Perceiving Climate Risks - How Our Brains Interfere

Climate risk has been a source of active discussion for 25 years; yet clear policy to address the climate change problem has yet to appear. It is easy to attribute this failure to the “tragedy of the commons,” the existence of economic externalities, or the political influence of fossil fuel interests. But research over the last 20 years has also opened a growing window of investigation into the role of human decision making in how we perceive and respond to different kinds of risks.[i] It is increasingly clear that the human brain operates to the detriment of logical and rational thinking when it comes to complicated problem-solving.

One explanation of this is that human society, and the nature of the problems we are trying to address, has evolved more quickly than the physical capacity of our brains to understand and respond to risk. As Daniel Kahneman put it in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, humans suffer from the “what you see is all there is” (WYSIATI) phenomenon. WYSIATI theory suggests that human decision making is based primarily on Known Knowns, namely phenomena we have already observed, and rarely considers Known Unknowns. Most importantly, human decision making appears almost oblivious to the possibility of Unknown Unknowns, including the kinds of climate change tipping points discussed above.

Brief profiles of specific cognitive biases are introduced below, with short discussions as to how they are potentially relevant to perceptions of climate risk.

• The availability heuristic is a way of describing how humans make judgments. We think we’re rational creatures, using all available information. But rather, we make judgments based on what we remember, which tends to be very recent experiences. Thus, in the days or weeks after a major earthquake homeowners will flock to buy earthquake insurance. Over time, the number of people buying earthquake insurance or preparing emergency supplies declines, even as the objective likelihood of an earthquake increases as tectonic stresses increase. The availability heuristichas major implications for how we think about a risk like climate change.

• The optimism bias is used to describe the human tendency to expect things to turn out better than data-supported forecasting may suggest. Regardless of the data presented, we tend to believe that the future will be much better than the past. The bias holds true across ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Taken collectively, people can grow pessimistic about world economies or the future of their country, but individually, they will tend to believe their lives will get better.^[ii] This bias also interferes with evidence-based risk management behaviors.

• The “neglect of probability” bias is another bias that kicks in under conditions of uncertainty, based on the difficulty our brains have in working with probabilities. In a field like climate change, as data intensive as it is, the “neglect of probability bias” suggests that much more focus needs to be made on describing climate risk in a way that avoids this bias.

• “Patternicity” is another cognitive bias with huge implications for climate risk perception.[iii] The search for patterns in everything around us has clear evolutionary benefits, but it is that kind of pattern-seeking that makes it so difficult to agree upon and manage climate risk today, as opposed to getting bogged down in debates of whether climate change is or isn’t already happening.

This short review just scratches the surface of the risk perception and risk management implications of cognitive biases as suggested in recent research.