UMass Amherst, UPenn research suggests invoking moral obligation may help
University of Massachusetts Amherst
AMHERST, Mass. – One of the more complex problems facing social psychologists today is whether any intervention can move people to change their behavior about climate change and protecting the environment for the sake of future generations.
Now researchers Hanne Melgård Watkins at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Geoffrey Goodwin at the University of Pennsylvania report after their recent experiments that an intergenerational reciprocity approach ¬- asking people to reflect on sacrifices made in the past by others for their benefit today – may generate gratitude and a sense of moral obligation to people in the future.
Details of their studies exploring this are online now in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
As Watkins says, “The question is how to motivate people to care for future generations. Other researchers have shown that reciprocity can be a powerful motivator. If someone does something for my benefit, that creates a sense of obligation to reciprocate, but if I can’t reciprocate directly for some reason, I might instead try to “pay it forward.” In our experiments, we tried to take that idea and scale it up to get people to feel a moral obligation to future generations by having them reflect on what people in previous generations had done for them.”
She adds that intergenerational reciprocity research has shown that this approach can work, at least with people playing games. “If the last participant in a game paid their winnings forward, people are more likely to do the same for those coming along after them.”
Overall, Watkins and Goodwin, who conducted this study while Watkins was at UPenn, state that “our studies revealed that such reflection – on sacrifices made by past generations – predicts and causes a heightened sense of moral obligation towards future generations, mediated by gratitude. However there are also some downsides, for example, feelings of unworthiness, and perceptions of obligation do not substantially affect pro-environmental attitudes or motivations.”
Further, “while reflecting on past generations’ sacrifice can generate a sense of intergenerational obligation, it is limited in the extent to which it can increase pro-environmental concern.” Watkins adds, “Feeling is one thing, actually doing is another.”
With climate change, the researchers note that they had chosen a rather broad topic “more distant and diffuse” than some others investigated in previous studies on intergenerational reciprocity. Thus their survey asked respondents to reflect on past sacrifices made by their families or others during the fairly clear sacrifices made such as in the Great Depression, World War II, or by parents who scrimped and saved to put children through college; “big sacrifices that cannot be directly reciprocated,” Watkins notes.
For this work, she and Goodwin conducted five experimental online studies where at least 200 participants and sometimes as many as 500, were asked to write reflections on either sacrifices made by past generations or, for the control condition, to write on fashion choices made by past generations. Subjects were Americans, half male, half female and though the sample was “not representative but a fairly well varied population,” Watkins points out. At least one of the five studies was a replication of the first survey.
They found that when people had reflected on past sacrifices they were more likely to report feeling a sense of moral obligation to future generations. “We then asked whether they’d be willing to pay a higher tax or make other actual sacrifices in their daily lives to help future generations deal with climate change,” Watkins notes. “In this we found no effect,” but there was a strong correlation between a sense of moral obligation to future generations and willingness to sacrifice. “This correlation may exist without any intervention,” she adds.
Finally, Watkins reports that in a mini-meta-analysis of their five experiments, they did observe a small but significant effect on willingness to make sacrifices for the environment after reflecting on others’ past sacrifices.
“It’s nice that this might make a difference, but it’s not clear whether it’s large enough to use, to implement as an intervention,” she points out. “We feel it is valuable to have explored the question, but if you want action on climate change you might be better served by trying something else. Maybe contact your local representative.”
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From the article: “As Watkins says, “The question is how to motivate people to care for future generations.”
No. The real question she is trying to answer is how do you convince skeptics that CO2 is a problem. Apparently, she thinks that skeptics don’t care for future generations.
Skeptics actually do care about future generations, that’s why skeptics are trying to stop the alarmists from bankrupting our economies and ruining our societies in their efforts to fix a CO2 problem that has not been shown to exist.
Just because someone doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the children, or the future. Skeptics would say you don’t care about the future when you try to destroy the lifeblood of civilization, the fossil fuel industry, for no good reason.
In the NOAA V4 GHCN Monthly dataset there are only around 1800 stations out of 27,000+ that have complete and unbroken temperature series between 1951-1980 and 1981-2010. Those 1800 stations only occupy about 25% of the 5X5 degree cells defined as the grid for weighting. Of those 1800 stations, about a third of them have a negative or flat trend in their annual mean temperatures for the period Jan 1989 – Dec 2018.
This is not averaging anything but an individual station’s monthly TAVG as presented by NOAA and available for anyone to download. I’ve loaded it into an Oracle database running on one of my systems, which allows for a lot of data mining. I use R to calculate trends from the output from the database, and Perl to format the output from R into *.kml files I can import into Google Earth Pro.
To me, the question that needs asking is a simple one: if the Earth is warming, why are there so many stations showing flat or cooling trends. How does AGW theory account for that?
This article about researchers Hanne Melgård Watkins at the University of Massachusetts is so insane that I had to read it twice to make sure that I was not misinterpreting some jewel of truth. Fortunately reading the comments below revealed that it was indeed, truly one of the silliest things that I have read in years.
