Groupthinking to oblivion

Last week, I attended the latest in a long series of conferences, round-table events and discussion evenings on sustainability. It had its moments. But a defining feature of these events is consensus – lots of it. Delegates from businesses large and small, NGOs, academics, the media, governments – all without fail voice their concerns about the parlous state of the planet, often quoting alarming statistics about the number of new power stations in China or the plight of fish stocks in the North Atlantic, and violently agree on the need for wholesale changes in consumer, state and corporate behaviour. Trenchant debate about how to achieve this is frequently lacking.

Now, as a pollster, you don’t need to tell me that what we have here is a self-selecting sample. If you’re either apathetic or professionally sceptical about the environmental challenges we face – which, for the record, I am not - you are unlikely to choose to spend your time at these events.

This is certainly not to say that we can dismiss these gatherings out of hand – the sheer number of them, for one thing, tells us that there’s a genuine groundswell of concern out there. But for those looking for explanations as to why we haven’t seen this mushrooming of bien-pensant concern translate (by most measures) into behaviour change on the scale required, perhaps University of Manchester psychologist Geoff Beattie’s new book can help.

Using ‘implicit association tests’ he has investigated how our stated attitudes differ from our unconscious biases and instincts, and has come to the conclusion that we aren’t as green as we think we are. He estimates that between 40 and 50% of people have ‘implicit’ attitudes towards sustainable consumption that don’t match their ‘explicit’ ones.

From a GlobeScan perspective, it wasn’t a huge surprise to read this. We’ve seen the number of self-described ‘ethical consumers’ in our surveys – those who claim to reward or punish companies on the basis of their sustainability credentials – balloon massively in the past few years. Now, are 62% of American consumers really going out there and punishing irresponsible companies, as they told us in 2009? Sales data would suggest not. So what’s happening here?

What’s undeniable is that environmentalism, to a greater or lesser degree, has become the new orthodoxy. The way that sceptics present their case illustrates that, with much talk of ‘a conspiracy’ to hoodwink the public. In that context, we should not be too shocked if people feel a social pressure to pay lip-service to attitudes that they don’t really hold, or if they exaggerate their commitment. People would like to think they are ethical consumers. Hysterical talk of climate change ‘deniers’ – with its overtones of the Holocaust and David Irving – will hardly help the situation.

It’s been said that climate change is the ultimate political, rather than technical problem. Moving to a sustainable world will require creativity and a real understanding of what makes people behave the way they do. Memo to those who share this laudable objective: groupthink and demonization of those who disagree won’t cut it.