Key takeaways
- The climate crisis contributes to increasing weather-driven disasters, but people adjust “disturbingly fast” to gradual temperature increases, leading to climate apathy.
- A new UCLA study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperature, in binary form — such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter — significantly increases people’s ability to see the impact of climate change.
- Making an emotional connection to the loss of local traditions may also help overcome climate apathy.
Slowing human-caused climate change requires decisive action, but the slow upward creep of global temperatures contributes to apathy among people who don’t experience regular climate-driven disasters, psychologists say. In a new study from UCLA and Princeton, researchers looked into ways to communicate the true impact of climate change and found a solution.
Showing people continuous data, such as temperature increases in a town, left people with a vague impression of gradual change, but showing binary data for the same town, specifically whether a lake froze or not each winter, brought home the striking shift, said incoming UCLA communications professor and cognitive psychologist Rachit Dubey.
“People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast,” said Dubey, senior author of the study. “When we used the same temperature data for a location but presented it in a starker way, it broke through people’s climate apathy. Unfortunately, compared to those who looked at a clearer presentation of the same information, those who only looked at gradual data perceived a 12% smaller climate impact and cared less.”
Dubey studies how people reason about climate change, how to communicate about it and how to improve climate communications. He noted how heavily political and personal experiences influence risk perceptions around climate change, and how quickly people redefine “normal.” A Vox article reporting on climate apathy in 2020 inspired Dubey to look deeper into the human tendency to adjust to change, even as science has proven that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change and increasing disasters like wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and sea-level rise.
“For years, we assumed that if the climate worsened enough, people would act, but instead, we’re seeing the ‘boiling frog’ effect, where humans continuously reset their perception of ‘normal’ every few years,” Dubey said. “People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast. My research examines how people are mentally adapting to the negative changes in our environment.”
In the study, published April 17 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the researchers first asked study participants about the climate in a fictional city they named “Townsville,” and later asked a second group about five real lakeside cities around the world, including Lake George in New York and Grand Traverse Bay in Michigan. In both versions of the experiment, the scientists showed half of the study participants a graph of temperature increases from 1940-2020, and the other half a graph showing whether temperatures caused the lake to freeze each winter. Whether charting temperatures or lake freezes, each pair of charts drew from the same slowly warming weather information. As temperatures gradually climbed, the lakes stopped freezing as often. For the real towns, study participants hearing about the lake also learned about the decline of activities like ice skating and ice fishing.
When the researchers asked participants to rate from 1 to 10 how much climate change impacted the town, people who learned about a range of temperatures responded lower than people who learned whether the lake froze — on average, 6.6, compared to 7.5, or 12% higher.
Making the emotional connection to local traditions, whether ice skating in the winter or freedom from wildfire smoke in the summer, may also contribute to overcoming apathy, said lead author Grace Liu, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Our study drives home the importance of discussing climate change not just in gradual temperature terms, but in concrete, either-or terms, showing how life has changed,” Liu said. “It’s not just warmer winters; it’s also a loss of ice hockey and white Christmases. It’s not just hotter summers; it’s the disappearance of a swimming hole due to drought or soccer practice (being) canceled because it’s dangerously hot.”
The researchers hope the results help anyone designing visual representations of climate change graphics or those seeking to clarify gradual changes, from climate generalists and data visualization professionals to policymakers and journalists.
“People working in these fields have a sense that binary data is more effective, and our study adds theoretical rigor, using careful cognitive experiments,” Dubey said. “Our study also helps explain why the ‘Show Your Stripes’ visualization is so compelling because it takes continuous data and presents it in a more binary format.”
By focusing on the increasing rate of once-rare events, like extreme heat days or thousand-year floods, or the slow loss of seasonal joys like skiing or outdoor ice skating, the researchers hope that the same temperature data that once led to public apathy can instead help communities care more about the climate crisis.
Journal
Nature Human Behaviour