Why don’t we care more about climate change?

Welcome to the climate conversations. I'm your host, julie. You psychologists have found that the mental shortcuts we used to make quick and efficient decisions every day can in fact prevent you from making more sustainable choices. What is it about human psychology that creates deniers, despairs

and doers. Why is it so hard to get humanity to care enough to do something about climate change compared to other issues such as Covid, my guest today took a deeper dive into these issues and are joining me to share more about what they found out. Edward choi and joe are a married couple and theater actors and they recently hosted a C. N. A documentary. Who cares about polar bears on this very topic. Welcome to you both have you you all work in theater

acting hosting. And when you were approached to be part of this documentary about climate change and not only climate change, but this whole psychological aspect of it. What was your reaction Ed? So I think the first was genuine pleasant surprise because

we are much better known for other things. So I was immediately like yes, I've absolutely got to do this because I'm the one at home who's completely obsessed with making sure the lights are switched off and that all the doors are closed when we've got air conditioning on. I'm hardcore that way,

it was very obvious. I mean, I'm the one who tells that we should really be taking more public transport, but I have to say the first reaction I got when we were asked to host this was guilt because I think a lot of singaporeans as included do feel that we're not doing enough for the environment. We posted

Children for the environment. I would definitely not say so, but I think this documentary was actually a great way to help us across this huge psychological gulf that, you know, just because you cannot be the only person to single handedly rescue Mother Earth from the brink of collapse. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't start somewhere. Absolutely. Your documentary really explores why our brains make it difficult to take action as climate change.

The intro even wanted to say that climate change is said to be the worst problem for the human psyche to handle. So let's get deeper into that. Why aren't people worried or doing enough despite the rhetoric about doom and gloom messages? What are some of the key factors I found? I think we explored a whole bunch of psychological barriers. I mean, what was it we called cognitive descendants? Right, So it's what we know about something,

but we don't act on it. And some of these examples would be hyperbolic discounting and that just means that okay I'm more focused on for example spending less today to get a product with a higher carbon footprint than thinking about the long term consequences of what I do. If I encourage this company to produce more

of these things, it just seems very far away. This this whole psychological distance, human beings are really, really stubborn when people are told heart disease patients are told that they must change their lifestyles in order not to die. Only one in seven heart patients are able to do so and so this is literally a life or death decision. As joe has said, there are all these things that companies normally use that they know work on our brains to manipulate it to sell us things.

Those same things can be used to help convince us to change our behavior so that we can do a bit more for the environment and maybe slow things down a little. Yeah, there's absolutely reason for hope and but sadly I'm sure what did you guys just said bring true for many people listening to the podcast who know that climate change is happening, the impacts are bad and only gonna get worse. So they make minor changes but overall continue to live

a sort of a typical high carbon lifestyle. So to find out more about your psychological tendencies, you both have run multiple social experiments on this documentary out of all of them, what are some of the things that we found most surprising? Okay, so one of the experiments that I led was actually in a little cafe in Mediacorp itself. We had this survey where we ask people, okay, so this is a $4 cup of coffee and this other cup of coffee is $6 but

it has a much lower carbon footprint. And we asked people what they would choose and almost every single person went for the $4 cup of coffee. So that wasn't surprising to me. You know, it's a very singaporean thing to do, I would say. But another very singaporean result was that when we tied in a free reusable mug to the $6 cup of coffee. Then people were like, oh you know what I do like that, I will go for that bearing in mind that it is friendlier for climate change and I get

a free gift, that's what we should go for. And I was just thinking, wow, that's it. We really are suckers for free gifts. And I actually tried that on myself, interesting. So you were talking about people's tendency to evaluate costs, benefits and we prefer to go for immediate benefits and delay cost. Is that what you're saying? Totally. Yeah, it's called hyperbolic discounting. But yes, yours is a much more understandable way of putting it.

One thing I also noticed about one of the experiments that you conducted, it was on psychological distance, how we sort of tune out climate change from my conversations or actions when the problem seems far away abstract irrelevant. Tell me about that. What you found out. Thanks for asking that question because it's completely related to the title of the show. We don't care about polar bears because the only one we've ever had here passed away a few years ago, but now there's no polar bear

to look at. When people tell us about polar bears literally halfway across the world, how does it relate to me in my everyday experience? However, when we tell people, hey, this relates to Singapore for you or for your Children, that Singapore is going to be harder to live in for yourself or your kids, that helps us latch onto ways in which we can get the message across me

here and now. Right. And I guess it's tougher for a lot of us here in Singapore because we're sort of insulated from the worst effects of climate change we often don't talk or worry about. And another sort of theory that you guys dealt with what it's called? Bystander effect, joe explained to me how this sort of psychological phenomenon applies to So I'm gonna

use Ed as a bad example, sorry, Ed. I mean, like a lot of the times, like during this interview, he was saying that corporations manipulate people corporations do these corporations do that. So bystander effect is, for example, when you assume that somebody else is going to do something because everybody knows about it and it's an easy thing for us to just go, well, you know, the corporations are causing a lot of this climate change, corporations need to fix this, what can I do?

