(00:01): 

Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me Trying to keep my footprints small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? 

(00:25): 

Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Dr. Robert Gifford. Robert is a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the University of Victoria. Professor Gifford's Research is at the interface of environmental, social and personality psychology. He's the author of five editions of the textbook, environmental Psychology Principles and Practice and about 150 journal articles and book chapters. Robert was also the chief editor of the Journal of Environmental Psychology from 2002 to 2016. His work has been the focus of numerous articles and interviews and he has presented for the Institute of International and European Affairs as well as the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. Welcome to in Over my head, professor Gifford. 

(01:04): 

Thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here. 

(01:07): 

So in talking about changing minds, I was thinking about the disconnect between knowledge and action. Many of us know more or less what to do to reduce our environmental impact, but so many times we fall short of the ideal. I'm curious if psychology has anything to teach us about why this is the case. Your research focuses on the dragons of inaction, a framework I found intriguing and useful to help navigate this problem and I'm looking forward to discussing them with you. So to start, perhaps you can explain what exactly are the dragons of inaction? 

(01:32): 

Well, let me give a little background. I've been asked this question for 10 or 12 years and I, I'm a bit of a collector anyway. I collect a few different things. So I began collecting the rationalizations that people use justifications. I know I should do this, but in the magic word of course is but, and so what follows? But, and the, the dragons, I've been collecting them now for 10 years or so and there's now 42 of them. It would probably take longer than we have to go into all of them, but we have kind of grouped them into some categories, both in terms of just how they sound and also doing it statistically as well. But part of it's just how we think about the problem, what kinda emotion we have about different things. Some of it has to do with ideologies. Obviously certain ideologies are slow to be active about climate. 

(02:18): 

We're all influenced by other people. So some of the dragons have to do with our friends or family or influencers that we have around us. Other ones have to deal with what we're invested in, not only financially, but in other ways we're kinda stuck with or invested in or decided to do certain things or buy certain things. Some are stuck with kind of a trust issue that they, for whatever reason have low level of trust in government or experts or whatever and have an automatic negative reaction to whatever experts or government People say. Other ones are risk to change what I've been doing could involve one kind or another of risk. And most of us are sort of risk averse. And the last sort of general category is limited behavior. That is basically saying, I think I'm doing enough already when that is the case for some people. I'll get into that later, but for a lot of people doing a little bit is used as a justification for not doing more. So those are the seven dragon genera if you will. 

(03:21): 

Okay, great. Yeah, I think we can maybe try to dive into it as much as we can. Like you said, we may not get to all of them, but we'll try to cover as much as possible. Maybe let's start with the limited cognition. Tell me about some of the dragons within that category. 

(03:33): 

Yeah, there's a lot in that category. I'm thinking there's at least a dozen or so, so I'll just highlight a couple of them. Among those are, you know, the polite word is information deficit, which means I just don't know how to do that behavior. That is a good behavior. A big one is uncertainty. We like to do things when we're pretty sure about something and one of the problems with the natural science, which is very understandable, is we don't always know exactly how many degrees the temperature's gonna rise. Usually there's a confidence interval or something. And we find from our own experiments in my lab that when people see a range, they tend to pick a behavior that goes in the self-serving end of the range. So for example, if the DFOs oceans people say there's between 20 and 40 tons of salmon to be fished, A lot of people say, okay, I guess there's 40 tons of salmon to be fished. 

(04:25): 

Uncertainty facilitates self-interest in terms of climate, but maybe one of the biggest dragons in the whole layer, if you will, the whole cave is a lack of perceived control. I'm only one person, doesn't matter what I do, et cetera. My one liner about that is, so you don't vote either then, right? Because you only get one vote. I think most people say, well even if I don't vote, I get it that we should vote. And so the same logic needs to be applied to climate change that everybody has to do their part. So those are the probably the most important cognition, emotion ones. There's another 10 of them or so that are often used. I'll just mention one more just to fill out that category a little bit, is what I call environmental numbness, which is the idea that sometimes we've heard the message enough times that we start tuning it out like any other ad basically. And of course this is an ad that we shouldn't tune out, but sometimes Oh yeah, I've heard that before. So time to make dinner. 

(05:24): 

Another one actually that was interesting to me was that time is money. Do you want me to just talk a little bit about that one? 

