us in the right direction. We'll be back for a special show on March 20th, celebrating World Happiness Day. I've even been given early access to the World Happiness Report, so I'll be announcing which country has been declared the happiest on Earth. And I'll tell you about a really simple change you can make to your life that will make you, your family, and your friends so much happier. All that next time on Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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