Writing Climate Change (30)
The Fight for the Climate – Psychology & the Individual (how people change)
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction
How does change happen? Why do some people get stuck when confronted with climate change, while others rise up and dedicate their lives to activism?
This may be one of the biggest questions in the fight for the climate. The ability to change is the decider between action and inaction. As a writer, you’ll be taking your characters through exactly these arcs of change. We need to know how that change happens, so that you can portray it, and potentially even stimulate it in your readers.
Some Real World Characters
Here’s some examples to give us a flavour of what behaviour change looks like in real life, before we get into abstract theory. See if you notice any common themes.
Bob Inglis
The USA’s Republican party is infamous for climate denial. But not all of them. Bob Inglis shifted from the usual partisan anti-science (If Al Gore’s for it, then I’m against it!), to a much more reasonable Green Capitalism (just like Al Gore!). Given the state of the Republican party, that’s a big change. That reasonableness cost him his role in a political party increasingly unfavourable to such attitudes.
So, why did he change?
My son, my oldest of five kids, was voting for the first time in 2004 when I was running again, and he said, “You know, dad, I’ll vote for you, but you have to clean up your act on the environment.”
....
The other cause was, I got on the science committee.... And I got to go to Antarctica to visit there.... I went to Antarctica and saw the evidence.
- Bob Inglis, explaining the two big factors that changed his view.
After being banished into the political wilderness, he didn’t give up on climate issues. He has continued to push climate policies. This was a permanent shift.
Random Internet Vegans, Answering The “Why?” Question
Here’s a some mini-stories from vegans on r/vegan explaining why they went veggie.
The veganism per se is unimportant, it’s the change that we’re interested in. Veganism is a large but not overly large personal change. Veganism is also socially conscious, and can put people in conflict with society. That’s precisely the level that most personal climate actions exist at.
In fact, I used to make fun of vegans I knew, and loved to eat tasty meat in their faces.
A lot of this changed when I started working at a veterinary hospital. I spent every day around dogs and cats... .... And every time I had to help put one "to sleep", I was having an intense inner struggle. .... It reached critical mass, and I decided I could no longer justify eating meat to myself.
[Direct experiences with killing or slaughterhouses is a common story]
I got out of the military in 2007 but those habits of eating a lot of meat still stuck with me. ...
Well last week I was watching TV with my wife and my heart hurt... It felt like my heart was pushing a golf ball through it. That was my OH SHIT moment. ....
The very next day I switched to vegan.
[Directly experienced health issues are a common story]
When I started working out and researching nutrition I wanted to gain weight in a healthy way. So, step by step, I read about plant-based diets. ....
[The “fell down a rabbit hole” story is fairly common. Specific documentaries etc get mentioned repeatedly.]
I wasn’t even veggie when I met my partner, who has been vegan for 20 years. 3 years together now. Been vegan since a few months into our relationship. It didn’t happen overnight but he inspired me to educate myself.
[The “Veganism is a sexually transmitted disease” story is fairly common. Family and friends also transmit the behaviour (no sex required!).]
Random Internet Electric Vehicle Enthusiasts, Answering The “Why?” Question
This is from r/electricvehicles. As with vegans the precise behaviour isn’t our focus. We’re looking at why people made the switch from the dominant behaviour (combustion vehicles), to a less common and politicized emerging behaviour (electric vehicles). This is one step down from veganism, in terms of the amount of social angst involved.
... I have a 100 mile commute to work 4 days a week and was tired of paying over $200/month in gas....
[Cost is a very common reason]
My reasons: no maintenance, no gas station trips, no transmission to clunk through when I hit the pedal, and quiet. ....
[Convenience is another common reason]
... one of my biggest reasons for buying an EV is so I don't have to fill up with gasoline. That stuff is carcinogenic....
[Again, health concerns matter to some]
The idea of going green got me to test drive one, but the actual feel off driving it, I immediately knew I needed one ...
[The environmental concerns are only a partial motivator for many, not the main one]
Gadget factor. I’m an electronics dork, and my Mach-E is the biggest piece of tech I have.
[Another common story. It fits their pet enthusiasms]
Now for the theory…
Why Do People Change?
Everyone is a mix of stability and change. We keep the same name, yet we grow older. We are always changing, always stable. The range of things that can change is wide too. Preferences, beliefs, identity.
Therefore “behaviour change” is a fairly vast and nebulous topic. There is no “answer” to what makes people change. Instead we’ll look at various perspectives. Within that we may find some common themes relevant to our task.
