 I'm Winifred Lewis. I'm a social psychologist at the University of Queensland. I study identity and decision-making. So I started off looking at prejudice and conflict, English-French conflict, gender relations, and I got into the environmental research in part because I became more and more interested in environmental politics myself. I was inspired by the work of Kelly Fielding here at UQ, showed that farmers were unpersuaded by messages from urban sources, but they were much more persuaded by messages that came from rural sources. So right from the outset, my focus was on effective persuasion and the importance of the groups that people were in, and I think almost all the work that I've done has been in this area. But one of the things that I've spoken at most passionately and I have data from my own lab is that it's actually not very positive at all to highlight the prevalence of the problem behavior. So especially a few years ago, almost all environmental messages would start off by showing piles of garbage or pollution floating in the ocean or pan over a sort of busy city and show all the wasted energy and water. But my message shows that when you make salient that negative norm, the descriptive norm that people are actually doing the wrong thing, not only does that not persuade people, it actually makes things worse. So for example, in one paper with Joanne Smith in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, we highlighted that if you say people are wasting energy and they should conserve energy, energy saving intentions go down. If you say people are wasting water and they shouldn't waste water, water saving intentions go down. So that message is not just ineffective, it actually lowers your intentions to act. Now of course that's not true for committed activists. So when you look at what's happening with more nuance, you can see that if you take the people that are already passionate about the environment, when they hear that message, it's a call to arms. So they really step forwards. And I think that's what happens. You get passionate people designing campaigns that motivate themselves. But when you look at the impact of that campaign on the target audience, when you look at the impact on uncommitted people and people who are skeptical, that campaign has a negative impact. And that's something I wish people would understand. A descriptive norm, as we call it in psychology, what other people are doing will lead to conformity in general. So if I say to you, Australians have a problem with unhealthy eating, you get the same backlash effect. If you say Australian teenagers binge drink, you get the same backlash effect. What I mean by that is the target behavior increases, the problem behavior increases. So we need to stop using these poorly designed normative messages. We really need to highlight positive change and focus on how things are changing for the better. Or if that's not possible, because sometimes it's genuinely impossible, we need to try and approach the topic without using that normative message in a way that's going to create a problem. So we might be looking at a trajectory where, for example, carbon emissions have slowed in the last few years, but they're still increasing. So you could say carbon emissions are continuing to increase, that would have a backlash. But you might also try to say the rate of increase is slowing, or in this city, in this specific city, which is like your city, they've managed to reduce the carbon emissions. So picking out an example, which is both positive and similar to the target audience, is the most productive. Where that's possible, it's not always possible. Here's where I want to say it's important to be authentic. So I'm certainly not advocating any deception, which can only backlash on our movement. Another approach is to try and focus on what we call the injunctive norm of what should be done. If you focus on that norm alone, though, what should be done, people often have an unintended backlash anyways. So if I come up to you and I say, you know, Australians should really brush their teeth, the thought that will go through your mind is, why did you say that to me? Clearly there's a problem. And what happens then we find is that if you just focus on what should change, people will still manage to infer that there's a problem. And because they've thought about that problem, their behavior becomes less positive. So we just have to be really careful in approaching these normative messages full stop. And I think that they should be designed ideally by focusing on positive examples of change in subsections of the community that ideally are similar. So for example, I'm a psychologist. It might be motivating to psychologists to highlight something about how, you know, over here the doctors have managed to lower the emissions in their building by 15% in the last year. That would catch my attention because those people are similar and it makes sense for us to compare each other. Along with the problem of putting forward the negative norm, a common problem is that people will not pay enough attention to what other people will see as similar or relevant to them. So if you put forward a model of change, it has to be based on other people who are seen as similar and relevant. That's particularly important around existing cleavages in society. The rural urban divide is really not been attended to enough by climate scientists until the last few years. Things are really changing for the better. But it's a reality that rural people have a justified sense that urban people don't know about their problems and don't care about their problems. So when we as urban