Combating Climatic Change Through Psychology Paper

Complete the Module 6 of the Explore and Analyze assignment.

Step 1: Click and read the NPR article on climate change:

Reference:

Lombrozo, T. (2015, November 30). How psychology can change the world from climate change. Retrieved from 

Step 2: Submit your response as a Microsoft Word document.

• We must change the way that we think and behave if we are to save the world from climate change. What changes in social norms do you believe will be necessary to combat climate change?
• A new  published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science helps explain why. The paper’s authors — Sander van der Linden, Edward Maibach, and Anthony Leiserowitz — review psychological research to identify key aspects of climate change and climate change communication that contribute to the mismatch between the urgency and severity of climate change, on the one hand, and widespread public disengagement, on the other. They highlight five features of human psychology that make climate change communication especially challenging, and they pair these with recommendations for how to make science communication and policy more effective.
  

  Important information for writing discussion questions and participation

  Welcome to class

  Hello class and welcome to the class and I will be your instructor for this course. This is a -week course and requires a lot of time commitment, organization, and a high level of dedication. Please use the class syllabus to guide you through all the assignments required for the course. I have also attached the classroom policies to this announcement to know your expectations for this course. Please review this document carefully and ask me any questions if you do. You could email me at any time or send me a message via the “message” icon in halo if you need to contact me. I check my email regularly, so you should get a response within 24 hours. If you have not heard from me within 24 hours and need to contact me urgently, please send a follow up text to

  I strongly encourage that you do not wait until the very last minute to complete your assignments. Your assignments in weeks 4 and 5 require early planning as you would need to present a teaching plan and interview a community health provider. I advise you look at the requirements for these assignments at the beginning of the course and plan accordingly. I have posted the YouTube link that explains all the class assignments in detail. It is required that you watch this 32-minute video as the assignments from week 3 through 5 require that you follow the instructions to the letter to succeed. Failure to complete these assignments according to instructions might lead to a zero. After watching the video, please schedule a one-on-one with me to discuss your topic for your project by the second week of class. Use this link to schedule a 15-minute session. Please, call me at the time of your appointment on my number. Please note that I will NOT call you.

  Please, be advised I do NOT accept any assignments by email. If you are having technical issues with uploading an assignment, contact the technical department and inform me of the issue. If you have any issues that would prevent you from getting your assignments to me by the deadline, please inform me to request a possible extension. Note that working fulltime or overtime is no excuse for late assignments. There is a 5%-point deduction for every day your assignment is late. This only applies to approved extensions. Late assignments will not be accepted.

  If you think you would be needing accommodations due to any reasons, please contact the appropriate department to request accommodations.

  Plagiarism is highly prohibited. Please ensure you are citing your sources correctly using APA 7th edition. All assignments including discussion posts should be formatted in APA with the appropriate spacing, font, margin, and indents. Any papers not well formatted would be returned back to you, hence, I advise you review APA formatting style. I have attached a sample paper in APA format and will also post sample discussion responses in subsequent announcements.

  Your initial discussion post should be a minimum of 200 words and response posts should be a minimum of 150 words. Be advised that I grade based on quality and not necessarily the number of words you post. A minimum of TWO references should be used for your initial post. For your response post, you do not need references as personal experiences would count as response posts. If you however cite anything from the literature for your response post, it is required that you cite your reference. You should include a minimum of THREE references for papers in this course. Please note that references should be no more than 5 years old except recommended as a resource for the class. Furthermore, for each discussion board question, you need ONE initial substantive response and TWO substantive responses to either your classmates or your instructor for a total of THREE responses. There are TWO discussion questions each week, hence, you need a total minimum of SIX discussion posts for each week. I usually post a discussion question each week. You could also respond to these as it would count towards your required SIX discussion posts for the week.

  I understand this is a lot of information to cover in 5 weeks, however, the Bible says in Philippians 4:13 that we can do all things through Christ that strengthens us. Even in times like this, we are encouraged by God’s word that we have that ability in us to succeed with His strength. I pray that each and every one of you receives strength for this course and life generally as we navigate through this pandemic that is shaking our world today. Relax and enjoy the course!

  Hi Class,

  Please read through the following information on writing a Discussion question response and participation posts.

  Contact me if you have any questions.

  Important information on Writing a Discussion Question

  • Your response needs to be a minimum of 150 words (not including your list of references)
  • There needs to be at least TWO references with ONE being a peer reviewed professional journal article.
  • Include in-text citations in your response
  • Do not include quotes—instead summarize and paraphrase the information
  • Follow APA-7th edition
  • Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

  Participation –replies to your classmates or instructor

  • A minimum of 6 responses per week, on at least 3 days of the week.
  • Each response needs at least ONE reference with citations—best if it is a peer reviewed journal article
  • Each response needs to be at least 75 words in length (does not include your list of references)
  • Responses need to be substantive by bringing information to the discussion or further enhance the discussion. Responses of “I agree” or “great post” does not count for the word count.
  • Follow APA 7th edition
  • Points will be deducted if the above is not followed
  • Remember to use and follow APA-7th edition for all weekly assignments, discussion questions, and participation points.
  • Here are some helpful links
  • The is a great resource

