Hope Matters. Elin Kelsey
and self-perceptions to manifest themselves. Objective health benefits depend not just on what we do, but what we think about what we do.
These days, many of us know the benefits of a plant-based diet for our health and the environment. So, what’s the best way to help someone choose to eat vegetables? The most common method for encouraging healthier food choices is to prominently display nutrition information. But Alia and other researchers at the Mind & Body Lab found that focusing on health but failing to mention taste unintentionally instills the mindset that healthy eating is flavorless and depriving.
In 2016, they tried a new approach and applied it to the food sold on the Stanford campus. The researchers chose adjectives that popular restaurants used to describe tasty but less healthy foods, and then used those same words to name vegetable dishes that were both nutritious and tasty. Decadent-sounding labels—like “twisted, citrus-glazed carrots” and “ultimate chargrilled asparagus”—persuaded more people to choose veggies.
They took the study nationwide, testing the same idea in fifty-seven US colleges and universities. They tracked nearly 140,000 decisions about seventy-one vegetable dishes. It turns out diners put vegetables on their plates 29 percent more often when those vegetables had tasty-sounding labels than they did when the vegetables had health-focused names, and 14 percent more often than when the veggies were given neutral names.10
Yummy labelling works because it makes eating healthy crave-worthy. Knowing that veggies are healthy and that eating them is the right thing to do isn’t enough. We are more likely to do something good when it also feels good. Our feelings about eating vegetables are not fixed. It’s not that we either love or hate vegetables; rather, our decision to eat them is influenced by labels that appeal to a delicious and indulgent mindset.11
People, too, can exert a placebo effect. When British doctors in a now-famous empirical study gave patients (who were suffering from minor cold symptoms or mild muscle pain) a firm diagnosis and positive assurances that they’d feel better in a few days, 64 percent of those patients got better. But when patients with the same symptoms were seen by doctors who told them they were uncertain of the diagnosis, and that if the patient still felt ill in a few days they should return to the doctor, only 39 percent said their health had improved.12
What we expect can cause negative consequences. Back in 1962, Japanese researchers did an experiment on thirteen boys who were hypersensitive to the leaves of the Japanese lacquer tree.13 Contact with leaves from these trees can cause a painful, itchy rash similar to poison ivy. The researchers touched the boys on one arm with leaves from a harmless tree and told them they were from the Japanese lacquer tree. They touched them on the other arm with leaves from the Japanese lacquer tree but told them the leaves were harmless.
All thirteen arms that had been touched by the harmless leaves showed a skin reaction. Only two of the arms that were touched by the poisonous tree produced a rash. Even more surprising, the reaction to the harmless leaves was stronger than the reaction to the leaves that were actually poisonous. Simply thinking that one is being touched by a poisonous leaf brought on a rash more often than actually being touched by one. Health professionals sometimes see the same phenomenon happen with patients who fear uncomfortable side effects to a prescription. The capacity of inert substances to bring about pain and other negative responses, simply because we expect them to do so, is called the nocebo effect.14
So, what does all of this have to do with hope and the environment?
Suffering headline stress disorder
Think of the environmental stories you’ve consumed recently. How do they make you feel? What’s the impact of being bombarded by the climate crisis, species extinctions, wildfires, plastics pollution, and so many other urgent, global issues?
We are exposed to horrifying events more today than at any other time in human history. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, alerts on personal mobile devices, and social media feeds bring incessant predictions of a bleak future.15 The percentage of adults using social networking sites jumped tenfold in the past decade. Much of our news consumption now occurs on these digital platforms. A mobile phone image taken by Alexander Chadwick, a survivor of the 2005 London subway bombings, jump-started what is now the everyday practice of reporting news in part through user-generated content. Our increased exposure to real-time, on-the-ground knowledge of things happening all over the planet can help build connections with people in different circumstances, but it also places us in perpetual, intimate contact with tragedies, which leaves many feeling cynical, desensitized, and ineffectual. Life has always been stressful and terrible things certainly happen, but personal exposure to horrifying events occurring any place on Earth is a new and disturbing phenomenon. What is also new is our heightened exposure to images and videos captured by ordinary people on their smartphones detailing the devastation of climate change, along with a clear message from our most trusted scientific sources that if we do not act fast, even more dire consequences are coming.
The anxiety, exhaustion, and difficulty sleeping many experience in response to the news has become so prevalent in recent years, psychologist Steven Stosny gave it a name: headline stress disorder. It’s the state of anxiety and fear people experience in response to an intense deluge of terrible news. Caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of doom and gloom, people experience a range of emotions, including fear, anxiety, anger, and depression. As Steven Pinker puts it, “Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will make us think it is.”16
It’s a matter of quantity—seven in ten Americans say they feel worn out from too much news, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study—and orientation. As numerous communication studies reveal, almost all of the news that we hear about the environment is bad. It feels like the world is falling apart.17
That’s a problem for you, and for everyone in your social network. Emotions are contagious. Not only in face-to-face situations, but online too. Every time you click on a terrifying news story about the state of the planet on social media, you are actively “catching” emotional despair, and every time you post or share that message, you’re spreading it.
We hear a lot more news about environmental problems than solutions
Climate change is an urgent, global-scaled problem. In October 2018, the world’s leading climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—released their most dire report ever: the world is currently 1 degree Celsius (1.8°F) warmer than preindustrial levels, and every fraction of additional warming will worsen the devastating impact of climate instability.
Yet worrying about a problem that is way too big for you to tackle inevitably feels discouraging. It’s disempowering. It breeds apathy. The same phenomenon happens in politics. When someone says, “Why would I bother voting?” they may be finding it hard to see how their single ballot among thousands or millions makes a difference.
To counter this feeling, psychologists say it’s important to see how our individual actions make a collective positive impact.18 Indeed, research demonstrates that when the news focuses on success stories about entrepreneurial activism and actions ordinary people are taking in local contexts we can relate to, we feel more enthusiastic and optimistic about our capacity to tackle climate change.
But unfortunately, that’s not the way climate change is typically reported. Less than 19 percent of climate change coverage on major nightly news programs in the US in 2017 and 2018 mentioned climate change solutions.19 We might assume that negative news will shock people into action, but instead it’s been proven that it can cause them to disengage. Stories that emphasize the failures of climate politics intensify people’s feelings of despair and cynicism. Journalist Elizabeth Arnold, in her five-year study of national media coverage about climate change in the US Arctic, found that almost every story perpetuated a narrative of “fear, misery, and doom” that left the public feeling powerless.20 The effects of this on our personal health and well-being are profound. As David Bornstein (journalist and co-creator of the Solutions Journalism Network) put it: “If the news were a pill, and all the known effects of the news were given in