(05:31): 

Yeah. This is a study done at UBC by some colleagues over there. What they found in pretty short simple terms is when people occupy themselves a lot of the time by simply thinking about their monetary situation, their financial situation, they then tend to discount climate change because most money-oriented thinking is not compatible with doing the right thing in terms of the climate. You know, thinking about money too much, you know, we all do have to think about it, but when it's sort of overdone from my perspective, that limits climate action. The other one, if, if you don't mind, that's a pretty big one, is this notion of discounting. That is, if it's far away in the future, we tend to discount its importance. So when an organization comes up with a plan for 2050, a lot of people say, yeah, that's nice, but you know, , I've got a, I've got these other things to do right now and spatial discounting, which is when it's something that happens far away, then we tend to give it less importance and there's a certain rational basis to that. The tendency to discount temporarily and spatially are another important in the cognition or thinking species of dragons. 

(06:43): 

Another category is social comparison. So how does that play into things? 

(06:48): 

Oh, why should I do it? If they're not doing it, why should Canada do it? If China's not doing it, why should I do it if my neighbor's not doing it? This sense of fairness or inequity sometimes is used and of course things may be inequity, maybe your neighbor isn't doing it, but that shouldn't really be used as an excuse when we know what has to be done. So it's when it's used as an excuse. The other one that I like of kind of a baby dragon is my boss made me do it. I had to fly to that conference because my boss requires it. And that's absolutely true sometimes that my boss requires me to travel somewhere to do something. But many times it's actually a choice. I've never seen New Orleans before, I've never been to Paris before. 

(07:34): 

Okay. Yeah. And I guess maybe when I saw that one I thought of just maybe it's difficult to speak up sometimes and stand up for yourself and say, I can't do this because of an environmental reason. Right. When maybe that's not seen as as legitimate. 

(07:46): 

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean sometimes the boss is requiring it and somebody might say, well you shouldn't be requiring me that. That's another side of it. Thank you. 

(07:55): 

Another one that interested me was the sunk cost. Let's talk a bit about that. 

(08:00): 

Yeah, so one of the general is investments. And so what most people think of as the sunk cost is owning resource stocks. And that is definitely an investment, a financial investment that causes what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. I own these stocks but I know they cause climate change. So there's a tension there between what I do and what I think or believe. So a lot of research that goes back decades for other things like smoking and other kinds of behaviors is the tendency to reduce the tension. I either change my behavior or I change my attitude about the consequences of the behavior. And a lot of times if you're sort of addicted or semi, it's easier to change your mind. So I know of a person for example, who's quite well informed about climate change but also owns oil stocks. So what he tends to do is to minimize climate change so that that he can feel better about owning resource stocks. 

(08:58): 

We have other kinds of investments besides financial. One is just basically what we call in terms of jargon, behavioural momentum or the plain language would be habit. We don't really make a decision every day about how to go someplace or what to eat or whatever. It's an old decision that just continues. So we have a sort of investment in terms of habit and another one in that category. That's one of the biggest ones is what I call conflicting goals and aspirations. And this is the idea that yes, we have other important goals, our health, take care of our family, take care of our job, et cetera. Those are completely legitimate concerns or activities or behaviors. They become a dragon when they're used as an excuse when they're not totally necessary. When it goes beyond reasonable use of that excuse, shall we say 

(09:50): 

One within that sunk cost that interests me was the lack of place attachment. Do you wanna talk a bit about that? 

(09:57): 

Yeah. Place attachment is one of the most important topics in modern current environmental psychology in general. And it's the emotional attachment that we have to usually to a, well, it can be to a residence or just a neighborhood or to a town. It can be attachment to a nation or the globe actually. But usually some smaller scale. And most research, there is a few exceptions, but most research shows that when we're attached to a place we wanna take care of it. It's like taking care of your own nest. And so sometimes if people have less or less attached, they just move somewhere they had to move. There's less attachment. If there's less attachment, there's less motivation to take care of it. So I'm more inclined to do the anti-climate kinda actions because I just don't really care about this place. 

(10:46): 

Yeah, I think we could go into the perceived risks. So what are some risks that people use as their dragons? 

(10:51): 

There's at least six of them. You know, it's a bit over now, but in the earlier days of electric vehicles it was with the battery work or not. Should I buy an electric car when I know that gas cars work fine, there's physical risk. If I start riding my bike, what if I have an accident? And I always like to throw in that I've had three broken arms from riding my bike in my lifetime. So there is real risk there. And then there's temporal risk that is goes back to information deficit that is I'm busy, I don't have time to figure out, do the research about how to do this or that. And again, with a lot of the other dragons, I don't mean to say they're absolutely wrong at all. It's only when they are overused or used as an excuse as opposed to being true needs shall we say.

