🔋Marshmallow Size Elephant In The Room

You care about climate because your personality says so

Mar 23, 2022

Press the heart symbol if you enjoy! :)

Why do some people care more about the climate than others?

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was an important step in the development of the theory of delayed gratification. The gist is that kids could either take one marshmallow now, or wait for an unknown time and receive two marshmallows. It is hilarious watching kids try to maintain composure and resist the urge to eat it.

In the original study and the many that would soon follow, it was found that children could wait longer if they did not have to look at the marshmallow (they suppressed/avoided the present marshmallow, NOT that they simply wanted two instead of one as previously thought). In addition, kids who were better at delaying gratification showed better overall competence, better SAT scores, and different brain activity later in life.

Climate change is clearly an important issue regarding the future of the planet and future quality of life. When I first thought about why people are so divided on the issue, I thought the conscientiousness personality trait (discussed further down) would be a good predictor of climate change support. It is a good predictor of how likely people will be willing to sacrifice the present for the future. If its our future well-being in question, then surely conscientious people who are more willing to sacrifice the present for the future will be the ones worried about climate change… right?

Who cares about personality?

Have you ever thought about your personality? Over the last two years I’ve learned about personality traits and how they impact behaviors and actions. Becoming aware of this has really changed my perspective on the world, but specifically about people and why we all act the way we do. We are crazy creatures after all who fight, laugh, and love (sometimes all with the same people). I have realized that so many disagreements and challenges we face are rooted in personality differences, and only if we could be understanding of each others differences we could all get along better. Maybe wishful thinking, idk…

Personally, I have realized that my own behavior had been stifled by this lack of understanding. Furthermore, understanding myself and my own predisposed tendencies helped me understand what situations I struggle with. This ultimately allows me to keep trying to be a better person by working on aspects of myself that make me uncomfortable. I truly believe that personality differences make us stronger. Having others around to see the world in a different light keeps us sane and keeps our dumb ideas at bay, because by ourselves we know frighteningly little. Surrounding ourselves with like-minded people may be comfortable and advantageous in certain settings, but probably boring and counterproductive in the long run.

Big 5

Personality is split into what is known as the “Big 5 Model”. Psychologists have basically filtered down how we are into these five main categories. Literature has shown that they are good predicters of things like academic success, job performance, social status, health, romantic success, and political attitudes.

Extraversion
- Assertiveness - Things like taking charge or speaking up. Also likelihood to dominate social interactions, captivate or influence others, and lead.
- Enthusiasm - How much social contact one can handle, quiet vs bubbly, love vs hate the spotlight, and difficulty in which one generates excitement.
Neuroticism
- Volatility - Likelihood to show frustration, irritation, and negative emotions in general.
- Withdrawal - Has to do with anxiety and how one handles threatening or unknown situations. How prone to sadness, grief, self-consciousness, etc.
Agreeableness
- Compassion - How oriented one is to other people or living things, likelihood to like conflict/competition, concern with helping others, empathy, and likelihood to put others before themselves.
- Politeness - How comfortable one is with confrontation vs obedience, how likely one has deference to authority or respect someone else
Conscientiousness
- Industriousness - Has to do with willingness to work hard, be busy vs sit around, likelihood to finish what they start and put things off.
- Orderliness - Cleanliness, think in terms of good vs bad/black vs white, organization, disgust sensitivity.
Openness to Experience
- Intellect - Not IQ. It is the interest in abstract ideas, new information, eagerness to tackle new challenges.
- Openness - Has to do with creativity and interest in music, art, aesthetics, and beauty.

All of these parameters are a spectrum and where you fall on each category can predict to a good extent what someone is like. Super orderly people hate messes and are disgusted at things more easily. Super agreeable people are very kind/caring, but more likely to get taken advantage of by disagreeable people. Extrovert/introvert and neuroticism are basically how much positive and negative emotion one feels. Really open people are the super talented artists or the founders of innovative companies.

Climate Attitude

I think it would be naïve to deny that some people are temperamentally more likely to believe that we should should do everything possible not to harm the planet for future generations, while others in contrast are more likely to say screw the planet and live it up in the present. The reality is that the majority of people lay somewhere in between just like most things.

My original predication was that conscientiousness would predict supporting climate attitudes. Like the marshmallow experiment showed, these people are willing to sacrifice the present for future, tend to have no problem saving money, be patient and wait for a better opportunity, and follow through with something that they said they were going to do. Conscientiousness is the one of the best predictors of life success in a stable society along with motivation and IQ, and conscientious types are generally hard-working, organized, and mindful of the future. What does the literature say?

While technically I wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t the most noteworthy trait. The figures below show climate attitudes (top) vs climate behaviors (bottom). Attitudes involve one’s favor toward the environment, whereas behaviors involve someone’s actions that impact the environment. The best predictor was openness, followed by agreeableness, and then conscientiousness. Extraversion was only significant in the behaviors section.