Nudging Micro-behaviours
Do you switch off the lights when you leave a room, or leave them on?
Most daily life is made up of micro-behaviours. These behaviours are overwhelmingly shaped by environment we live in. This is the whole “barriers to action” problem we looked at previously.
Here’s the flip side:
If you want to change micro-behaviours, you can just change the environment. How much does an electric vehicle cost? Is it more convenient? Does your neighbour drive one?
Advertisers and government planners love this stuff. There’s an entire field of research dedicated to various methods of influencing people this way. The most powerful nudge of all is other people. Therefore we’ll come back to things like social norms and social contagion another day.
Nudging is something that gets done to people rather than by people (although you can nudge yourself, self-help books will often tell you how). As a story-teller, nudges are world-building. Nudges exist in the setting, rather within characters.
When you go inside a character, you are likely engaging with a much deeper forms of behaviour change.
Schema Change
One step up from unconscious actions directed from outside, are unconscious actions directed from inside. We’re talking about beliefs held too deep for us to realize they exist.
They’re called schemas.
A schema is a psychological construct for some bit of reality. For example, you likely have a schema for “bicycle”. If you see something that violates this bicycle-schema then it’s going to throw you.
These schemas are in our heads, not the world. Therefore these schemas can change dramatically. That has big implications when the schemas involved are more serious than “a bicycle has two wheels”.
Schemas can be hyper-specific to the person. Even so, people are likely to end up with schemas in common. I can bet you a lot of guys have a “If-I-don’t-drive-a-car-then-I’m-not-a-real man” schema. Obviously such schemas can feed into climate relevant behaviours.
Schemas are not facts.
You can’t change schemas with mere information. Schemas exist as a network of associations. This includes emotions, bodily sensations, smells, snippets of songs, memories of that cuddly toy from childhood. You can shout facts all you like, but if the behaviour is being driven by an unconscious schema then it won’t just change. Therefore changing schemas can require deep emotional and experiential work.
If you can’t feel it, you can’t change it.
Previously we looked at how the stress of climate change means people engage in avoidance. That means they can’t feel it. That means they get stuck.
That stuckness can be deeply irrational and emotional. For example, the “I-need-a-car guy” likely won’t understand why he needs a car so badly. He’ll just fly into a rage if you ever suggest he shouldn’t have one. You’ve unconsciously threatened his sense of self.
Changing his behaviour would involve bring the schema into conscious awareness (I must have a car!), then creating a new emotional experience which contradicts this I-need-a-car feeling. Perhaps he could have an experience of feeling manly while riding a bike. Whatever works. If successful, his emotional reaction would dissolve. He would be freed up to choose other behaviours.
Here’s the thing:
The arts just happen to be very good at creating these juxtaposed emotional-cognitive experiences. I suspect the entire technique of Socratic dialogue in fiction exists for this reason. Potentially you can do this to your audience.
Worldview & Identity Change
Stepping up from schemas we have people’s entire sense of who they are and how reality works – their worldview. This too can change dramatically. The effect can be profound. When we looked at the novel What Is To Be Done? we saw the author leveraging people’s sense of identity. This was so effective that he helped motivate people to fight and die for a cause. It became who they were.
As a guide let’s consider religious conversion. Obviously not everyone is religious, but all religions are worldviews. We’ll leave aside stuff like “forced conversions” (nudging someone with a gun), and focus on the more genuine kind. Exactly why people convert is a subject of debate. Even so we can pick out some common occurrences.
Experiences of dissatisfaction: Suffering, meaninglessness, whatever it may be – something feels wrong with life. Some people may turn this dissatisfaction into an active search for truth. Some people may only be aware these problems retrospectively (e.g. “I never noticed how much the drink was killing me until after I went sober”).
Breaking The System Of Meaning: We all have our own personal narrative of who we are. This can break. Having upset one system of meaning, you are now open to alternatives.
Life Turning Points: Those breakages often happen during major life events (e.g. leaving home, losing a job, birth of a child) that destabilize meaning. Previously we’ve seen how this can happen to an entire society, as in the case of World War Two. Adopting a new system of meaning in turn leads to a redefinition of life.
Connection & Intensive Interaction: You have to spend a lot of time with the ideas and people if you’re going to shift your worldview over to theirs. No contact means nothing can happen. Social Bonds are particularly important. People join groups because their friends and family join.
Mediating Factors: All this takes place in a specific context, which throws us back to behavioural nudges and barriers. Again, other people are the biggie.
