Psychologist explains why people ignore the climate crisis

People can overlook the climate crisis even when its effects are visible around them, psychologist Julia Sangervo says in an interview with Yle.

Europe has recorded record heat this summer, while widespread forest and wildland fires have spread across the continent. This week, a sudden flood in Nepal was triggered by a broken mountain glacier. Researchers have warned that climate change is advancing at a troubling pace, yet some people continue to act as if it were not happening.

A widely circulated photograph by French photographer Maximilien Lamy shows a couple sitting on sun loungers at a beach near Bordeaux. Behind them, on the opposite shore, a huge plume of smoke rises from a forest fire. The fire does not appear to disturb the couple’s summer day.

Sangervo, a psychologist and non-fiction author who has studied the psychology of climate change, says several factors can explain why people and social institutions appear to ignore the climate crisis.

People adapt to gradual threats

One factor is the normalisation of threats. Research refers to this as shifting baseline syndrome, which can loosely be translated as the changing baseline phenomenon.

“If our living environment changes slowly and we become used to, for example, the increasing frequency of forest fires, the next generation may no longer experience them as an emergency,” Sangervo says. “We are like frogs being boiled in a pot. We are poor at responding to danger when it happens slowly enough for us to get used to the new situation.”

Repeated exposure to similar threatening information can also weaken emotional reactions over time. Sangervo says the same phenomenon can be seen in coverage of crises and wars.

Passivity does not mean that people do not care, she says. The intensity of an emotional reaction is affected by many factors, and extremely large problems can feel paralysing.

Sangervo wrote about people’s attitudes towards climate change in her book Psykologian vallan kumous – Irti terapiakulttuurista, published this spring by Vastapaino. She is also a Green Party regional councillor, deputy member of parliament and deputy chair of Tampere City Council.

Uncomfortable contradictions

People tend to reduce contradictions between their beliefs, values and actions, Sangervo says. Such contradictions can create an unpleasant feeling known as cognitive dissonance.

Some people may consider the climate crisis serious and emissions cuts important, while also wanting to live in a way that produces high emissions.

“One option is to change your own behaviour, but it is often easier to change the explanation instead, for example by thinking, ‘My actions do not matter’ or ‘Finland is such a small country,’ or even by convincing yourself that climate change may not really exist,” Sangervo says.

A similar contradiction can appear at the level of society. While the scientific community communicates that climate change is advancing at a dangerous pace and that fossil fuels should be abandoned, the same news page may carry an advertisement encouraging overconsumption, Sangervo points out.

“The human mind always tries to maintain harmony, which means that two opposing things cannot both be true at the same time. This can feel very uncomfortable,” she says.

According to Sangervo, cognitive dissonance occurs in many other areas as well. People try to preserve a consistent image of themselves as good people and of the world as a predictable place.

Individuals cannot solve the crisis

Society has an unfortunate tendency to turn structural problems into individual problems, Sangervo says.

She says this assigning of responsibility to individuals can be seen both in the climate crisis and in the mental health crisis.

“The climate crisis is often presented as a problem to be solved by an individual consumer monitoring their carbon footprint, while the mental health crisis is presented as a problem to be solved through therapy and mindfulness exercises,” Sangervo says.

In her view, both people and nature are treated as resources that can be stretched without limit.

Growing demands can lead to burnout among people and to a decline in biodiversity in nature, Sangervo says.