scientists are talking to rural people, we may not be aware of how they're receiving us and that may lead to backlash effects. I have a theoretical model I call getting a grip and I have a TED talk on this. But the three things that I think are most important and there are 30 things that we could talk about are 300 things. But the three things that I think are most important are realizing that you're dealing with groups, not individuals, and realizing that you've got to be inclusive in your message and realizing you've got to be positive. So I'll just go through each of those three things. One issue when people are trying to get others to take action is they often approach it as if we're all individuals floating in a sort of sea that are we're all equally like each other and equally different from each other. But we're not at all. Some are students, some are teachers, some are parents, some are children within an extended family. And when we become more aware of the groups in society, we can think about whether the intention that we're talking about, for example, intentions to introduce energy efficient appliances, apply to this group students or this group renters in the same way that they apply to others who might be employed homeowners. So we have to focus on groups, not individuals, to target our messages and to really reflect on that. The other issue is when we identify that there's a problem group, the most common way to approach that is exactly the way that doesn't work. So you identify the problem group verbally in the message and then you say something negative about them, usually some sort of negative norm. For example, Brisbane homeowners have the largest carbon footprint of any capital city in Australia. I made that up, but you can imagine that it would be the kind of statement that would start off a persuasive message about a problem. That's exactly the worst way to approach it because as we talked about earlier, it leads to a backlash effect. What you would start off by doing is an inclusive message where you position yourself as part of the group that you're talking to. And that again might mean changing who the messenger is if you're not the right person. So I could say, you know, Brisbane homeowners like me, okay, and then I'm going to segue on to something positive. So that's what we talked about earlier. I'm not going to say have the largest capital footprint, but you might say something like are starting to think more and more about what we can do about our large blocks of land that we have in this city and the way that we've been approaching, say, air conditioning in the last five years. So those three tips of focusing inclusively, focusing on groups, not individuals, and focusing positively will help with intentions to act. Having said that, there are some more concrete and specific things as well. Usually when people approach intentions, there are three factors which can be identified. One of them is do people already support that action or not? That's their attitude to the behavior. If they don't, that's a serious problem that needs kind of preliminary attention. The second issue is, do they feel they have control over that behavior? If they don't feel they have control, that's another serious issue, you'd focus on empowerment and efficacy. The third question is, do the social norms in that context from other people like them permit that action? So that's something that's often relevant around, say, green behavior in suburbs where there hasn't been a history of that before. So something like Christmas lights, right? That might annoy a lot of environmentalists because it's conspicuous waste and it seems to have no reason. But it's supported by an immense and important rich tradition. It's supported by important identities. Everyone in the neighborhood does it. It's seen as fun. So once you identify what the norms are relevant to that intention, you can decide, is this the right intention to target? Are we picking the behavior that's going to give us the most leverage? We know from other work that the three big areas that we need to target are around transport, around meat, and so on. So picking small, relatively symbolically important actions like Christmas to target create an absolutely unnecessary backlash that we could avoid by focusing on other behaviors that might be less strongly supported by norms. The broad principle of evidence-based decision making is familiar to any scientist. So the idea is that if we face a challenge, we shouldn't just go with our intuition. Our intuitions can be wrong. And so we would look at the evidence basis and in particular look at the science before we approach a policy decision, whether that's water conservation or energy conservation or reusability. What's striking is that science communication from a psychological perspective seems to itself not be evidence-based. So you can have a sort of ad hoc and anecdote-driven approach to communicating the hard science around say environmental change. And what I mean by that is that people are guided by their intuition about whether incremental change should be supported or whether we need to press for radical change or they're guided by a sense that we need to have a dramatic and militant approach versus a more moderate approach without actually having examined the copious literature on persuasion. And I would really call on hard scientists in the environment space to look at the social science of persuasion and in particular a persuasion in conflict because there is an important distinction between trying to persuade someone like you or I are doing right now when we're in a relationship of trust and openness. When