Time: Conversions do have their dramatic moments, but mostly they’re a process that unfolds over time. Repeated searching, encounters, and re-evaluation slowly take the person to a radically new place.
Put some combination of these factors together, and you can push people into radically new visions of themselves and reality.
Adversity & Post-traumatic Growth:
Previously we looked at how powerlessness is one of the main barriers to action. At the mild end people engage in emotion management. In its most extreme form this becomes trauma.
The flip side is that this can make people change.
At the mild end we have growth through adversity. These are challenges within your current ability to cope, leading to slow improvement. At the extreme end we have post-traumatic growth. This is an extreme form of breaking meaning. Trauma blows up the universe. Survival then depends on your ability to put reality back together.
Growth could be considered the normal response to trauma, whereas prolonged mental illness a sign something has got stuck. Things such as a failure to give people support, validate their experiences, or process the events are what blocks recovery and growth.
If a person makes it through this process they will be stronger than before. We could sum the change up as an increase in “wisdom”. Old habits, beliefs, and identities that were too weak have been shattered and replaced.
Something like Greta Thunberg’s archetypal crash into despair followed by an emergence into action fits this pattern. Not everyone horrified by climate change gets stuck.
A quick aside:
Trauma therapy has already shown up in climate fiction thanks to Ministry for the Future. The traumatized character is shown ineffectively doing EMDR. Getting stuck is sadly common, but it is far from inevitable.
Here’s a quick primer on what effective trauma therapy often involves.
This will depend a bit on what type of condition they’ve developed. Is it “merely” PTSD, or something more severe like CPTSD, or even Dissociative Identity Disorder (if it happened to a child)? Either way, broad similarities exist.
A common approach is do this in three phases (often overlapping, or moving forward and back as needed).
1. Stabilization and Safety: meeting physical needs, and teaching emotional management skills (e.g. Cognitive behavioural Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, etc).
2. Processing: dealing more directly with the trauma so that it is no longer overwhelming. Various approaches exist. e.g. EMDR.
3. Integration: rebuilding a coherent sense of identity, and moving back into life.
That is how you facilitate post-traumatic growth, when we’re talking about severe life-destroying trauma. People with trauma can heal, and indeed grow as a result.
Peak Transformative Experiences & Post-ecstatic Growth:
What is the opposite of trauma? Something wildly positive! So positive it breaks your mind.
Examples: tripping on LSD, mystical encounters, falling in love, the sublime sight of lightning bolts crashing upon a mountaintop, the beauty distilled in a artistic masterpiece. Whatever works for you.
Curiosity. Inspiration. Awe. “Oh wow!” you say, and then... life is never the same again.
How does this happen? Because it does happen.
Depending on how you define this stuff, trauma is a transformative experience in the same way, just less pleasant. The point is you have been ripped out of ordinary experience, thrust out into a realm of mind-breaking truths, and heart shattering emotions. In this space your sense of reality must be re-organized. You will never be the same again. This moment may be a sudden intrusion into your life, or it may be the climax of a slow build up change. Either way, you have broken through into something new.
This is a much more rare and dramatic form of change, but not one to overlook. Bob Inglis was partly changed by going to Antarctica – a removal into an awe inspiring otherworld, were he could see ancient ice with his own eyes. This is what we’re talking about.
Peak experiences certainly are not a normal topic in climate discussion. But we’re talking about the arts here. We are in the business of deliberately manufacturing peak moments (as are church services, meditation, rites of passage, carnivals, political rallies, and dance parties).
Aging
People also change with age. I’m going to skip over it, because it’s mostly a result of all of the above. A child becoming an adult must redefine their identity. An old woman confronting death must grow in wisdom, or crumble into bitterness.
Whatever changes we undergo, they happen in the context of our general life development.
The Path of Activism
So far we’ve looked at change in general. Later in this series I’d like to look at the history of both the climate movement, and that of climate denial. We’ll want to understand why people join such movements.
The general population exists in a state of habit and powerlessness. People just live their lives. A subset undergo change. They become different than the general population. That change may be small or large. A subset of these people become activists. They go much further. They seek to change the world.
How does this happen?
Every activist has to pass through a series of filters – opportunities to not be an activist. Most people don’t make it, hence such groups tend to be small. Existing activists are trying to push as many people as possible all the way through. In contrast, people who are blocking change are trying to divert as many as possible onto one of the off-ramps.
Those off-ramps are:
Inaction: no change. You might want change, but you do nothing.
