Verified by 
Key points
- Emotions can guide our actions toward the climate.
- Boredom proneness is associated with a lower intent to take action on climate change.
- Hope is a powerful drive for resolving to take action on climate crises.
Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962, bringing to light the perils of the widespread use of pesticides. Others at the time were researching the issue, but her work shone a light on the detrimental effects in a way that had lasting influence.[i]
Carson’s book is seen as a signpost of sorts, when issues of human influence on the global climate first became widely discussed. Scientists had been concerned about the effects of human activities on the environment since at least the early part of the 19th century.[ii] But it wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th century that talk of human-made climate change became commonplace.
Now we have annual reports from the International Panel on Climate Change and nightly news centered on all manner of environmental crises. And yet, action on climate crises seems to struggle mightily with inertia. Why?
What Affects Our Willingness to Take Action?
There are, of course, influences from vested interests that both shift the problem to the individual and lobby governments to slow the pace of change. To cap it off, it seems clear that those who hold more conservative political views seem to frame the issue of climate change with less urgency and so are less inclined to act. But there may be other, more fundamental forces at play.
Our propensity to act may be determined largely by our emotional reactions to the situations we face. It is certainly true that the climate crises we are confronted with provoke strong emotional reactions.
Feelings of anxiety could go one of two ways, either propelling us to act to alleviate the stress of contemplating the effects of climate change or leading to withdrawal in the face of the imminent threats.
Even feelings of helplessness can split for or against action on climate crises. The obvious link here is with the failure to act. If one’s evaluation of the situation is essentially “What’s the point?” it’s easy to see how actions would feel futile. On the other hand, appropriately evaluating the situation as needing group action—in other words, the belief that one can’t do it alone—might actually push an individual to join larger efforts at stemming climate change.
Ultimately, how we respond may be related to how much control we think we have over the potential outcomes. Our feelings of anxiety and helplessness could leave us feeling powerless to effect real change.
All of this is critical in determining how best to mobilize action both in individuals and at larger social scales.
A recent paper by Nathanial Geiger and colleagues examined the influence of a range of emotions on how likely people were to prospectively act to tackle climate crises. People were asked to indicate their intentions to engage in "public sphere actions" that might foster cooperation (e.g., encouraging others to act, sharing their own knowledge, or donating money to the cause). At the same time, they gave ratings of anxiety, helplessness, hope, and boredom.
The Role of Boredom in Inaction
Why might boredom be an important determinant of our propensity to act on climate crises?
One reason might relate to how we anticipate feeling about our prospective actions. If we think something will be boring, even before we do it, it may become harder to imagine that action vividly and so commit to seeing it through. This may tie in with helplessness. If the only actions I can imagine taking seem small and lack gravitas (recycling plastics, say), then I might view those actions as both futile and boring.
And we may experience boredom in the face of climate crises in part as a function of the constant barrage of negative messaging. Here, the lessons we learned from cigarettes and drunk driving are instructive.
In a bid to reduce cigarette smoking in particular, shock ads were created showing, among other things, patients breathing and speaking through tracheotomy tubes in their throats. Images were emblazoned on cigarette packaging showing diseased organs, and the latest efforts now print warning messages on individual cigarettes.
Similar efforts to shock us into action were launched against drunk driving in Australia in the 1990s. From television ads to billboards, frank images and slogans (“If you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot.”) were used to confront consumers with the stark consequences of their actions.
In a sense, the daily stories of the severe consequences of climate crises are like these shock ads, showing us horrendous wildfires, floods, and heat waves as just a few examples of events driven by human-made climate change. The problem is that humans become inured to the shock ads, habituating to them and maybe even finding them boring.
One study showed that over nine years, the effectiveness of health warnings on cigarette packaging declined significantly in both Canada and the U.S. Interestingly, the decline was steepest in Canada, where shocking images were used, compared with the U.S., where only text warnings were placed on cigarette packs. Perhaps the more shocking the ad, the more short-lived the impact.
There are other reasons why boredom might impede the call to action on the climate. Boredom, in part, signals a need for agency, to feel like we are the ones determining what we do next. This is likely important in two ways. First, calls for changing behavior in the face of the many and varied climate crises impinge on our need for agency. We are explicitly being told what to do to effect change and are being told that it is our choices to date that have contributed to the problem. We have to change and we might not like the constraint that places on our autonomy.
Second, boredom proneness is characterized, in part, by a diminished sense of agency. The feeling that highly boredom-prone people experience of not being fully in control of their own actions may be a strong impediment to action. This is evident in other domains that require "public sphere actions," such as political campaigning and voting more generally. People who see such things as pointless are also more likely to be highly boredom-prone.
Finally, we may feel as though we lack a sense of personal connection to the crises. Certainly, in some parts of the world (such as where we are in Canada), the many effects of climate change can seem quite distant. Even if we can see a change ourselves—for example, lower snowfall levels in winter and fewer days with viable outdoor skating rinks—such things hardly impinge on our daily experiences. In such a detached, disconnected situation, boredom can set in. Where there is little personal connection, there will be less urgent feelings of meaningfulness and ultimately, more boredom.
All of these things may conspire to make boredom a prominent driver of inaction, of a certain reluctance to engage in behaviors aimed at combatting climate crises.
That’s certainly what Geiger and colleagues found. It turned out that helplessness and anxiety did not play major roles in whether people intended to act on climate change. But boredom did. The more bored people felt at the prospect of acting on climate change, the less likely they were to report strong intentions to act.
Interestingly, boredom and helplessness did not amplify one another. Whatever the mechanism boredom had on intentions to act, it was not the case that boredom simply led to people throwing up their hands in despair and declaring, “What’s the point?”
More research is needed, but it may be the desensitization we feel to the constant messages of climate breakdown or the struggle we feel to believe that our actions will have meaningful impact that is more responsible for the inertia many experience. For those who are already prone to boredom, the effect may be even worse. That feeling that you lack any sense of agency may prevent you from engaging in a wide range of actions, including those that might help address climate crises.
Importantly, there was one final driver of intentions to act on the climate crises, and this one had the largest impact of all—hope. The authors of the study found that the strongest positive predictor of taking action on climate change was a reported sense of hope. When presented with options to act, the more hopeful people felt about those avenues to change, the stronger their intention to act.
Hope signals that we feel like our goals are both important and achievable through our own actions. How we can marshal hope to combat the inertia brought on by boredom and propel us toward more effective change is a question for another study.
[i] The book was voted one of the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006 by Discover magazine.
[ii] Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician best known for Fourier analysis, is credited with first raising the possibility that human activity could affect the Earth’s climate, in 1824.