you're listening and the audience is listening, they're here to learn. But that's very different from the challenge that we face when we're talking about communication around climate science. It's not just communication and there is a science of communication. It's communication in conflict and we really need to look at that. What to do about mistrust, what to do when people are closed because it changes how you approach a communication challenge. An important principle is that you can only persuade someone who trusts you. So the first question you need to ask is what is my relationship to this person. If your relationship doesn't exist or is negative and conflictual, then you're in a poor place to communicate positively with them. It's very likely that if you try to persuade them that they will become more entrenched in their opposition. So if your relationship with that person is that they see you with skepticism and mistrust, when you try to put forward your argument you will make things worse. It's not just ineffective, it makes things worse. So the answer to your question is can you persuade someone yes, but you have to work from relationships. That means either you have to painfully build the relationship which takes a lot of time or you may need to not be the voice of the particular communication. You may be the person who is not placed to deliver the message, not best placed to deliver the message. And so the question then would be well how do I persuade this person, not by talking to them directly necessarily, but by thinking who do they trust and in that network of people that they already see as experts, that they already see as important to them, is there anyone that you have a relationship with? So for example environmental scientists might communicate with a business community through insurance corporations. They're alive to the issues around climate risk, they might communicate through agricultural companies. They're alive to the issues around climate risk. So those intermediaries would then become part of your plan for communication. I'd really like to see a lot more thought given to that, a question of not just what we should say but who should say it. And is there anyone that we can give this message to that can speak to our target audience persuasively? And political change is really part of that process. Values have been studied by Jonathan Haight, so HAIDT, and he's put forward a body of work around moral foundations that really underpins what I'm about to say about left and right wing audiences for political messages. He has identified various dimensions of political orientation which underpin people's principles and basically these are values such as avoiding harm and mitigating suffering, fairness values are important to everyone in varying degrees, we shouldn't overstate it. But what's striking is that people who identify as more left wing in their politics typically place a greater emphasis on avoiding suffering and fairness than on the other three dimensions. Values like purity may not be very important to people who come from a more left wing perspective. In contrast people who are more right wing in their orientation they value avoiding suffering, they value fairness, but they also value these other dimensions of tradition and purity and loyalty more strongly. So that research has been used by a number of people including an Australia Kelly Fielding Matthew Hornsey and they've put together a whole range of review papers and experiments which have shown that when you pitch an environmental message and it's often designed by people who are more left wing in their orientation the sort of dominant frames that you might think of are really about fairness and suffering. So we talk about how people will suffer in the third world, animals are suffering, it's unfair, our privilege and these are the motives that are put forward to try and drive action on this topic but there are other ways of approaching it and so we can google prominent speakers in this area and they might not be people that your audiences have thought of but for example Arnold Schwarzenegger recently in June 2017 released a message on Facebook which was a response to the withdrawal of President Trump from the Paris Agreement and it was talking about the environmental impact using language that's very different than other left wing leaders were using at the same time. He talked about issues like energy that's clean versus energy that's dirty, local impacts, you know the role of leaders at the town level and at the state level in stepping up. So we was using these kinds of values that might be recognized as more right wing in the hate framework, moral foundations theory and doing so in a way that I believe would be more persuasive to that audience. So the point that I was making is not that left and right wing people don't have common values because they do but that the ones that are particularly important and most persuasive are often mismatched between the current environmental campaigns and the current audiences of those campaigns. So when we've got left wing people designing campaigns targeting center voters and right wing voters there's the potential to get the frame wrong and I just encourage people to think about that and to do so by respectfully modeling and and imitating the kinds of messages that right wing environmentalists are putting forward. I mean to some left wing people it's a contradiction in terms to be a right wing environmentalist as long as we have that arrogant approach we're going to miss out on the opportunity to learn from the people that are trying to be persuasive and that already are persuasive in