But the fact is that everybody can make a difference and when bystander effect kicks in, sometimes people forget that they can be the person to make the difference. Suppose one way that we learn to kind of hack our brains is to, I don't know it, I suppose just really just take

more responsibility for it. You know, I mean what I said and I'm not very healthy for a marriage, but hopefully it's better for the environment, you know, I mean, So that's not so much bystander effect as what we also studied, which was in group out group like, hey everybody is doing this so you should do that too. And I'm just really Nagy to add sometimes and it's Nagy the same way to me and that way we

can hold each other accountable. I hope for real joe has gotten me to stop taking plastic bags from the supermarket, which is a big deal.

Because as consumers, we have such power. Right. What I personally do is that I have stopped buying any clothing that is not secondhand because I do find that waste from the clothing industry has been proven to be so damaging and it's increasingly becoming a priority for consumers in Singapore and beyond where they don't want to keep supporting unsustainable fashion. And that just pressures the people who are coming up with this fashion to go like, okay, we have to

change our behavior, consumers have power. We need to generate their grounds well, so that there's enough of us to make a change on my side because as you can tell, I'm quite obsessed with the idea that Corporates have to change in order for there to be meaningful change for the planet. I'm also financial literacy advocate and as part of investing, I would encourage everyone to look into E. S. G. A lot of people here straightaway, this switch goes off in their head.

It's nonsense. It's ridiculous. It's just another thing they use to make you invest in them. But that said there have been many companies that have been forced to work in ways which are a lot more green. We're talking massive companies making billions of dollars of investments. I would

advise people and this is a deep rabbit hole. You can go into to look for funds that allow you to place your money with activist fund houses or fund managers that will actively pressure the boards of companies to do better for the environment. Yeah, maybe look like a drop in the bucket, but it can become a powerful force. So joe and Ed as a couple. I'm sure there are a lot of

couples who are listening to the podcast. What are some of the ways that you have or will be incorporating sort of climate action into your daily habits after working on this documentary. Oh no, she's asking for commitment, public commitment to commit more behavior now. I think definitely for myself, I'm going to try to switch to Buying everything as possible. 2nd hand. I've also become pesca teary in several years ago just to try to minimize my meat consumption.

I'm gonna go and try to keep pushing onto vegetarian because fish have feelings too. I don't know whether that's true, but I mean you better for the environment. So I'm going to commit to doing that and you guys are doing this as a couple or just, you know, it's it's just me and tell me about your commitments. So instead of buying a car, which we've been thinking about for quite a while, we've discovered that close and very good alternative is actually electric car rental services.

It's cheaper than buying a car. It's not as convenient, but it's definitely better for the environment. Internal combustion engines is the technology. I think that's going to be phased out the Singapore. Government agrees. My issue is that it's not as convenient as it could be. I'm grateful the government is doing their part to just change the infrastructure in Singapore. So I'm praying they will be easier and there'll be more service providers for people

to rent these electric cars. And one of the fun things is that we've discovered how to create a cross wind in our house by opening the right windows so we don't need air conditioning. All right, so two heads obviously better than one and together you can make twice the impact in tackling this global challenge. Alright, so before I let you guys go, if you could change one thing about how most people approach climate change, what would it be?

I think personally for myself I would say really just look into reusing the whole scene now where people gift each other things that you don't have a use for one man's meat is another man's points and there's so many forums, so many outlets, you can do that, you don't need to buy more stuff. My biggest bugbear is people not sorting their recycling. The other day, I saw a taxi driver step out of his taxi and throw his bag of copy that he just finished drinking into the recycling bin,

which ruins the entire bin. By the way, folks, that's the one thing I would really want to change for people. Look, we have single stream recycling, we don't even have to sort it into separate boxes to put them in individually Singapore. Makes it that simple. If people would just stop throwing their used pizza boxes in to the blue bins, I'd be very, very grateful. Alright, great message to end on. Thank you so much for

making it to the end of this episode. I hope you've learned some new tips and how to hack your own psychology and to make more eco friendly choices our planet may just depend on it. But thanks for listening to the climate conversations. The team behind this podcast is Jacqueline, chan, Joanne, chan Tiffany, young and Christina robert and I'm julie you signing off till the next time