JISCMail - BIOGRAPHIC-NARRATIVE-BNIM Archives

Reading these contributions, I suddenly thought how they (especially perhaps James Barratt's) are also relevant to the 'active listening' promoted by BNIM listening in interview. The 'therapeutic presence' is just a thoughtful interpersonal presence that BNIM when it works well fosters. John Berger - art critic and chronicler of the French countryside -- remarked that "Initimacy implies having time on one's hands", and doing BNIM work implies 'thoughtful pausing' and 'unhurred, unharried, time'.

It makes good reading on my 80th birthday!

Best wishes

Tom

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Paul Hoggett <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2019 at 13:27
Subject: Re: article: Why your brain doesn't register the words 'climate change'
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>

Lucy you ask some important questions. I don’t know whether you were at the recent CPA event with Jem Bendell and Ro Randall but Ro suggested that those who become active around climate change first often seem to go through a moment of epiphany in which they can feel quite overwhelmed by feelings, including panic (which I think often takes on the form of a kind of catastrophic anxiety). If the panic can be contained then they are more likely to move into some kind of action rather than paralysed despair. But of course this is at the individual level, at the level of the group or crowd panic can be something else and can be much more difficult to contain so that it takes on the form of the plague (and I wonder sometimes whether social media recreates crowd effects like panic). You also ask about shame which is another interesting issue. Adrian Tait recently posted something on what Scandanavians are starting to call ‘flying shame’ (can’t find the post now). There’s a whopping psychoanalytic literature on shame and Donna Orange, one of our members in the USA, is more versed in this than me but my understanding is that when we feel ashamed we feel less than the person we would like to be. So when Greta Thunberg tells we adults that we should be ashamed of ourselves it might trigger a positive response which says “yes, she’s right, we adults can be more than this”. The problem with shame of course is that it can so easily feel persecutory and my guess is that many of the people we see in our consulting rooms are oppressed by shame and the feeling of just not being good enough.

Increasingly I wonder whether there are any general rules to follow when it comes to climate communication. Perhaps shame works for some people and not others, the same with fear appeals, guilt, etc. The key thing is to know and respect your audience whoever they are (well maybe not Peter Hitchins!).

Paul

On 1 May 2019, at 13:36, lucyford2050 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Richard,

Thanks for this article.

It's interesting to think about.

I agree we need to be very careful with terminology. I wonder though, whether this neuroscietific research misses some things. Firstly, it's not actually measuring what people will do as a result of the information, it's just measuring whether they have an emotional response (sweaty palms etc). I am not sure this actually helps us. I also worry that it's missing the unconscious dimension and would love to hear more about what psychoanalyists think about using words like 'panic', 'extinction', 'emergency' etc - it is my hunch that this is more likely to push people into denial and shut down out of dread. I certainly worry about filling the next generation with a narrative of fear and the mental health consequences of this. Just yesterday we heard that suicide figures are at an all time high (no doubt for many complex reasons, but I can imagine that fear of the future due to climate change will in the future be a contributing factor to suicide). Politically, I also don't see it as a particularly useful strategy (more likely to play into the hands of the right - see Brexit and Trump).

Caroline Lucas MP said in 2001 at a press conference of the European Summit in Gothenburg something along the lines of 'we will go down in history as the first species to monitor our own extinction'.....(18 years prior to Extinction Rebellion)....she was right then and is still right - we need to act. What is the best language to use to get people to act? I reckon positive language works better than negative language (isn't it true that if you tell your child 'Don't walk on the road' they will walk on the road because they don't hear the negative - instead it's better to say 'walk on the pavement'....the same goes for 'Campaign against Climate Change', or Anti-war protest.....choosing positive messages e.g. Campaign for a sustainable future' or 'pro-peace protest' apparently work better for the brain - I'll have to ask a neurscientist to verify!)....at the moment lots of people (in the UK and some other places) are getting very excited about the'crisis' narrative of Extinction Rebellion....it remains to be seen how successful this actually is. Dare I say, we are in a middle class rather white bubble.....a lot of people have never heard of Extinction Rebellion....as for Greta - it will remain to be seen where this all goes. I sincerely hope though that it does not lead to an infantilisation of the environmental movement and message....I'm also interested to hear from psychoanalysts what they think of her strategy of shaming? Has shaming ever worked?

