Extracted/ English Version - May 2024 : Taming our cognitive biases against climate action
International readers : this post is for you. French-speaking subscribers, we advise that you switch to this section: https://exfiltrees.substack.com/
Faced with the alarming reality of climate inaction, many researchers and leading figures in environmental commitment are highlighting the deep-seated mechanisms that would prevent us from taking action. Since Sébastien Bohler's famous 2019 book “The Human Bug - Why our brain is programmed to destroy the planter and how to prevent it”, many have stopped at the observation that we are condemned to self-destruction. But isn't this defeatism itself the expression of a cognitive bias? This is what we explore in this month’s issue.
What to expect in this issue:
In-depth : Cognitive biases
From Knowledge to Action : EU Elections
TV Show of the Month : Parliament
We hope you’ll enjoy reading, and many thanks to our new subscribers! Feel free to share your comments, remarks, and suggestions.
IN-DEPTH : 💡Cognitive biases, striatum: how our brain resists change (but it's not the only one!)
What if the solution came from within?
Diving into our unconscious and its mechanisms 🫣
Neuroscience tells us that our primary brain is programmed to survive and be as efficient as possible. For this, it develops a series of mechanisms that allows it to think by shortcuts and associations, and therefore to judge more quickly. Unfortunately, these judgments are sometimes packed with “cognitive bias” that can lead to errors of appreciation: you do not think about activating every muscle when you walk, but the price of this approximation is that, sometimes, you stumble.
However, these biases are not necessarily negative, as they depend on the context. For example, optimistic people are generally happier and more successful in their projects, but being optimistic when you're losing everything at the casino is particularly dangerous.
The main goal of our biases is to maintain our consistency while making a minimum of effort and changing our habits as little as possible. Here it is the striatum (part of the limbic brain) that is in control, that is, the part of our brain that privileges immediate gratification.
In the case of the environmental crisis, these biases could be very damaging to our collective survival in the medium and long term, when they lead us to delay, reduce or simply prevent our action. Here are a few examples:
Good conscience/rebound effect: a gesture for the planet is offset by an action that largely cancels out its benefits (e.g. a weekend on the plane because I sort my waste every day, the purchase of a larger electric car, or an increase in the temperature of the home since the installation of a more efficient boiler)
Pluralistic ignorance: the vast majority of us want binding regulatory change, but we censor ourselves and minimize the commitment of others, and believe that there are more “free riders” making no effort than there actually are.
Excessive optimism (and its variant “technoptimism”): human beings have always been able to cope, our ingenuity and technology will get us out of it, and we're not in such a bad position. This vision is all the more pronounced if the person believes he or she is on the “right side of the fence”, i.e. has the material and financial means to adapt better than the average.
Acquired helplessness: Overcome by eco-anxiety (see our March newsletter), some people remain frozen in shock, denial or pathological mourning. As with people suffering from depression, the notion of ‘learned helplessness’ lies at the heart of the mechanism. Our past experiences have led us to believe that we cannot act on our environment, so we fall into a form of resignation and find excuses not to change anything and resolve the cognitive dissonance between our intentions (to change things) and our actions (insufficient or even counter-productive).
The dreadful bias of confirmation: aggravated by the algorithms of social networks that offer us more and more content that goes in our direction, it is about believing only in the information that supports our current beliefs, and therefore rejecting any nuance or argument that would make us change our minds and behavior. Instead of thinking like a detective, you think like a lawyer seeking to confirm your thesis. Its corollary: motivated ignorance, which leads us not to seek information that is likely to challenge one of our habits.
However, we don't always function in automatic mode, prey to our immediate desires. In theory, the striatum and the neocortex (the ‘Cartesian’ part of the brain that enabled us to create human societies) balance again after adolescence...
Although we are increasingly aware of our biases, why is it so difficult to detach ourselves from the injunctions of our striatum?
It's important to put these biases into context 🏘️
Other people's behaviour influences ours. The more people there are to intervene, the more we feel entitled to do nothing (this mechanism has unfortunately been widely documented in the case of witnesses to assaults or illnesses). This “diffusion of responsibility” applies particularly to environmental action: the inertia of others inhibits our own desire to change, and co-responsibility in a large group reduces the perception of our own responsibility, whether at the level of an individual, an industry or a state (“My company/industry/country only accounts for x% of emissions, so I am not the problem!”).
Marketing, mainstream information and the availability of carbon stocks constantly feed our biases. Consider this example: climate is important to me, but I really want that Caribbean vacation (spring is really crappy and my Instagram feed is full of photos of sunny elsewhere). I am going to get out of this dissonance by buying carbon credits on the airline's website (even though I know it won't really offset things).