(11:41): 

Yeah, I think that's a good example with your bicycle for instance. So yeah, obviously yes there is a risk to riding your bicycle on the street or on the road, but you're still doing it because it's better for the environment and you know better for your health overall. Right. Yeah. I think the last one that really stuck out for, well there's two that actually stuck out for me. One was in the limited behavior tokenism. Do you wanna talk a little about that? 

(12:02): 

Yeah. Tokenism is the idea that when a person says I've done enough but what I've done is not enough. So you know, the kind of one liner about that is I recycle. So I guess I've done enough for the environment and of course recycling is a good thing, but we all have to do more than recycle if we're gonna get outta this crisis alive so to speak. Tokenism is basically doing a little bit but claiming that that's enough. 

(12:29): 

And probably the last one that we could probably squeeze in under ideology was the techno salvation. Cuz I feel like there's so much information about technology that's going to get us to net zero. How does that factor in? 

(12:42): 

Yeah, that's makes an interesting story. The basic idea is when somebody says I don't have to do anything really because the engineers will do it and I'm the first one to say that the engineers are doing wonderful things with solar panels and electric grids and all kinds of wonderful things. But here's the punchline to that. On my campus engineers came across the quadrangle over and knock on my door and said a lot of the things that we innovate that are gonna be wonderful, we can't get people to buy them or adopt or are right to their MLA or to support them. And so we're doing some great things that aren't happening because they don't have public support. Can you help us with the public support part? ? So that's what psychologists at least think they're good at is devising messages and you know, almost like advertisements for any product to show the public, hey, this new innovation is a good thing, you should support it. 
  
(13:40): 

Yeah, I think that that kind of naturally transitions into maybe some of the solutions. So how can we slay some of those dragons and get rid of those excuses to not act. 

(13:51): 

We still don't know, believe it or not, how many people engage in which kinds of anti-climate things. We environmental psychologists still need to figure out who is doing which of them because if we're going to make a difference, we need to do a lot better targeting of messages and interventions. Oh, it's this group of people who are mostly doing that kind of behavior, so they need this kind of message. So I have what I call the Rubik's cube where instead of a kind of global message for everybody, you should take care of the environment. We need to say have different messages for different behaviors for people who use different kinds of excuses. That's more on, you know, people like me. It's plate rather than the average person's plate. But I, I can jump to more what can you do type of solutions. One is definitely work together with other people. 

(14:46): 

There's nothing more discouraging than being the only person who's trying to do something. So I tell people to look around their social network or workplace for the other people who are trying to do something. So that's definitely one thing is form groups. The other one that I like to tell people is get into the policy process instead of just talking over the dinner table and grumbling. Not everybody wants to run for office, not everybody wants to be a public figure, but we all are part of some social network. We're all part of a neighborhood. We all live on a block or in a building. We don't have to be Greta Thunberg to join in the process. And if you're not in the process, then your voice is not gonna be heard and you might as well be shouting at the moon. It won't help. So join with others but get into some kind of organizational group that's not just your group, but the group is also in your organization, whether it's a low level, small level group or if you do wanna run for office, that's cool too. But a lot of people don't wanna don't wanna go into that level. So those are a couple of things that I often suggest. 

(15:55): 

I wonder like, because these things are psychological, do you find in your work that people have kind of made up their mind cuz they're making these excuses so they're just kind of finding reasons not to do it? Do you find that's the case? 

(16:08): 

Well, yes, definitely not everybody though. I mean I have another organism in my eco menagerie called a mule and the mule is that person who is carrying the load. This is a person who's, who is already pretty much doing everything within her or his power. So one of the other things that I say is to, we should do more rewarding of mules that person down the street that you heard was or in the organization who is really doing pretty much everything, can we at least praise the person? 

(16:42): 

Okay. And so, and maybe I'm wondering if it would be effective to even like write a news article about them or somehow highlight them in the media as well. Do you think that would be an effective way to, to raise awareness about that? 

(16:52): 

I'm gonna tease you a little bit Michael. Hey, you should find a mule to go on your podcast. 

(16:57): 

, right? Yeah, we could just talk about it on our show. Why not ? 

