The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves; confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true, such as the promise that human life will endure, rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world; the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is, and to the endowment effect, or instinct to demand more to give up something we have than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it). We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence and an optimism bias. We also have a pessimism bias, not that it compensates—instead it pushes us to see challenges as predetermined defeats and to hear alarm, perhaps especially on climate, as cries of fatalism. The opposite of a cognitive bias, in other words, is not clear thinking but another cognitive bias. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.