Climatic change : Cognitive science for it’s perception
Climatic change is a fact admitted by the higher authorities, national and international, and which is mobilizing a lot of people in associations, NGO, foundations… The anthropogenic origin of this phenomenon is more and more explained and justified, but it appears that people have difficulties to admit, and to perceive the risk it’s representing.
This is calling to a better representation and explanation of the phenomena, in order to develop the perception of the risks linked to it. This enhancement need first an understanding of the cognitive, psychologist and sociologist facts at stakes around this problem.
Climate change is a systemic phenomenon which need a “complex cognition”
First there is a need of defining some of the ideas developed here. The cognition can be define as a range of mental processes which are allowing and structuring knowledge for a person. There a lot of function in those processes, like memory, language, perception, movement… Emotions seem to be strongly linked to those processes.
We will talk of cognitive vulnerability when the subject doesn’t have the required information/knowledge, nor the information treatment needed to understand correctly the phenomena he is experiencing.
Complex cognition is, in opposition to the basics cognitive processes, what make the humans able to use logical links for information and representations get by the individual, and what is giving access to reasoning and problems solving. Those processes are linked to the local culture (education, memory, classification…). Mankind develop those reasoning tools to face complex problems, like the climatic variations. But this reasoning capacity is limited by the calculus and cognitive capacities. All this make the complex system that is the climate hard to comprehend for the human, because of the many interactivity between the variable and reactive cycles, and of the many uncertainty.
Studies on climatic change perception
Several studies had been made to understand the role of cognition in human adaptation to climate change and the role that cognitive psychology can play in this field. Among those study can be cited the Note n°5 de la FEP [1] and the work of A. Lammel [2].
Those studies aimed to define the perception of climatic risk of people living in places with different exposition to those risks. The questions asked to those population were about their representation, categorization, understanding, spatial and temporal cognition and the solution of the problem. The interviews took place in metropolitan France (Paris, Alps, Ile de Ré) and in the overseas (Guyana, New Caledonia). The total number of interview is more than 800.
Several quotation and data are given in the work of A. Lammel [2], and the results show that the cultural environment influence the perception of climatic change. One of the criteria was the existence of mankind as a possible victim of this change, feel by the population living in less urban places, like the Guyana, where the temperature is more stable (around 27°C, with very small variation along the year. The idea of an addition of 2°C to that temperature was really bad for the inhabitant) or in the Alps (where the effects of climatic change are already visible on the glaciers and landslides). People living in Paris had a far more distant and simple analysis of the change, associating the climate to only the weather, and without saying that their life could be impact by this change.
It seems that the “Psycho-physiologist” obstacles are one of the main difficulties for people to perceive the climatic change [1]. As said before, the individual in France are use to a big variability in everyday temperature (between 7.1°C and 9.4°C per day), which is a problem for the individual physiologist perception of the 2°C objective of 2050. As the philosopher Dominique Bourg [3] said: “The drama of the environmental questions is that the difficulties we are confronted with today aren’t perceptible with our senses”. Usually when a danger is present, our senses make us able to see/feel it. And then a reaction is put in places by the brain activity, to avoid the pain. But when this problem is presented through the media, and describing the problem as something concerning only the polar bear, people have difficulties to feel concerned and responsible about it.
The question of the uncertainty
A problem of the climate study is that it is a dynamic (chaotic) system, and the uncertainty of this system, and of the human system. Which led the IPCC report to give several scenarios about the future of the planet. That had to the proliferation of simplification tools about climate is provoking contradictory information and the transmission of many uncertainties.
Cognitive sciences are speaking about a “paradox in precision”. Research has shown that people relied more on information with a small interval, even if the ones with the largest interval are usually the fairer.
The vocabulary used to describe scientific data can be also misunderstood, depending on the expectancy around it or the possible consequences. Some words as “highly probable” or “less plausible” drive the lector to an uncertain field.
Those cognitive obstacles might have behaviour consequences: favouring or blocking the individual mobilization and the comportment change.
Bibliography
[2]Lammel Annamaria, Dugas Emilie et Guillen Gutierrez Elisa, « L’apport de la psychologie cognitive à l’étude de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques : la notion de vulnérabilité cognitive », VertigO — la revue électronique en sciences de l’environnement [En ligne], Volume 12 Numéro 1 | mai 2012, mis en ligne le 29 mai 2012, consulté le 02 décembre 2015. URL : http://vertigo.revues.org/11915 ; DOI : 10.4000/vertigo.11915
[3] Climat : le thermomètre et le philosophe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Z9sjVmj7c
[4]IPCC report : https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SummaryVolume_FINAL_FRENCH.pdf
