Cultivating a culture for climate action

Confronting the climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues of our time. The cause demands unprecedented levels of cooperation and collaboration from a world that seems more divided than ever. So, do we have the capacity to cooperate at the level required to change our trajectory?

Professor Quentin Atkinson believes the field of psychology has a lot to contribute to the conversation, but he is cautious about the potential for simplistic recommendations, recognising there is still so much we don’t know.

He studies human cultural variation and the evolution of human culture. He is particularly interested in aspects of culture that help people cooperate and coordinate, like language, religion and political ideology.

His current research is specifically concerned with how these subjects apply to climate action, noting that despite being widely acknowledged in mainstream media and politics for decades and many initiatives and international agreements, progress toward tackling the climate crisis has been remarkably slow.

His research disputes claims that humans are not evolved or are inherently equipped to deal with the climate crisis and highlights how cultural diversity may be key to solving the climate crisis.

While on sabbatical in New York, Atkinson and NYU Associate Professor Jennifer Jacquet uncovered some interesting insights.

The pair produced a literature review challenging the validity of more than two dozen claimed psychological biases or barriers to tackling climate change. They pushed back on claims that evolution has left humans particularly ill-equipped to tackle climate change, which Atkinson says are “based on empirical evidence that is weak or doesn’t necessarily translate to the real world.”

Atkinson believes these claims aren’t just inaccurate but may even be dangerous, perpetuating misinformation.

Counter to claims that humans are better suited to short-term problem solving or are inherently selfish, he argues evidence instead supports that humans are uniquely forward-thinking and cooperative. On cooperation, he says, “Interestingly, humans tend to be conditional cooperators, so we’re happy to cooperate if others are, which I think will be key to solving this problem”.

The good news is people do care about climate change. Atkinson points to a recent Pew Research Center report on a survey carried out during the height of Covid-19 that revealed climate change to be a highly perceived threat across European countries, even during a global pandemic with immediate and tangible threats dominating news cycles.

Quentin believes the barriers to action are better viewed in our culture and social norms, not our genes. We operate within culturally constructed norms influenced by our values and ideologies. These are perpetuated by the institutions we have created. “If we are going to solve the climate crisis, we need to be able to step outside our current cultural matrix and consider alternative ways of viewing and understanding the world,” he said. This leads to another area of research Quentin is focused on, linguistic and cultural diversity.

Linguistic and cultural diversity are intrinsically connected and heavily influence our perspectives. Quentin says this provides us with a massive resource of alternative ways of making sense of the world, a source we should be tapping into.

This makes it all the more troubling to learn that the world is also in the midst of another crisis: the predicted extinction of as many as half of the world’s roughly 7000languages by the end of the century, taking with them valuable insights that could help shape new norms conducive to a more sustainable future and contribute to climate action.

Much of Quentin’s work has sought to understand the processes of cultural evolution that both generate and erode this rich diversity.

“We’re using models and database tools borrowed from evolutionary biology and applying it to languages to build a picture of the world’s linguistic diversity –the linguistic equivalent of Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life,” he said.

"This new knowledge can be applied to unanswered questions that will help us identify where we will find the most diversity globally and how to protect it."

“Modern linguistic diversity emerged over the last 100,000 years as anatomically modern humans expanded within Africa and then spread out to colonize the globe, ultimately producing the 7,000 languages we see in the world today.

“If we add up the thousands of branches in this global tree of language, each one an independent evolving lineage, we find there are over 10 million years of cultural evolution packed into the last 100,000 years of human history. I love that number because it gives some sense of the enormous wealth of accumulated knowledge carried by languages and the people who speak them around the globe”.

“Unfortunately, some of my work is showing that linguistic diversity is even more fragile than biodiversity,” he said. Atkinson points out that evolutionarily unique species with no close relatives (like the platypus) don’t seem to be more at risk of extinction than species with many close relatives. But the same is not true of languages – those with few close relatives are also more at risk. This means these languages will take with them even more unique cultural diversity should we lose them.

There is still a lot of work ahead. Quentin is quick to point out he does not have all the answers. He says psychology has much to contribute to the cause, but staying humble and admitting what we don’t know is important. “My own discipline of psychology is crucial to tackling the major challenges of the 21st century, but we need to be realistic about the current state of knowledge, and there is much we don’t know,” he says.

Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for complex systems, has recently provided seed funding to help Atkinson and colleagues work on indigenous and traditional knowledge. Still, in the early stages of development, he hopes to learn how these perspectives might positively influence strategies for tackling the climate crisis. “One advantage of studying human cultural evolution is you have a very clear sense of how transient and contingent cultural systems are, and that includes the current dominant global cultural system, which is not more than a couple of centuries old.

It’s clear we’ll need to find new cultural values, norms, and institutions if we’re to solve the climate crisis, and I think we’d be crazy not to try to listen to speakers of as many of the world’s 7,000 languages as we can, and the accumulated wisdom of 10 million years of cultural evolution that they represent.”