Details are in the caption following the image

Openness is the largest predictor and this makes sense intuitively. Someone more open and interested in abstract ideas and new information is willing to see issues and want to solve them. Agreeable people tend to be super caring and it seems like these sympathetic and altruistic folks are more interested in climate change since it is the second best personality predictor. In terms of conscientiousness, industriousness seems to be a good predictor with orderliness less-so. It’s probably the people who view climate change as a challenge that we can work hard to overcome or view it as their duty who make up this correlation. Orderly people tend to see things more black and white and may not see renewable energy a clear path forward so there is some variation within the main category of conscientiousness. As far as extraversion is concerned, I assume it is people who are more keen to take action and get excited about things that are going to actually behave different about the environment.

Political Connection

I mentioned earlier that political attitudes can be predicted in some part due to personality which is fascinating [1,2,3]. The right/left are separated to a large extent due to psychological reasons based on needs to limit uncertainty and threats. Today, liberals and conservatives differ most in conscientiousness and openness to experience. They average the same agreeableness, but differ in the sub-category. Liberals tend to be less orderly, more open, more compassionate, and slightly less assertive. Conservatives on the other hand tend to be more orderly, less open, more polite, and slightly more assertive. I sometimes wonder how many political arguments come down to people just being different.

Another paper looked into the connection between political attitude and climate change. They found that the idea of tolerance of ambiguity (TA) was significant in correlating political orientation and climate change.

Why would low TA individuals be more likely to deny climate change? Bochner (1965) characterized TAs as having “a preference of familiar over unfamiliar” and “rejection of the unusual or the different” (p. 394). Science concerning anthropogenic climate change is fairly new which may push low TA individuals towards more familiar explanations like the earth warming due to natural fluctuations in the weather. It is also possible low TA people reject scientific explanations because they tend to be complex and lack definitive conclusions. Scientists communicate in terms of available evidence and probabilities which may, because of its ambiguous nature, be repellent to low TA individuals

They basically found that people with low TA were more likely to deny climate change and be conservative. Climate change is newer, not a clear and straightforward path forward, there are various alternatives for energy and sustainability, the traditional way of doing things has afforded us a better life, and many developing and confusing technologies are involved lead me to suspect that these are main reasons why conservatives tend to care less about climate issues.

This matches the real world as well since conservatives and liberals tend to be on opposing sides of the environmental debates. It also makes sense based on personality of political orientation and climate change. More open/creative, more industrious than orderly, and more compassionate people who are likely liberal are also the ones more worried about the climate. This is a striking overlap in personality in the two categories and explains why the political divide falls the way it does.

So who is right? I don’t think either side is uniquely right in the fact that there are reasons that both sides think as they do. It is true that energy through fossil fuels has brought us immense wealth and prosperity. It is a clear cut, tried and true method to provide energy security and safety. On the flip side there are sustainability issues with the trajectory we are on and people are very creative to solve climate problems that by nature of things have never been done before.

Renewable energy sources vs traditional mining for power — Thomas

The beautiful dichotomy

Energy is life and ingenuity is the backbone of our human progression. There is always a dichotomy between old/new, meaning there is a cycle in which we are always replacing broken legacy systems with new ideas and then those new ideas become the legacy systems. When is it time to give up creating new ideas and go with something that works? When does a corrupt system need to be replaced by something new? A number of the papers I went through were discussing ways to convince climate skeptics and strategies to leverage personality to try to get people to see things in a pro-climate way.

In my opinion, it should be less about making people believe, as this is teetering the line of propaganda. We should find solutions with evidence to back them up that are practical and realistic, while having an honest portrayal of the energy picture to maintain the wealth and prosperity we have accumulated. People care about the past, people care about the future, so finding clear and practical ways forward with evidence and not vilifying things/people that have worked in the past should be a more productive way forward.

Much of the green movement is about demonizing the fossil fuel industry and shutting it down now, and at all costs. On this vein there is much propaganda about climate change which I only see as counterproductive (yes of course there has been a lot of lobbying/propaganda supporting fossil fuels too). Yes, there will always be people that don’t believe new things until those very things turn into the legacy system. Demonizing a way of life only possible through fossil fuels will not help convince conservatives to care, just like limiting research/denying problems will not convince the liberals.

Our personalities are a beautiful reflection of the dichotomy of old/new, death/rebirth, stability/novelty. Each side of the political and climate debates are fundamentally different people based on personality. People find this infuriating and fight the other side often with much vigor. It is an epic battle in which both sides are equally necessary. “Don’t destroy what working things we have vs get rid of this old corrupt way of being”. I think an understanding that people are temperamentally different is so important to finding the true solutions that help move society forward. Instead of political opponents/people on the other side of the climate debate being the countervailing enemy, they are actually super helpful. Through discussion and debate we create better ideas after challenging and criticizing them, and what comes out of the mess is hopefully a better way forward.

The person that disagrees with you is often your biggest supporter.

-Grayson

Leave a like and let me know what you think!

If you haven’t already, follow me at twitter @graysonhoteling and check out my latest thread.