4 Heuristics Make Climate Risk Particularly Problematic

<p>2012 Trexler_Changing Nature of Business Climate Risk

The availability heuristic is a way of describing how humans

make judgments. We think we’re rational creatures, using

all available information to make decision. In fact, we make

judgments based on what we best 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

declines, even as the objective likelihood of an earthquake

increases as tectonic stresses increase. The availability heuristic

has major implications for how we think about a risk like climate

change that to date is difficult to differentiate from natural

climate variability.

• 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.25

This bias also interferes with evidence-based risk

perception for a problem like climate change.

• 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 communicating climate

risk in a way that avoids the potential for this bias to interfere.

• ‘Patternicity’ is another cognitive bias with huge implications for

climate risk perception.26

The search for patterns in everything

around us has clear evolutionary benefits, but it is exactly that

kind of pattern-seeking that has helped political discourse get

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, but proposes that much more policy and communications

attention will be needed if these barriers are to be overcome when

addressing climate risk perception and management.</p>