Six years ago I posted an article on this website (Thinking – Is it Overrated?) challenging the popularity of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I made the point that CBT is premised upon a long-since discredited view of the relationship existing between higher cognitive functioning and emotionally based cognition. Regardless, CBT is proffered as a scientifically sound technique, the validation of which (we are told) is evidence based. Consequently, we still have an army of CBT counsellors telling their patients that all emotion is led by thought, and that’s the end of the matter! I offered CBT as an example of a scientific community establishing a strong consensus, notwithstanding the incomprehensible levels of ill-informed naivety required to do so.

Today, I would like to return to the subject of thinking and emotion, but with quite a different motive. Before I start, I offer the following passage taken from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, which I think provides a most eloquent exposition of the issue:

In a landmark article, [Robert] Zajonc urged psychologists to use a dual-process model in which affect or “feeling” is the first process. It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behaviour). The second process—thinking—is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation. In other words, thinking is the rider; affect is the [ridden] elephant. The thinking system is not equipped to lead—it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen—but it can be a useful advisor.

Haidt’s metaphor of an elephant over which the rider has only limited influence (an elephant’s gotta do what an elephant’s gotta do) is intended to emphasise the primary role of our affects and emotions in invoking our moral positions. We may be able to offer a rationale for the stance we have adopted, but these are always post-hoc rationalisations. The rider serves the elephant and not the other way round. The moral position is established emotionally (by the elephant) and then justified rationally (by its rider).

The main way in which the rider (thinking) serves the elephant (affect and emotion) is by using its command of language to influence other riders, probably in an earnest attempt to get them to align their elephant with yours. After all, the only reason why we have moral positions is to affirm our rightful place in society. And so we spend endless hours on the internet, pushing our post-hoc rationalisations in the hope that some sort of herd behaviour would coalesce around our elephant.

But we are nearly always disappointed with the results, mainly because we shouldn’t actually be talking to the other riders — let’s face it, they are just as much along for the ride as you are. That’s not to say that a fruitful, rational exchange of views is impossible; it’s just far more likely that an impasse will result, with both parties seemingly unmoved by the other’s reasoning no matter how airtight it may be. How often, for example, have you found yourself dealing with an individual who is clearly out of his or her depth but who doggedly refuses to back down (‘tis but a scratch)? How often have you written to your MP pointing out the obvious folly of net zero, only to be fobbed off with a boilerplate response that allows for no nuance or balance? Often a supposedly moral or ethical position is maintained long after the individual concerned has run out of rational ways to defend it (it seems that reason is cheap but emotional attachment is sacrosanct). The bottom line is that the elephants are in charge and so, to get anywhere, you would be far better off appealing directly to the elephant.

The idea that rational debate is likely to fail when strongly held moral positions are at stake is well-known to psychologists. Consequently, the internet is loaded with expert observations as to how this plays out when the subject is climate change. However, you may have noticed that, despite the fact that everyone is riding their own elephant, only the climate change sceptic is deemed to be suffering from a lack of effective control. Only the climate change sceptic needs someone to have a quiet word with their elephant to help them achieve a higher plane of understanding. Take, for example, what Professor Sander van der Linden has been saying regarding the importance of manipulating affect and emotion. In one of his papers he states:

Indeed, the interactive engagement of both cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms is key to fostering more public involvement with climate change.

And according to the BBC:

He says years of research have shown him that confronting people with hard evidence is not the way to go. While it might be tempting to try to bluntly fight conspiracy theories with facts, “there’s a very high chance it backfires”.

Yes, it is obvious to van der Linden that irrationality is the exclusive domain of what he calls ‘conspiracy theorists’. But he is not alone. The IPCC has made it abundantly clear that it sees elephant whispering as the most valuable tool in its armoury, and that goes a long way towards explaining the media’s obsession with the anthropogenic contribution to extreme weather. Furthermore, in the UK we have the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) with its MINDSPACE, emphasising the importance of priming (‘our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues’) and affect (‘our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions’). And I should add that Haidt is actually one of the worst culprits for singling out the climate change sceptic. Yes, they are all at it, employing every trick in the book to overcome the dogged resistance of the often intelligent but always ‘wrong-headed’ rider of the climate sceptical elephant.

