Want People To Care About Climate Change? Get Them To Think About Their Grandkids

We humans are often quite immediate creatures. We know that healthy eating and regular exercise will help us avoid obesity, but that knowledge is frequently overwhelmed by the immediate appeal of potato chips and the cushiness of our favorite recliner. We intend to take those blood pressure and cholesterol pills that our doctors prescribed, but pills are a pain, right in the here and now, and the benefits of those pills…they feel so distant! Our immediateness may also influence our unwillingness to sacrifice our current economic interests in order to reduce global warming. That, at least, was the conclusion drawn by Lisa Zaval and colleagues at Columbia University in a study published in Psychological Science. In the research, Zaval employed a technique in common use among behavioral scientists: she primed her participants to conjure specific thoughts before assessing their attitudes towards a seemingly unrelated topic. It’s the kind of priming that explains why, when people are given hot cups of tea to hold, they judge strangers as having warmer personalities (compared to when they are given cups of ice tea). It explains why, if I ask you to name the colors of the squares on a chess board and then ask you to name an animal in Africa, you are likely to think of a zebra, since the colors black and white have been primed by thoughts of the chess board. Priming interventions play off the recognition that our attention is limited, and we can only focus our minds on so many things at a time. Once our attention is focused on a specific topic, or feeling, or category of ideas, that attention will spill over into subsequent mental activities.