this space. Yeah I do have a strong view that it is effective and I just want to encourage people to think about approaching the study of decision making through the existing research rather than reinventing the wheel or getting bogged down. So what consensus messaging is doing is communicating for example the strong positive consensus around environmental scientists that climate change is anthropogenic and is real and so you see for example images of the 97% in the pie graph and that's kind of badged as a message that goes out to the broader community and the reason why I believe it's important is because that's a direct communication of a normative message in other words people are communicating that the group supports a particular action. Now I've seen some of the evidence that challenges the idea that consensus messaging works and those kinds of studies have shown that sometimes when you put up that information you get a backlash effect. When people receive messages from scientists if they don't believe the scientists then they will have a backlash effect and for some of the target audience particularly of people hostile or skeptical they don't trust the climate scientists they perceive them as biased. So this message is going to be very important for uncommitted voters for people in the center but for people who might be political opponents or more active denialists then it will become something that just leads them to have a backlash because we're talking about a consensus of climate scientists. A more important consensus message for that target audience of denialists would be for example industry leaders or people from the insurance industry. In other words trying to talk about consensus yes but consensus with groups that they see as similar to them and as relevant to them so not all people see science as persuasive and that we need to be mindful of that potential. Consensus messaging is powerful but it has to be the consensus of a group that you trust that you identify with. That's where I really feel like it's so important to understand that we're talking about communication in a conflict context. So I feel as though some of the environmentalists that are reacting with frustration simply don't understand what progress in conflict looks like. They base their approach to communication on a sort of model of knowledge dissemination in science where you speak the truth and then people accept the truth and it gets out there and there's no pushback. So the idea that we would have a weak version and then a stronger version or that we would have a weak version and then it would be repealed and then we would try again and then it would be repealed this comes across as if it's a failure of the message but in fact it's part of the process. No matter how strong our message there will be pushback because we're actually in a political conflict not just a conflict of scientific evidence. I mean even in science it's the case that you could communicate you know a strong evidence for one theory and that would motivate the other side to come back. So we do have a little bit more knowledge of give and take than I'm giving scientists credit for but in politics the idea of one step forward two steps back is incredibly common. If you have a success your opponents will counter mobilize and there is an evidence basis for the idea that accepting and encouraging incremental change will lead to better outcomes in the longer term. You can look at the conflict management literature you can look at mediation you can even look at parenting teenagers right. If you simply take a strong absolute stand all that does is destroy your relationship with a person you're trying to change. As they change towards you you have to encourage them and reward them and I particularly like to tell the story of I was at one point talking to a conservative politician and he was an environmentalist and he said to me every time I take one step towards the environmentalists they take one step back and so then he's attacked from both sides and he quickly learns he cannot move towards this direction there's no freedom of movement in this direction. So every time a conservative politician in particular says something that's a gesture of incremental change usually the greens will attack them as inadequate and then their own side will attack them as a naive person who lacks faith with a party ideology. So if we keep doing that we're shooting ourselves in the foot we have to encourage and reward people who are moving towards us whether that's individual citizens who might be partially skeptical these people need to be welcomed not ridiculed or whether it's right-wing politicians that might have a sort of 10% support for a policy that we want to see at 100%. We need to welcome that 10% and say you congratulations we're excited to see this positive step and the same thing with the Paris Accord it's not just an opinion there's an extensive literature and all you need to do is google incremental change in conflict management. I mean there is a literature I should say in conflict management which shows that if you start off with an extremely high demand sometimes that can drag the final solution towards you but if you look closely at that literature that effect is overshadowed by the likelihood of stalemates so when you start off with an extreme demand it greatly increases the likelihood of stalemates and stalemates are what we don't have time for in the environmental space. I think that if we have a long-term agenda of radical system transformation and a short-term agenda of welcoming incremental change that's the best outcome. So did you say no hand gestures? Harsh. Okay.