This is all very well and I would be more than happy to sit back and take it on the chin, were it not for the obvious bias blind spot on display. Yes, we sceptics often are intelligent and that intelligence has provided us with the insight that we are dealing with a universal human trait here. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those on the climate alarmed side of the issue are debating sans éléphante. So for every person who is tearing their hair out with sceptics who can’t see that we are faced with an existential threat, you will find a hair-tugging sceptic who points out that there is nothing in the IPCC reports to suggest that the threat is existential. But it is not intelligence or education that determines which side of this debate you are on; it is probably the affect you experience when you reflect upon the physical risk posed by climate change as opposed to the translational risk posed by Milliband’s lunatic proposals. We can argue until we are blue in the face, but what will ultimately sway the debate is a public mood fuelled by self-interests, gut reactions and visceral fears. This is not a battle for minds but a battle for hearts. In the UK, blackouts and a ruined economy will finally settle the issue, but alas rather too late.

24 Comments

  1. Yes John – but when his strongly held moral position changes from an overriding need to saving the planet to an overriding need to save his seat, my MP may begin to take note of the many dangers (to him) of the pursuit of Net Zero.

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  2. A funny thing happened to me on the way to…….As some may know I recently sent a letter to Peter Kyle MP of BSIT re the accuracy of the Met Office. No response ensued and after 2 months I published it online. Subsequent reposting and publicity resulted in over 5 million views as well as various sponsored attempts at “debunking” facts that I had raised. Throughout the process I became aware of “monitoring” my online profile as well as a potential hacking into my emails. I opted to put in a “Subject Access Review” (FOI type request) to find out what data was held by government about me. Final answer date is the 20th February. Quite astonishingly just yesterday one section of government (who I had not directed my SAR to) sent me a “partial” reply claiming they had never seen the said letter to my MP. So all my effort was seemingly in vain and Peter Kyle either ignored it or more likely never even bothered to exercise his “reader’s” time (Kyle has the self confessed reading age of an 8 year old) to explain it to him.

    To me (pending the final complete response to my SAR) it seems conventional access routes to the democratic process are somewhat a waste of time hence I am pursuing my arguments (as is this blog) through the latest variant of the “Fourth Estate” via online presentations. But I have to accept that, as Robin Guenier asserts above, it is only when some people need your vote, will anything possibly happen.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. Robin,

    Indeed it may. But this will not be because the content of an argument has finally persuaded him, and that’s the point I am making. Besides which, although a survival imperative usually trumps a moral imperative, I fear we have a long way to go before he has to worry about political survival. Let’s hope I’m wrong about that.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. John,

    Thank you for explaining in such clear terms what should have been obvious to me, but which until now had eluded me. Suddenly so many things that had puzzled me now seem to make sense.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. John R, my own experience (over more than 10 years) has suggested that I have indeed been wasting my time writing to my MP about climate/energy matters.

    Initially, with my very first letter on the subject, my MP forwarded my missive to the relevant minister who replied to me with a few lines advising me, an electrical engineer, how much technical progress was being made.

    Since then I have written to my MP many times but had no more acknowledgement than the automatic ping back in the case of e-mail submissions.

    I have also written to other politicians on climate/energy and related issues (e.g. BBC bias): the Chancellor, several Prime Ministers, a Prime Minister’s wife (when I thought she wore the trousers), my local C of E Bishop, a Lord with an academic interest in the history of government.  Not one of them replied to my warnings of the dangers of, for example, the Climate Change Act.

    The only reply I did receive was from the late Queen’s secretary – I had been hoping that Her Majesty would discuss relevant matters with her Prime Minister.  Unfortunately, my timing was very poor as I wrote in that period between the Duke of Edinburgh’s last spell in hospital and his death a few weeks later.

    So, John R, I fear that you are correct, “This is not a battle for minds but a battle for hearts. In the UK, blackouts and a ruined economy will finally settle the issue, but alas rather too late.”

    So what can we all do in order to be best prepared for the (partial) recovery following the tsunami that this “virtue signalling” stupidity will bring down upon us?

    Regards, John C.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. Mark,

    I am, of course, indebted to Haidt for his elephant metaphor — it is a godsend for essayists. In fact, although I have only just begun reading his book, I think I am already in a position to heartily recommend it to others. It’s just a shame that he is yet another psychologist jumping on the behavioural science bandwagon and using his insights in such a partisan way. It’s not as if these psychologists are unaware of the problem of cognitive bias blind spot (i.e. the ability to see cognitive bias in others but not yourself). Haidt covers it very early on in his book. It’s just that, ironically enough, they can only see cognitive bias blind spot in others!

    Liked by 2 people

  7. John C,

    “So what can we all do in order to be best prepared…”

    God I wish I knew!