(17:00): 

And there are these people, I mean every time I give a in-person talk that's got 20 or 30 people, they'll say, oh yeah, there's Harold over there in the corner or mod over there in the corner. She's the mule in our, in our organization. And usually these people are quiet, they're not the self-serving get publicity type of person. But yeah, they should get an article, whatever kind of reward is suitable within the context. And then that will of course rewards, you know, as we know in psychology, rewards influence people's behavior. So if she's getting a reward, maybe I can get one too. 

(17:33): 

And, and I know, I think you kind of touched on it earlier, but within your research you said it wasn't exactly clear which of these dragons were more predominant or was it kind of depending on the person? 

(17:45): 

Yeah, I mean just think of it, think of say people, retired people versus students. They're gonna have different dragons and they're gonna be engaging in different behaviors and then you could multiply that out by cultural differences, by income differences, by national differences or you know, other differences. So what we have to do is maximize the effectiveness of our efforts, whether it's in tax dollars or interventions or messages based on who is doing what and what each of those groups' main dragons are. So we have done some surveys and I mean it's not gonna be shocking to say that if you ask a bunch of people what's your main dragon, you're gonna get different answers. And in fact, I have something called the dragon self-diagnosis where across the top you have the main climate impact and down the column you have all the usual excuses. And when I do a talk in person, I ask people to self-diagnosis. You know, what's your main climate sin and what's your main excuse for that? And it's like some other problems like say alcoholism, behavior change starts with recognizing that you do have a problem rather than just saying, I'm not a very good environmental citizen. Well in which way and why ? So start by diagnosing yourself 

(19:00): 

, I'm not sure if this is part of your research, but have you followed up with people down the road and to see if they've, if they've actually made some positive changes in their life once they've identified what dragons are theirs? 

(19:12): 

Actually we have I don't probably want to go into gory detail right here, but I have a model called the theory of behavioral choice and it includes some dragons, some intentions, then some behaviors, and then that's modified by both dragons or psychological barriers. But also sometimes by structural barriers that is sometimes people really truly cannot do something. Some people cannot ride a bike because of some physical disability. We have done a few studies about food and transportation and then identifying which dragons have the most impact on the gap between I intend to change my diet or I intend to do some transportation. And we've learned that even across people there's different dragons for different behaviors, say food change, diet change and transportation. 

(20:01): 

One thing I was kind of curious about, Robert, you've been doing this work quite a while. Have you noticed kind of an evolution in how people are talking about climate change and maybe the various excuses they might be using, if that makes sense? 

(20:15): 

I don't wanna claim that I've made any great difference myself. Well the article on the Dragons is, okay, I, I'll be egotistical for one sentence is the most cited article in American psychologist for the last 10 years. And that's for across all areas of psychology. But I still don't think I've made that much of a difference. But some other people who do opinion polling definitely suggest that more people are talking about climate change, more people are trying, et cetera. There's some a group at Yale for example that does big frequent surveys and they notice all kinds of changes happening in terms of at least people being concerned about it. Just think about it, how much climate change talk was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Some natural scientists were, have been working on it longer than that. But it sort of became a thing when Al Gore came out with an Inconvenient Truth. I think that was the tipping point and it's gotten only better since then. But , if I can finish by saying this, a lot of people are thinking about it, but still a lot of people aren't doing enough yet maybe cause of these dragons. 

(21:17): 

This show is about empowering assistance to take action on the climate crisis and it's kind of come out in our discussion, but if people are looking to slay those dragons and make fewer excuses, where can they start? 

(21:27): 

Well, the first thing is that not everybody has equal agency. So some people are able to do more than others. And I like to think that the problem was caused by 8 billion people making decisions every day. But we tend to think of people like ourselves. But there are people who, for poverty reasons or other reasons, can't make many changes. And people in some less developed countries, even if they tried, they couldn't make a difference. On the other hand, you have people who are shareholders, board members, CEOs, who could do a lot by making a few simple improvements in their own life and in their company or organization. So all that to say, figure out what you're able to do and do it and know that that's a good thing even if you don't change the planet yourself. 

(22:18): 

Great. Well, this has been a very interesting conversation, Professor Gifford. Thanks so much for coming on the show. 
  
(22:23): 

Well, you're welcome Michael. Thank you very much for asking. 

(22:27): 

Well, that was my talk with Professor Gifford. What really stood out for me in his work in general was the dragons themselves. And even though they're psychological things that we can't see, he's really brought them to life. And I really appreciate that. And just identifying areas where people make excuses so we can stop making excuses and start making changes. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In Over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible. 

(23:08): 

I'm trying to save the planet or will someone please save me.