The Psychology of Green

I have always been fascinated by psychology. In fact, it was one of my majors in college. I just love the idea of dissecting my people do the things that they do, and often finding that conventional wisdom people have held onto for generations is totally not the way we think. My favorite is the idea of catharsis – numerous studies have shown that doing things like hitting a pillow or punching a punching bag won’t calm you down when you are feeling angry – it will actually make you angrier and more likely to comit an act of violence.

Here psychologists are aiming their microscopes at what makes people think “green” – what peoples attitudes are and which messages work and which ones don’t when it comes to environmental issues. Among the findings of these studies were:

People feel much better after walking outside for 15 minutes than walking inside.

Now this alone doesn’t seem so amazing – in fact it almost seems like common sense. But the real kicker is that this study also found that people under predict how much less happy they are inside then outside. They attribute this as one of the causes for people not spending more time outdoors. Combine this with the fact that amount of time spent outside is directly related to how protective people feel towards the environment and we see a huge reason to start convincing people that more time outside is better.

Negative feedback can backfire.

Seems like common sense again, but it is actually trickier than that. What the research found is that for people who are not heavily invested in the environment, giving them feedback about how bad their carbon footprint is etc. can actually make them LESS likely to do anything for the planet. On the other hand, for people who are already invested in environmental protection, showing them how bad their footprint is is actually very effective. This tells us that we need different messages for different people, and tells us what those messages should be.

News stories that provide a “balanced” view of climate change reduce people belief that humans are a cause of global warming.

This is not surprising but EXTREMELY relevant. There is a tendency in the news today to always present two sides of a story. That is usually not a bad thing – most stories have two sides. The problem is when a story doesn’t have two “equal” sides – rather, like climate change, it has one side which is overwhelming accepted by the worlds greatest scientists, and a few skeptics.

In the current news climate, there is a lot pressure on news organizations to give these two sides equal time. And I do think that there is a place for climate change skeptics – I don’t agree with them, but in the name of knowledge I always like to hear what other people have to say. The problem comes when a skeptic is given equal time in a report that is meant to be solely factual – in this situation, people are significantly more likely to be convinced that humans are not the cause of global warming because they are not made aware of the fact that this is not a debate between to equal sides – rather it is a debate between an accepted majority and a fringe group of skeptics. The study above proves the need to make this distinction clear.

There are a bunch of other fun studies sin this article as well – please feel free to click through and read them all. Very interesting stuff.