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  8. Ray,

    Yes, Robin is right, but I am holding out hope that the right public mood will kick in early enough to start the process of back-peddling long before the actual election date. That said, political analysis is way outside of my comfort zone.

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  9. The climatists appeal to fearful emotions is a deliberate tactic of persuasion for their cause. Case in point:

    Question to then IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri (2002 to 2015) “What do you see as the next tools you could utilize to create change?

    Pachuri Response: “Children. I think we have to sensitize the young and tell them how their future is going to be affected if we don’t take action today. I think if we can get them to understand the seriousness of the problem they would probably shame adults into taking the right steps.”

    And Greta and rest of it is history.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Ben Pile exposes how climate radicals are using media messaging to advance the climate crisis mass delusion in his substack article Behind the ‘climate crisis’ myth: green ideology.  

    “The facts and stats of the world are in contradiction to the ideological conception of nature held by the global green Great and Good and by the street-level environmentalists, but not the broader public. So what is this ideology, and how does it overwhelm its victims’ capacity for reason and facts?

    As David Attenborough explains, it,

    Our economies and political systems are unconsciously predicated on the belief that nature will continue to be a benign and regular provider of the conditions we need to thrive. […] Our stable and reliable planet no longer exists. The impacts of this destabilisation will profoundly impact every country on Earth.

    We can know that this is a false belief, because it is a myth that nature has ever been anything but extremely hostile, rather than a benign ‘provider’. Hence, until the end of the 1880s, a quarter of all British children died before reaching their fifth birthday. In Germany, half of children did not survive that long. Globally, infant mortality was 22.4 per cent in 1950. In 2021, it was 3.7 per cent. The ‘planet’ is manifestly far less hostile to humanity than it was just a lifetime ago. And this is thanks to industries, to expanding access to markets, and to technological and scientific development – sheer artifice – not to Natural Providence. David Attenborough is as misled and misleading as he is a ‘national treasure’.

    Tiny children’s view of the world and their own futures have been poisoned by an ideology that has no care for facts, much less the children and their prosperity. Their heads have been deliberately filled by the false idea of a ‘climate crisis’ in order to make them instruments of a political agenda, against their own interests, far before they are equipped to understand the claims they reproduce.

    Society needs to confront green ideology urgently.
    It is the greatest threat to our safety and prosperity.

    Synopsis and link to video: https://rclutz.com/2023/02/26/save-the-children-from-climate-grooming/

    Liked by 3 people

  11. I don’t know nuffin about Haidt, nor have read his book, but as I understand what is written above, the metaphorical elephant is the repository of visceral or gut feelings. I reckon that these feelings are a deal more calculated than that. Instead they are the product of an emotional response further down. This I reckon is a deep-seated desire to be well thought of by others. What those cynical Frenchies call the “bien pensant”.

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  12. Max,

    “This I reckon is a deep-seated desire to be well thought of by others.”

    That’s an important point, and one made by Haidt in his book. He quotes research that shows we all having a ‘sociometer’, meaning we are more concerned about looking right under the public gaze rather than actually being right. Haidt says:

    The sociometer is part of the elephant. Because appearing concerned about other people’s opinions makes us look weak, we (like politicians) often deny that we care about opinion polls. But the fact is we care a lot about what other people think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. I think, therefore I am.

    They think, therefore they are.

    We think, therefore we are.

    The problem is, we are all so heavily invested in our own egos, our own sense of self. ‘They’ think that by getting us to affect and not think, they will herd us like sheep into a self-unaware pen so that we may do their bidding. But in getting us to affect and to supposedly abandon thinking, they have to do a lot of thinking themselves and thus invest heavily in their own sense of self-importance. Such a tactic is ultimately doomed to fail, because the humans riding imperiously upon compliant elephants who think they can make other elephants with humans on board go in the direction they want them to go make the fundamental mistake of thinking those other humans are not like them. But we are, because we think.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Jaime,

    It’s not that they don’t give sceptics the credit for thinking, it’s that they presume the thinking to be motivated reasoning designed to serve our elephants. And they would be right. However, they go further in presuming that our elephants shouldn’t be so served, i.e. they presume our motivations to be misplaced. Meanwhile, their own motivated reasoning is supposedly okay because it is only a desire to respect the evidence. They just can’t accept that we are on that same elephant. They can’t accept that respecting evidence is an involved process and has to go beyond straightforward acceptance of a scientific consensus.