I don't agree that we need to panic - I reckon we want to try and stay as calm and compassionate as possible :)

Lucy

On Tuesday, 30 April 2019 16:26:01 UTC+1, Richard Pauli wrote:

To save your time reading the article it's: "The two phrases that caused the strongest emotional reaction overall were "climate crisis" and "environmental destruction."

But I've heard scientists use "global heating with climate destabilization"

Found this in Grist' I've used "global warming" - but I read here that it is insufficient.

=======================================
Why your brain doesn't register the words 'climate change'
By Kate Yoder on Apr 29, 2019
Which phrase does a better job of grabbing people's attention: "global warming" or "climate change"? According to recent neuroscience research, the answer is neither.

If you want to get people to care, try "climate crisis," suggests new research from an advertising consulting agency in New York. That phrase got a 60 percent greater emotional response from listeners than our old pal climate change. (It must be music to the ears of Al Gore, who uses the phrase in just about every other tweet.)

SPARK Neuro measures brain activity and sweaty palms to gauge people's emotional reactions and attention to stimuli. The company is backed by a wildly diverse range of investors, including Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and famous libertarian, and Will Smith, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Netflix, NBC, and Paramount have used its services to gauge interest in ads and movie trailers. And now SPARK Neuro is turning its attention to climate change.

For the experiment this spring, SPARK Neuro brought in 120 people -- divided evenly among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents -- and sat them down at the lab. Participants wore electroencephalography (EEG) devices on their heads so the researchers could measure the electrical activity coming from their brains every fraction of a second.

While a webcam tracked their facial expressions, little straps on their fingers measured the sweat that accompanies heightened emotions through galvanic skin response -- the main technology that's used in lie detector tests. SPARK Neuro takes the tornado of data from all of those sources and runs it through algorithms to quantify their subjects' reactions to whatever they heard.

In this case, they listened to audio recordings of six particular phrases. "Global warming" and "climate change" performed the worst of all in terms of emotional engagement and audience attention. They were trumped by a batch of less familiar phrases: climate crisis, environmental destruction, weather destabilization, and environmental collapse.

It's the latest sign that climate change communicators have a whole lot to learn from cognitive science. "People understand that something is not working about climate change and that some change needs to be made," said Spencer Gerrol, SPARK Neuro's CEO.

It's been an open secret that "global warming" and "climate change" might not be the best phrases to get the public engaged. Most people, after all, think that warm weather sounds pretty nice. And "climate change" naturally lends itself to confusion; after all, deniers say, hasn't the climate always been changing? (It has, but nowhere near this dramatically!)

Gerrol came up with the idea to run a messaging experiment about how to frame the subject while talking to a colleague about the importance of language and how the right phrase can change policy. He pointed to the "estate tax," which normal people didn't care much about until Republicans started rebranding it as the "death tax" in the 1990s. Frank Luntz, a well-known messaging consultant for Republicans, further popularized the phrase in the early 2000s.

"As soon as they started calling it the death tax, people started caring," Gerrol said. "Regardless of how you feel about the estate tax, that language changed people's emotional perceptions, and ultimately that changed behavior and policy." Since 2001, Congress has weakened the federal estate tax, temporarily repealing it in 2010. It returned in a weakened state in 2011 and took another blow under the 2017 tax bill.

Gerrol suspects that there are two reasons "global warming" and "climate change" performed so poorly. For one, they're both neutral phrases. "There's nothing inherently negative or positive" about the words themselves, Gerrol points out. (Luntz, as it happens, once encouraged Republicans to use the benign-sounding "climate change.")

Then there's the problem of overexposure. Both global warming and climate change are "incredibly worn out," he said. There's a reason why advertising companies aren't using their ad campaigns from the 1980s -- sometimes you need to shake things up to get people to pay attention. If a term doesn't evoke a strong emotional response in the first place, it's even more likely to wear out quickly, Gerrol said.

