These days, it’s easy to succumb to hopelessness. Whether you’re thinking about the climate crisis, the prospect of AI apocalypse, war or political turmoil, the list of challenges facing humanity can seem insurmountable.
It certainly feels unprecedented, and much of it may be. The sense of impending doom, on the other hand, is nothing new. And what we have learned from the past is that doomerism can lead to paralysis. If everyone freezes, then nothing changes – but if we want to have a chance of mitigating some of the threats I’ve mentioned then action is what’s required.
In 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created an infamous magazine cover with a “Doomsday Clock”. The hands move closer to midnight whenever events push humanity a little closer to catastrophe. They move back when we make the world a little safer. The original setting was seven minutes to midnight, and the hands are now a mere 85 seconds away.
The Doomsday Clock was a particularly memorable form of crisis communication. The idea was to wake people from their day-to-day routines and help them realise the grave risks facing us. As such, it stands in a long tradition of debate about how to inform, warn and inspire members of the public to take action.
On one end of the spectrum are the doomers. These are often activists and whistleblowers who feel a genuine sense of dread about imminent disaster, and want to inspire the same alarm in others. Recently, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon made headlines by arguing that frontier AI models pose an existential risk to humanity.
At the other end are critics who tend to dismiss these calls as either overblown or self-serving. These folks argue that hyperbolic claims either lead to needless panic or distract from more important issues.
I find myself in a third camp of people who harbour sincere concerns about the problems facing humanity, but worry that feelings of dread will immobilise people. Inaction is a sensible response if you are led to believe that we are past the point of no return, or that the scope of the problem is so immense that anything you do won’t make a difference.
The problem with doomerism isn’t necessarily that the risks are exaggerated, but that it may create a self-fulfilling prophecy – by engendering helplessness, rather than galvanising people.
This aspect of human psychology has been well known for many years by experts on persuasion. When people hear messages designed to appeal to our fears, they can be moved to take action. But this only tends to work as a one-off, and only then when the messages convey a sense of efficacy – a belief that it’s still possible to make a difference. By contrast, if people are inundated with scary and overwhelming stories about the climate or AI, they tune out. Like the boy who cried wolf, those bearing these messages can quickly find themselves ignored.
A big problem for us now, then, is that the modern information ecosystem tends to reinforce negativity. For decades, a core principle in the news business has been “if it bleeds, it leads”. This came from an understanding among journalists that humans are drawn to bad news. This principle now dominates what you see online.
My colleagues and I looked at traffic to news stories on Upworthy.com. This was a website that became famous for conducting A/B tests of headlines to see which one drove clicks, and then using the most popular headline. We analysed 22,743 of these mini-experiments and found that each additional negative word in a headline increased clicks by 2.3%. Psychologists call this the negativity bias: bad is more attention-grabbing than good.
So how does consuming these stories affect our behaviour? We tested the impact of negative messaging around climate in a massive study with 59,440 participants in 63 countries. We had climate experts create 11 different messages to determine exactly which of them changed beliefs and mobilised people to take real action.
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The messages included emphasising scientific consensus (for example, noting that “99% of expert climate scientists” agree on the facts), social norms (stating that a majority of people in each nation was concerned), consequences for one’s region (emphasising the increased frequency and severity of wildfires and floods) or the effects of climate change on future generations (asking participants to imagine writing a letter about their actions regarding the climate crisis that would be read by people decades from now).
We also included a text loaded with doom and gloom that told participants: “If your anxiety about climate change is dominated by fears of starving polar bears, glaciers melting and sea levels rising, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a young adult today. And yet the swelling seas – and the cities they will drown – have so dominated the picture of climate change/global warming that they have blinded us to other threats, many much closer at hand and much more catastrophic …”
This terrifying passage was the one that proved most effective at getting people to spread it on the internet or social media. But like other fear appeals, it failed in inspiring real action: it was the single worst message for getting people to make the time and effort to mitigate climate effects – by planting trees, for example. It also failed to increase belief in the climate emergency or support for climate policies.
This absolutely doesn’t mean we should avoid sharing the facts about the climate crisis. The message that emphasised the overwhelming scientific consensus noted that the “Earth is warming and climate change is happening” due to human activity. It was more effective than negativity on every outcome we measured, except for sharing on the internet. It conveyed the facts in a sober manner, with the backing of 99% of climate scientists.
What this shows is that, instead of making people feel inept and miserable, we need to take the exact opposite approach. Scientific consensus isn’t the only powerfully motivating message. My PhD student Danielle Goldwert has found that telling people about the potential emotional benefits of climate action – such as increased hope and connection – makes them significantly more likely to take action, be it political participation, advocacy, donating money to climate causes or changing their lifestyle.
If we want to motivate people in the face of dire threats, we must give them a reason to hope. Without that, we are destined to doomscroll while the world burns.
Jay Van Bavel is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.
Further reading
Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie (Vintage, £18.99
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (Canongate, £10.99)
The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac (Vintage, £12.99)