    This is one reason why I think the CBT example is so interesting. You may recall in my article from six years ago that I pointed out how CBT counsellors were encountering patients whose personal experiences did not fit the CBT theory, i.e. patients reported that their maladaptive emotions had not been immediately preceded by maladaptive thoughts. So did the experts take this on board and ask themselves if this evidence required a rethink of their central idea? No, they just responded with a classic case of motivated reasoning in order to protect their investment in the scientific consensus. They started inventing the idea that the thoughts were there but they were subconscious, for some reason. They even redefined ‘thought’ to include activity happening within those parts of the brain designed to modulate emotional cognition. Rather than accept that they were wrong, they constructed a theory that was just incoherent and self-negating – a classic case of ‘twas just a scratch. So, we have no reason to take lectures from psychologists warning of the perils of motivated reasoning.

    Liked by 2 people

  16. Speaking of elephants and the assumption of motivated reasoning, I note this response on ATTP to my previous article on prosocial censorship:

    Holy crap, that post by John Ridgway (cliscep.com/author/johnridgway4/) on Curry’s blog is nasty. If we didn’t know by his link what axe he’s grinding, we soon get the picture from his words. OMG, the smug truculence, the quote-mining, butthurt-victim-playing, false-equating, — whoa, gotta pace myself! If anyone deserves the pejorative label science denier, IMHO, it’s him. I for one would fully support a little anti-sociopathic censorship in his case.

    If that’s the rider talking, I’d hate to meet his elephant. Anyway, he concludes:

    And even with all good scientific intentions, there’s the real potential for conclusions that are narrowly true to be co-opted beyond their limited meaning by racists and xenophobes, or mercenary culture warriors like John Ridgway, with intersubjectively bad, solely self-interested intentions!

    As I have said before, some people are convinced they are dealing with orcs. Any question of human nature just doesn’t come into it.

    Liked by 4 people

  17. And that’s why you’re wise not to get involved in commenting there. If Cliscep is an echo chamber (and I concede that it probably is) it’s as nought to aTTP’s place.

    I know I would say this, but I think by and large discussions here are thoughtful and respectful. I see precious little of either quality over there.

    Liked by 3 people

  19. Mark,

    I guess we are not always perfectly respectful towards those who hold contrary opinions but, there again, none of us are saints. Yet I cannot recall ever calling anyone a sociopath or mercenary culture warrior. What we are seeing here is the wrath of the righteous mind, and it isn’t pretty.

    I do wish they would drop the insults and accusations and address instead the data provided by my article. Not one of my detractors has made any attempt to do so — not even Professor Rice. Who’s being the science denier now?

    Liked by 2 people

  20. Just to be clear, the rant I reported earlier wasn’t from Professor Rice, but it did appear on his website unmoderated. He claims to have very high standards when it comes to moderation. This claim is patently false.

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  21. Re BIG Elephant and tiny rider, a serf cannot but concur that we are emotional beings but

    we need to bewarethe Post Modernists’ ‘There are no truths, only ‘your’ truths or ‘mine’.

    This goes against Nature’s realities. ‘If you step into a murky swamp you’re likely to drown.’

    We ARE emotional but we are also creators – Aristotle’s logic, Socrates ‘know thyself,’

    Galileo’s ‘guess and test’ and Popper’s falsification, – nature’s trial and error.

    ALL IS NOT HOPELESS – hence Cliscep many postings analysing and refuting

    Net Zero illogicalities and WOKE absurdities.

    Liked by 2 people

  22. John,

    Ironically the failure over at aTTP’s place to address the issues raised by your article, and their choice instead to insult and abuse, simply make your point for you. The further delicious irony is that they don’t understand that.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. Mark,

    It’s not so much the insult and abuse that bothers me, it’s the fact that it isn’t a comment that lends itself to a cool and rational response. For example, he talks of ‘quote-mining’ but doesn’t think it necessary to explain which quotes he is referring to or why they are problematic. He talks of ‘false-equating’ but doesn’t think it necessary to point towards where he thinks that is occurring. And just how am I supposed to be ‘playing the victim card’? What does that even mean? This isn’t a fellow rider attempting to communicate, it’s a bull elephant charging. It gets us nowhere but I bet he sure as hell feels better now.

    Mind you, I have to admit, he got me with ‘smug truculence’. I deliberately chose a truculent, self-assured style of writing, which won’t have endeared me to those coming from the other moral camp.

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  24. Beththesurf,

    Indeed. Evolution has provided us with the gift of rationality and it has done us a lot of good. But I wonder whether it will save us in the end.

    Like

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