People who care about our warming planet are starting to realize the power of words. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal," for example, has helped push the conversation around climate policy into the mainstream. And George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist, has argued for replacing "cold and alienating" environmental terms like "nature reserves" with warmer and poetic phrases -- say, "places of natural wonder."

There's no shortage of alternatives. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus recommends "climate breakdown." The New York Times recently used "climate chaos." Some scientists suggest "global heating." But to know what really resonates, you have to study the brain.

Before the emerging field of neuroscience-based analytics, researchers relied on focus groups and surveys to learn how people felt. But those self-reporting methods are subject to a lot of biases that can distort results. People play for the audience. "You want to seem smart, seem caring, and you want to get the right answers," Gerrol said.

Unlike those more traditional approaches, SPARK Neuro scans your brain activity and parts of your nervous system -- because physiological activity doesn't fib. The company's work has been called a "lie detector on steroids."

For the messaging experiment, participants were first shown neutral stimuli to establish a baseline. Then, they listened to recordings of the six phrases played at random. The phrases were either in isolation or in a sentence.

In both cases, the results were consistent, Gerrol said. The two phrases that caused the strongest emotional reaction overall were "climate crisis" and "environmental destruction."

But a strong emotional response isn't always a good thing, especially when it comes to a polarized subject like climate change. "Environmental destruction" actually evoked too much emotion from Republicans: a 55 percent stronger reaction than that group's average response for all terms. That spike in emotion would likely have a "backfiring effect," Gerrol said. They'd get so riled up that they'd likely experience cognitive dissonance -- that uncomfortable feeling when something you learn conflicts with your values -- and come up with counterarguments to get out of that mental pain.

"Climate crisis," on the other hand, was the Goldilocks of the study -- not too weak, not too strong. Among Democrats, Republicans, and independents, it caused a strong emotional reaction without going overboard. That kind of response leads people to pay more attention and encourages a sense of urgency, Gerrol said.

And that urgency is key. Much like retirement planning, another messaging problem SPARK Neuro is tackling, climate change requires planning for the future -- not exactly a strength for the human brain. Present bias (valuing today more than tomorrow) is just one of many cognitive biases that inhibit us from taking climate change head-on.

To be sure, this initial research only looked into six terms, so there's a lot more testing to do before settling on "climate crisis." How would "climate chaos," "climate breakdown," or "global heating" measure up?

Maybe one of these phrases would do a better job of helping people realize that all those bad things they've been warned about are no longer off in the distant future. That scary future has already arrived.
https://grist.org/article/why-your-brain-doesnt-register-the-words-climate-change/

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(Only) if interested in BNIM,the Biographical-Narrative Interpretive Method approach to qualitative research interviewing, is the following relevant.......

STOP PRESS! There will be a 2-Day Training Intensive in BNIM Interviewing in London on November 14th and 15th 2019. Do contact me if you might be interested.

STOP PRESS! I've just been notified by RESEARCHGATE (see below) that they think that my BNIM Short Guide published in January 2018 has now (March 2019) been read over 800 times. If they're right, that means an average in the last 15 months of over two people per day finding out about BNIM. Amazing. [Or it may be statistical gobbledygook].

In any case.....

JUST PUBLISHED (November 2018): 'BNIM and the unconscious in psychosocietal research', in Kalina Stamenova and R.D.Hinshelwood (eds) 'Methods of research into the unconscious: applying psychoanalytic ideas to social science' (London: Routledge). LOTS OF GOOD OTHER CHAPTERS TOO!

PUBLISHED A LITTLE EARLIER (2013) 'Biography-using research (BNIM), Sostris, institutional regimes and critical psycho-societal realism' in Jeffrey Turk and Adam Mrozowicki (eds.) 'Realist biography and European policy (Leuven: Leuven University Press)

xxxxx

A lot of material about BNIM is available from my page at RESEARCHGATE.

This now includes the Quick Outline Sketch, the Short Guide, the Detailed Manuals, and a BNIM Bibliography.

Also several articles and papers.

Do feel free to consult and use the RESEARCHGATE facility.

Quite separately, I would be very pleased to receive and respond to any comments or questions that you may have about those materials or more generally about BNIM.