Elke Weber

Elke Weber (Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1957) holds a BA in Psychology from York University (Toronto, Canada) and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University (Cambridge, United States). From 1984 to 1999 she held a series of teaching and research positions at the universities of Toronto, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, Stanford, Koblenz (Germany) and Ohio State. She then joined the faculty at Columbia University, first as Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology and, from 2003 onwards, as the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School. While at Columbia, she founded the Center for Decision Sciences and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, as well as holding visiting appointments at the London Business School and the Copenhagen Business School. In 2016 she moved to Princeton University, where she is currently Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs.

Weber has been president of three learned societies in different branches of psychology – the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, the Society for Neuroeconomics, and the Society for Mathematical Psychology – and was a lead author in Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change) for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She is currently an Einstein Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Einstein Center Climate Change of the University of the Arts Berlin, and the Science of Intelligence Cluster of Excellence (Technical University of Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin), as well as a Visiting Scholar in Environmental Sustainability at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In the mid 1980s, Professor Weber began studying decision-making and uncertainty as applied to the financial world. She then took up her first academic appointment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where the Dean tasked her with bringing together all the researchers on campus who were working on decision-making, regardless of their field of expertise. It was then that she coined a phrase she has since employed many times to express the importance she lays on crossing the lines between scientific disciplines in order to tackle an issue holistically: “Combine and conquer”.

As part of this effort, she organized a series of meetings that gave rise to a field study on perceptions of climate change among farmers in the region: “Three behavioral economists, experts on agriculture, were working on a National Science Foundation project and needed a psychologist on board to conduct the interviews.” What she discovered from these conversations was that farmers were trying to safeguard their business from the effects of climate change either by changing their production methods, by using financial means like insurance or forward markets, or by lobbying local policymakers to legislate changes. “It turned out that people were doing one of those three, but not all three together,” she recalls today. “And that’s where I came up with the idea of a single-action bias,” whereby people take one step then stop, when a portfolio of strategies would be a mode optimal approach.

Another conclusion that dates from this experience is that “climate change is, in some sense, a perfect storm. All the things that make behavior difficult for us in other situations, like not eating right or not saving enough for our retirement, are there with climate change in the sense that action is costly right now, and the benefits of the action will come later. But at least with healthy eating and investing, the consequences come back to you, to your future self. With climate change, though, the perception is that the benefits will come back to future generations in far away places. So there’s this collective action component as well. And attribution is much harder too. It’s a tricky scientific issue.”

The Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University is clear where the solution lies. “No discipline has all the answers,” she reflects. “We need engineering answers, we need economic answers, but we also need individual and collective action. And I think the big advance over the last twenty years or so has been in behavioral economics, realizing that not all decisions that are made, even by political decision-makers, are rational.” This is so, she explains, because “political and economic agents are people like all of us, with their feelings and rules of conduct. And by not utilizing all of the ways in which humans process information and arrive at decisions, we are in many ways leaving essential tools just lying on the table.”

The most effective mobilizing factors in climate decision-making

In a 2006 paper titled “Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions of Long-Term Risk: Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us,” published in Climatic Change, Professor Weber sums up her research on climate change perception and action in three fundamental insights.

The first is that climate change does not elicit as much fear as other more concrete extreme events, “hurricanes or forest fires” being the examples she chooses, and are therefore less likely to motivate action without further intervention. “Climate change,” she goes on, “is a statistical phenomenon, and we know that what people care about are concrete events. We care about stories. We care about things that happen to us personally.”

The second insight belongs to the realm of the emotions. The pessimistic narrative to the effect that the climate change tipping point has already passed is, she says, counter-productive. On the contrary, her research has found that what moves people to action is positive emotions. “Instead of feeling guilty because you’re part of the problem, you feel proud because you’re part of the solution. I think the key message to convey is that action is possible. It’s a difficult problem. It’s a wicked problem. But we know what needs to happen in terms of renewables, in terms of nuclear power, in terms of carbon capture… And we also know it’s not going to bankrupt us. It’s going to be very good for parts of the economy. And, on top of that, individual behavior in the private sector can make a difference. So telling people what are the most effective actions they can take, in their jobs and as citizens of their country, is I think a really important message that the media should be trying to transmit.”

The third insight uncovered by Weber’s research is the immediacy of experience. For her, the most effective means to make people aware is having personally witnessed or lived through something: “When you see it happening in your backyard, when you see hurricanes become so much more intensive and coming every two weeks rather than two per season. I think personal experience is a very powerful teacher.”

The first psychologist to serve on the IPCC

Until 2010, no expert from the field of psychology had been invited to serve on the IPCC. Weber was the first, out of a team of literally thousands of scientists: “There were more moral philosophers than psychologists on board. In part, it was because the economists thought they knew how people make decisions. And if you assume they make them rationally, you don’t need a psychologist for that.” In this respect, she sees herself as “a missionary for behavioral decision theory,” and this initial contribution was just the first of many. “Now, we have our first ever standalone chapter on demand-side solutions and social processes. So in one seven-year cycle, there have been huge advances.”