Individual action: only changing yourself e.g. ethical consumerism. You’re simply part of a demographic, not a movement.
Non-contentious action: organizing for change, but strictly within the limits of the status quo. e.g. voting in elections. You’re a concerned citizen, but not in a social movement.
Serious social movements end up with collective contentious action. Think of the actions Extinction Rebellion have carried out. Masses of people claiming a public square and bringing the city to halt. Anything that seriously throws a spanner in the works is contentious action – however it may look in practice.
We do get into questions of tactics here. Non-contentious action is a tactic activists will use. What separates an activist from a concerned citizen, is that the activist is willing to engage in contentious action if they think it’s strategically useful. A concerned citizen is too freaked out to go that far.
As an aside: you can also get individual contentious action e.g. lone wolf terrorism. Such acts struggle to form the basis of social change. One person making a short-lived bang is too small to drive the deep changes social movements seek. However, they may catalyze other events e.g. like the self-immolation that sparked the Arab Spring. Those events may have little relation to what the (often now dead) individual was trying to do. I’ll let you decide if contentious inaction is also a thing (maybe ask a hermit? The hippies?).
Back to the psychology.
All that avoidance and powerless we looked at previously pushes people to inaction. Therefore, to get to action they need to undergo some change process, as we’ve looked at here. One that involves empowerment.
Getting to collective action requires more change – you need to experience both cognitive and emotional liberation. You need to see and feel that these problems aren’t just some personal flaw. The world needs to change. You can change it.
Chances are this process will involve breaking some aspect of your worldview, including deep unconscious emotional schemas. Most people have been socialized into accepting the status quo as good, natural, or at least unchangeable. If this wasn’t true the social order would collapse. Therefore, we are looking at some serious worldview and identity changes.
Getting to contentious action requires going further still. More breaking of the intellectual and emotional bonds that bind you to the status quo. In some cases this very much takes on the quality of a religious conversion. A new vision. New friends. A new found solidarity and purpose. The emotional part may be fairly serious too. Profound suffering may have pushed you to this point. Likewise peak positive emotions may be important – discovering a deep love for life and the world which makes accepting injustice intolerable.
Everyone’s path is unique, but this gives a general sense. Some people will have been raised in activist subcultures, so require little change. Others will be starting at the other extreme. The end result: one day, they’ve been transformed into something different than the mainstream. A climate-denier finds himself running a climate action think-tank. A depressed teenager find herself boldly storming a coal mine. A new purpose. A new identity. A new hope for the world. Whatever form that hope may take for them.
Conclusion
That was a lot. Let’s pull out a few common factors:
Context: a lot depends on where people are at. The people around them are an especially big deal.
Emotional and Cognitive, plus Intense: Just emotion, or just ideas seems not to be transformative on their own. Combining them seems to unlock something more powerful, especially when it’s high intensity.
Juxtaposition, Challenge, and Disorientation: Opposites need to come into contact, new ideas and old ideas, contradictory realities and emotions, the breakdown of old patterns. Change by definition means something old giving way to something new.
Encounter and Engagement: The person has to be held in contact with the source of their change. They’ve had to do something new, meet someone new, think new thoughts. This needs to happen in the first place, then be given time to play out.
Pull it all together, and we undergo that curious life experience – becoming someone new. For climate change, all these processes have potential to lift people out of the general mass, and set them on a new course. Who and how many people this happens to will decide the future of our world.
WRITING PROMPTS
Take a character. 1) Give them a bad behaviour you’d like to change. 2) Choose a new behaviour you’d like them to switch to. 3) Walk them through a scene were “nudges” shift them on to this new track.
Take a character. 1) Give them an unconscious schema you’d like to change. 2) Choose a new more truthful schema you’d like them to switch to. 3) Walk them through a scene were they experience both schemas as being true simultaneously. One schema will collapse.
Take a character. 1) Give them a worldview & identity you’d like to change. 2) Choose a new more truthful worldview & identity. 3) Walk them through a scene were they undergo a conversion experience.
Take a character who feels overwhelmed and powerless. Write a scene where they break out of this state, and take their first step towards growth through the struggle.
Take a character with a worldview you’d like to change. Write a scene where: 1) They are taken into an extraordinary place 2) experience heightened emotions. 3) Have the established meaning system of their current worldview broken by this experience.
Take a character, and walk them through to the end point of Contentious Collective Action. At every potential off-ramp tempt them (inaction, individual action, non-contentious action). Use the change processes we’ve explored to push them all the way.
Next in this series we’ll look at social psychology.
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