I was trying to read the spines of the books on her bookshelf.
One of them is Current Directions in Psychological Science. Another is World War Z.
(I wonder if she was rooting for zombies?)
Oh! And in regards to considering past sacrifices making us more prone to sacrificing for and following the Gang-green crowd, I’ve no desire to follow the example set by the kamikazes.
“She adds that intergenerational reciprocity research has shown that this approach can work, at least with people playing games.”
Playing games just about sums up what was going on here. Rather like using dodgy computer models to predict the climate in fifty years time.
First they ask you to change.
Then they tell you to change.
Then they put you in jail for not changing.
“any intervention can move people to change their behavior about climate change” For anyone who has been following this issue for any length of time is solidly convenienced it is a hoax. As such there is no intervention that will move us. What you have to worry about is how easy it is to demonstrate how flawed the whole issue is. And when you tie it to the globalist’s agenda of world dominance, that makes it even more believable.
These people are perpetually pestering me to join them in changing the global climate. Wait for the real Second Coming please and somebody needs to convince them I’m not their Messiah. I’m just another Bwian with a bwain although I’d be willing to be suitably crowdsourced to give it a go if they could drop those pesky Consumer Laws for caveat emptor.
I am so tired of the presumption and fallacy that burning fossil fuels is immoral, but denying affordable energy to the 3rd world, the poor and the elderly , as well as generations to come is virtuous.
I don’t by this sly manipulative premise of the author, the “moral obligation” and responsibility on society applies to all generations, especially to the young. The obligation on generation-Zombie is (as always) to respect elder knowledge, wisdom, experience, effort and achievements to build a better world.
Except they can’t even acknowledge that honestly, and are too ill-educated to understand what was even involved in producing NOW.
The onus is on generation Zombie to not stupidly wreck or degrade those achievements via willfully listening to opportunistic political cocktail-waitress dimwits and socialist eco-clowns, who assert they can unveil an all ‘new’ means to lead society to a ‘new’ utopia through re-enacting stupid old failed ideas (i.e. let’s take earned property away from its owners and steal it, yeah, that’ll work!) that have failed numerous times in the past, and can only ever fail once again, and destroy a generation of the decadent.
I’m still waiting for generation-Zombie to show any sort of commitment to honesty, sanity, or clear reasoned thinking. And to a practical real-world understanding of living and of stepping up to the reality of an 80 to 90 year lifespan, rather than planning life in terms of 2-minute intervals, which is all they can manage as they can’t remember from one moment to the next because they’re too stoned on pot to get any further, or to become any brighter at how to live.
Pleasure seekers who want to party with drugs, booze and fake-friends, and who take no responsibility to personally prepare for every single decade of life, within a a 90 year lifespan, end up as bums living in squalor within a smelly squatters tents shivering in winter, and begging for help and sympathy which isn’t coming.
And that seems to be the futile path most generation-Zombies ‘choose’ to go along.
The loony-left politicians, parties and NGOs are all perfectly ok with this, thus so much for their manipulative “moral obligations” blah-blah and fake concerns each election cycle. “Do what I say, not what I do.”
“If the last participant in a game paid their winnings forward, people are more likely to do the same for those coming along after them.”
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Yep, and when you are slow rolling the eight ball into the side pocket, you take a quick recon of those that might rather it didn’t drop.
Then it is battle stations, or, a grudging acceptance of the outcome.
Character counts.
People make sacrifices for things the believe in. Perhaps climate believers might just stop and give the idea that telling people something is right beyond question rather than answering what are clearly serious questions about the integrity and competence of the sources that claim to be one step above God and beyond question does not make for that belief in others.
Surely simple ones like why are we not seeing the out of control rises predicted in the hundred months if teh science is really beyond question are to my mind so basic at to make the idea of climate scientist as anything more than arrogant self denuded academic twits untenable. More so coming from a background where any less than 95% accuracy of timing and result in the models our team worked on was considered total failure.
Hey! I think I found Waldo!
Via Jonova- ‘The worst part was taking a week off from the gym’-
https://www.outsideonline.com/2405491/vasectomy-climate-change
The burdens one must bear to be a climate changer.
“I’ve always struggled to combine the idea of personal responsibility with the overwhelming need for human society to address the threat posed by climate change. Since at least the 1970s, the massive energy corporations responsible for the vast majority of our carbon emissions have known about, and done nothing to mitigate, the harm they cause. Because they own politicians worldwide, there doesn’t appear to be any will to take government-level action. But I’m supposed to turn off a light? What possible impact could that ever have? And why is all this on my shoulders and not theirs?”
Although he appears at first glance to be on our side I think we can safely leave the other mob to claim him for their social psychology peer reviews. Watch your back carefully Greta as the doomsdayers might have unearthed a new guiding light and shining star in vasectomy man.