Thus, the over-mediatized behavior of some (private jets, excessive consumption), coupled with the greenwashing of private players, keeps us powerfully inactive. Added to this is the unclear stance of political players, who also summon up our biases (“It's China's fault” / “There are too many of us”) and give us the illusion of action.
Conversely, studies argue that a tipping point is possible for changing behavior if a critical mass of 10% of convinced players is reached. The more transparent the context, and the more an effort is understood and shared, with visible results, the easier it becomes to change our habits. As Aurore Grandin, a doctoral student in cognitive science at the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, summarizes, “Every citizen must be able to follow and observe, with tangible and visual evidence, how others, communities, companies or the State act, to create a social norm and encourage contribution”.1
Time to reprogram 🧘
According to researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, there are three systemic criteria that can lead to civilizational disasters, and global warming unfortunately embodies all three:
Decision-makers have nothing to lose from inaction (“no skin in the game”), if not everything to gain;
Information is asymmetrical (those with the right information do not manage to pass it on effectively - hello IPCC);
We know what needs to be done, and we'd all agree if a conductor came along to implement it (two-thirds of French people say that binding measures will be necessary)2;
Clearly, it is up to us not to allow our striatum to be permanently lulled by the dopamine of social networks and advertising messages, and to strengthen our neocortex and therefore our ability to accept making investments today (costly in terms of time and effort) for benefits in the longer term. But it is just as crucial not to make the individual solely responsible and to devote more attention to the change in context (the messages to which we are exposed) and to the change in governance.
Studies show that the more we are in a position of power, the greater our confirmation biases and the more sensitive our striatum is to dopamine3. If our decision-makers, private or public, can less easily detach themselves from their bias towards immediate gratification, then let's be the 99%, aware of their power to act, and exercise our right to vote!
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FROM KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION 🙋: European elections - En route to the Polls
Why it matters
In 2019, the European Commission adopted the "Green Deal," an ambitious series of proposals aimed at adjusting EU policies to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, making Europe the first carbon-neutral continent. To achieve this, the Commission pledged €1 trillion in funding.
The subsequent violent health, geopolitical, and economic shocks have undermined some of these commitments. It is obvious that the green and energy transition has become a major source of fragmentation within member states and polarization among political parties. Some Green Deal laws, such as those concerning nature restoration, pesticide use, and energy taxation revisions, have seen their goals significantly reduced or have stalled altogether.
As the European bloc fractures over energy and environmental issues, other countries have not hesitated to deploy legislative arsenals to protect their industries and promote investment in the transition. Notably, $400 billion has been deployed under the "Inflation Reduction Act" in the US.
In this context, the June elections will play a crucial role in either cementing or burying the Green Deal (with some parties calling for its outright repeal). It is important to remember that the majority of environmental regulations are decided in Brussels. In this regard (and concerning geopolitics, but that's another matter 😊), the upcoming elections should not be seen merely as a reaction to national politics: the European ballot has unique stakes that deserve to be examined. Below, we provide some key insights.
Tell me how you voted, and I'll tell you who you (really) are
Because in environmental policy, there is often a (large) gap between declarations and actions, we recommend taking a look at an excellent tool developed by the NGO Bloom, which has documented the votes of the 853 European Parliament members on 150 crucial ESG votes over the past five years.
While most leading candidates seem to agree on the diagnosis (strengthening European sovereignty, particularly in energy), in practice (and thus in votes), the left-right divide remains very pronounced. The European People's Party (EPP), including the Republicans, which held the majority in the last mandate, has been the most active party against Green Deal measures.
The situation is not much different for the votes of French MEPs, with a slightly better score for Renew (including Renaissance).
Here are the results for the UK delegation, with a strikingly low score on climate action for Renew.
If you want to read more about French candidates and their election platform, go to the French version of this post.
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TV SHOW OF THE MONTH 💚 : Dive into the heart of (Strasbourg) and Brussels' meanders
This Franco-German-Belgian TV show brilliantly meets a major challenge: to present the life of the European institutions in a light-hearted and funny way.
Broadcast in a dozen countries and already seen by nearly seven million viewers, the series follows the trials and tribulations of Samy, a parliamentary assistant who has just arrived in Brussels, for better or for worse. We can't resist sharing a short teaser.
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Her research focuses on the contribution of psychology to the fight against climate change.
“The French and ecological inaction”, 2024, Observatoire des Opinions Ecologiques
D. Martinez et al., « D2/3 Receptor Availability in the Striatum and Social Status in Human Volunteers », Biological Psychiatry, 67/3, 2010, doi : 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.07.037.