Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (29 page)

I’d probably notice it but : at the same point if yo:u ::: [wanted that product then :: you probably buy it anyway]
₍₃₂₎
::: and obviously [if they were next to each other]
₍₃₃₎
:: [and it was obvious]
₍₃₄₎
that [one was good and]
₍₃₅₎
[one was bad]
₍₃₆₎
[then you’d go for :::
[
the good one
]
]
₍₃₇₎

There has been very little research until recently on the phenomenology or the experience of holding discrepant explicit and implicit attitudes, one notable exception being an interesting paper by Rydell, McConnell and Mackie (2008), who measured the consequences of holding discrepant explicit and implicit attitudes towards a person (‘Bob’). They found that one consequence of this was that when the implicit/explicit discrepancy was greater, dissonance or discomfort was aroused within the individual. In other words, people do not like being in this psychological state. Interestingly, it also had an effect on subsequent information processing such that the more discrepant the implicit and explicit attitudes actually were, the more the individuals then focused on information relevant to the object or concept.

In the gestural analyses we have just seen, we see for the very first time an identifiable behavioural manifestation of a
discrepancy between implicit and explicit attitudes that may well help to promulgate a sense of unease or discomfort within the individual concerned. The conscious medium of speech and the unconscious medium of gesture seem to be at odds with one another; perhaps the individuals themselves can sense this behavioural clash and this might be the kind of thing that was reflected in gesture 37. This is a new hypothesis that could be worth testing.

Let me try another one. There is a good deal of evidence (from Festinger 1957 and others) that when people are pressurised to say things that are at odds with their underlying beliefs, they may change their underlying beliefs to align themselves with their behaviour because of cognitive dissonance. If you subscribe to this theoretical point of view, then one way of changing underlying attitudes to the environment is to get people to espouse green attitudes, in effect to get them to tell you how they would make green choices in supermarkets. The theory predicts that (through time) their underlying attitudes would change to match what they have been saying.

But suddenly for the first time we see that things may not be quite as simple as that. When people espouse green attitudes and when this is at odds with their unconscious implicit attitudes, they still have a form of overt communicative behaviour at their disposal (namely, gesture) to communicate their real attitude. Festinger and others analysed only talk itself. In 1957, we did not understand that there is something additional to words that can communicate our ideas and thoughts. So one interesting and important question becomes: when individuals espouse attitudes that are not congruent with their underlying beliefs (because they have been explicitly asked to, or have implicitly felt the social pressure to do this), but where they make these gestural movements that are congruent with their underlying, implicit attitude (like Andrew and Sarah), does this actually prevent a shift in underlying belief state? I think we have a new idea that could run and run in psychology!

The material that we have just been considering is entirely novel research and shows for the first time that when people openly and explicitly espouse green attitudes at
odds with those attitudes that they hold unconsciously and implicitly, then we can find behaviour manifestations of this clash. These gesture–speech mismatches are not that common (with a frequency perhaps similar to slips of the tongue), but they do seem to indicate the unconscious slipping through into their observable behaviour.

There are a number of significant implications of this particular bit of research. The first is that what people tell us about their attitude to the environment and what consumer choices they will actually make may, on occasion, be a valuable resource for researchers, but on other occasions people may tell us one thing while their unconscious gestural movement may tell quite a different (and more accurate) story. Therefore, it may be wrong, in research on green issues, to focus
exclusively
on what people say. Explicitly people may want to save the planet, explicitly people may want to appear green, explicitly (and almost certainly) people may want to appear considerate and nice, but implicitly they may care a good deal less. And given that it is these implicit attitudes that direct and control much of our spontaneous and non-reflective behaviour in supermarkets and elsewhere, these are the attitudes that we have to pursue and understand and change.

The second implication is that there does appear to be a dissociation between explicit and implicit attitudes. There does appear to be a conscious mind and an unconscious one. The unconscious mind may not be governed in quite the way that Freud had thought (obsessed with sexual gratification and the libido), but it is there and it does impact on our everyday behaviour. It affects the way we shop, how we talk, how we move, how we gesture, and it can even produce visible signs of discomfort as we speak (with odd, uncertain hand movements and strange, incomplete intonation), sometimes leaving us all a little puzzled: even the green fakers themselves, even me.

The implication of all of this for those wishing to do something about climate change should be clear. It is not sufficient to rely on explicit measures of attitude to low-carbon-footprint products and make assumptions about how easy it will be to change consumer behaviour as a result
of providing carbon footprint information (as some others have done: see Downing and Ballantyne 2007). Rather, a significant proportion of individuals have implicit attitudes that are discrepant with their explicit attitudes and this may have significant implications for their ‘green’ choices. And, on occasion, when you analyse the talk of such individuals you can see the unconscious implicit attitudes of these individuals, so rigidly held and so deeply suppressed, suddenly and unexpectedly revealing themselves as the speaker lays out his or her apparently green agenda. Their sudden appearance seems to surprise everyone, even sometimes the speakers themselves.

So there are green fakers out there, sometimes with odd discrepant body language, who say one thing but believe something different. And in these individuals you can sometimes see their iconic gestural representations go one way as their speech goes another. We need to produce a fundamental change in attitude towards the environment in these people if we are going to change their behaviour towards low-carbon-footprint products (on the assumption that their underlying implicit attitudes are a better predictor of many of the relevant forms of behaviour, including supermarket shopping with all its inherent pressures, than their explicit attitudes). Merely providing carbon footprint information to such individuals (including myself, let’s not forget) will currently not necessarily do very much.