   

   

  In brief, here are their five insights and recommendations:

  • First, people are generally more responsive to personal experience than to abstract analysis. This can be a problem because climate change is typically described in very abstract, statistical terms — we see the numbers and figures, but we rarely recognize the effects of climate change it in our own, everyday experience. The authors suggest that “information about climate change risks needs to be translated into relatable and concrete personal experiences.” Fortunately, this might not be that hard: Climate change is already occurring in ways that do affect our own, everyday experience.
  • Second, when faced with the enormity of climate change, it’s easy to lose any sense of personal efficacy. But rather than despair, we can capitalize on the fact that we’re social beings who respond to social norms. Motivating individuals to act can be a challenge, but establishing and rewarding community norms can help encourage pro-environmental behavior even when individual behavior seems like a drop in the bucket.
  • Third, we tend to treat the immediate and personal quite differently from the distant and uncertain. When climate change is presented as distant in space and time, it’s easier to ignore. In making decisions, for example, immediate costs (like the inconvenience of reducing one’s carbon footprint) tend to loom large, while uncertain future costs (like the catastrophic consequences of warming) are underweighted. Climate change communication might be more effective by focusing more on regional impacts of warming that are close in space and time — like the effects we can see now in our own communities.
  • Fourth, research has shown that people’s attitude to risk can depend on whether they’re thinking about potential losses or potential gains. In particular, people are more willing to tolerate risk when dealing with losses, so some probability of a loss in quality of life downstream is a gamble they’re relatively willing to take. “These psychological insights,” the authors write, “suggest that shifting the policy conversation from the potentially negative future consequences of not acting (losses) on climate change to the positive benefits (gains) of immediate action is likely to increase public support.”
  • Finally, research suggests that motivating behavior with extrinsic rewards — such as monetary incentives for conserving energy — could be more effective when paired with appeals to people’s intrinsic motivation to improve others’ wellbeing and to care for the environment. Specifically: “Appealing to people’s intrinsic motivational needs can be a more effective and long-lasting driver of pro-environmental behavior.” When intrinsically motivated, pro-environmental behavior is more likely to be maintained after extrinsic incentives are removed, and extrinsic rewards can actually undermine people’s intrinsic motivation to change.

  In sum, climate change is often presented as an abstract, uncertain cost, distant in space and time, and requiring external incentives to motivate individual action. Psychological research suggests this is an especially dangerous combination, sure to make people underestimate the risk and unlikely to compel them to action. Instead, policy makers and science communicators might do well to focus on the concrete manifestations of climate change in our own experience, the consequences of warming that are affecting our communities here and now, and the ways our current actions can be tied to gains rather than losses, to social norms and to our own intrinsic motivations.

  Effective climate change mitigation will undoubtedly involve insights from the natural sciences and engineering. But changing our own attitudes and behavior requires insights from psychology, as well. It’s  for the social sciences in dealing with global warming, an issue that certainly ought to be a top priority for the president and Congress.

There is widespread scientific agreement that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and that its consequences could jeopardize both ecological and human systems. The scientific study of human behavior in social and cultural settings, known as social psychology, is an important tool for understanding how people interpret and respond to climate change. We conducted a comprehensive review of the social psychology literature on climate change in this article. We selected 130 studies on climate change or global warming from 80 publications published in journals listed in Journal Citation Reports’ “Psychology, social” category. Based on this sample, we can see that social psychologists have produced an amazing canon of research on this important topic, with diverse research methodologies, outcome variables, and theoretical perspectives. However, there are some gaps in this literature, such as a lack of authors and data from non-Western, developing, and non-democratic societies, a lack of cross-cultural comparisons, reliance on young and Amazon MTurk samples, a lack of attention to some key outcome variables, and an overemphasis on intrapersonal and intrapsychic processes. Future social psychological research on climate change should extend geographical and demographic representation, look at study outcomes other than mitigation behavior, and use more “social” theoretical viewpoints, according to the authors. We also make recommendations for how these needs can be met.

Social Psychology and Climate Change

Anthropogenic climate change is happening, according to scientific agreement (Cook et al., 2013). Extreme events will become more frequent, pervasive, and intense as a result of continued global warming, placing both ecological and human systems in peril (International Panel on Climate Change, 2018). Climate change also includes more gradual, less spectacular, but nonetheless significant changes in the underlying climatic conditions that our societies are built upon, such as heat and precipitation.

These shifts in the geophysical climate have major ramifications for human social behavior and, as a result, social psychology. One of the most persistent teachings of social psychology has been that external forces have a greater impact on individuals than is commonly recognized by the layperson. Although psychologists have primarily focused on social aspects of the situation, such as other people and important social roles and expectations, the physical environment clearly has the potential to have both direct and indirect effects on behavior, as well as effects moderated by social constructions of the environment. Furthermore, climate change has become a part of our social context: social interactions influence both our perceptions of climate change and how we are affected by it (Geiger & Swim, 2016; Whitmarsh & Capstick, 2018).