Instruction: Read the passage given below carefully and answer the questions that follow.
Can you teach an old society new tricks? We’re often told that people are voting with their feet and their wallets for the world as it is. But people are not voting. They’re playing a game in which the dice of day-to-day decision making are hugely loaded, reinforcing the carbon atrophied economic structures around us. Habits of over-consumption that push our excessive carbon emissions run deep. They are locked into our subsidised, car-biased transport system, our cheap-flights holiday culture and the numbing complexity that confronts us if we want to give our homes a green makeover.
More fundamentally, we live in a culture that defines us first and foremost as material ‘consumers.’ We’ve become locked-in as carbon emitters on three sides: surrounded by physical, economic and cultural infrastructure that gives most individuals precious little carbon room for manoeuvre. In terms of physical infrastructure, decisions to go ahead with new large, centralised coal and nuclear power stations (which aren’t, by the way, carbon free) lock-in huge energy inefficiencies that the individual can do little to effect. Economically, price signals don’t work because they exclude climate-costs. For example, Network Rail recently sent 200 workers to a meeting by road rather than rail because they deemed the train too expensive. Almost the whole of economic policy is geared toward growth and promoting energy intensive material consumption. Culturally, we are constantly and disproportionately prompted to behave primarily as self-absorbed consumers, and only remotely as engaged, publicly-minded citizens. Worse still, work on the psychology of how we make ‘free choices’ suggests that we dramatically over-estimate the role and potential of individual free will to make the necessary big, changes.
Flights that are cheaper than railway journeys, car upgrades subsidised by the taxpayer, and a government publicly committed to airport expansion – it’s hardly surprising that many individuals are unmoved, or at best confused, when exhorted to cut their emissions. The dirty secret of Britain’s official approach to getting individuals to cut emissions is that the government wants to have its carbon cake, and eat it too. The mixed message sent is deeply de-motivating for the general public, especially when getting people to behave differently is up against so much else. It is not the case that we have no free will. Thankfully we do. But decades of research show that it is psychologically expensive to employ. For the vast majority of our actions, as a result, we take prompts from the world around us: from other people, from culture, from advertising, and our own habits. Here is the biggest obstacle to change. These factors guide our behaviour, inform our identity and even effect how our brains work. It is a vastly under-estimated dynamic.
Take what psychologists call ‘stereotype activation.’ In one brilliant study, a group of people were subtly primed with words relating to the stereotype of being elderly. Compared to a separate control group, they then began to exhibit stereotypical behaviour for old age. They walked more slowly and actually became more forgetful. What does this mean for our crisis of over-consumption and carbon emissions? Recently, doing research to deliver a lecture for the Schumacher Society, I counted two things during a normal working day. First, I added up every advert I saw that encouraged me to be a materialist and consumer. Second, I clocked every message that prompted my behaviour as a public-spirited citizen, who might, for example, take action on climate change.
