The Climate Engagement Lab

Some people think climate change is a hoax, some think it is hopeless, and many sit somewhere in between. Changing systems at this scale, Halperin says, has always needed massive public involvement, and we are a long way from it. He points to smoking, littering and civil rights: change was possible each time, once the public got seriously involved. So his question is why that has not happened here. The project has talked with thirty-some organizations trying to change the same equation. He wants engagement, which is more than communications, though communications is part of it.

Survey research is valuable, Halperin says, and he uses it. But when you ask people how they feel about climate change, their answers are what they think they feel. That is not the same as the emotions that drive what they do. Commercial marketing has known this for a long time. His example: there is a reason PepsiCo does not put the nutrition label on the front of a bag of Fritos. The company is after an emotional decision, and it understands how those decisions are produced. Climate engagement, he argues, has not taken that lesson on board.

Orfield Laboratories, in Minneapolis, is a multisensory design research lab. Its anechoic chamber is the quietest place on earth by Guinness's count, and its acoustic lab is accredited through the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It also has labs for lighting and vibration, because, Halperin says, people are multisensory. The lab has spent more than fifty years surfacing emotions people are not conscious of, mostly for corporations. The goal here is analysis that thousands of organizations, not the project itself, can use to engage the people who already follow them.

The project is not trying to help organizations talk better about climate, Halperin says. People have been talking about climate for a long time. The aim is to start from what is already on people's minds. So it works with organizations whose members have picked themselves out: people who go to aquariums, to ocean science centers, on Sierra Club outings. Each group becomes a cohort, and each study a piece of the climate puzzle: map the emotion to forests, then forests to climate. Trees come first because most people have an experience of a tree. Almost nobody has one of methane.

Each sheet was a semantic differential: ten pairs of opposing words, each on a seven-point scale. In a real project, Halperin says, three things are designed to line up. The stimulus, here images, is chosen after research on what people have already seen. The cohort is recruited, people who know who they are but not what they have come to do. The word pairs are fitted to both. Participants are called jurors. Context counts too. A dark, quiet room gives different answers from a bright climate reception, and this room was neither a lab nor a cohort.

The pace was calibrated, so people would mark what hit them first, before the brain stepped in. The brain's interpretation, Halperin says, is an opinion. The project wants the more visceral emotion under it. He gave Emma Orfield Johnston's example. At a movie, something makes your eyes well up. Afterward a friend asks how you felt, and your brain explains. The two are related but not the same. Orfield calls the method perceptual market research, and says it invented it. Each step can take months, and the analysis at the end matters most to Halperin.

Halperin's case study: European rules forced Harley-Davidson to make its motorcycles quieter, and the company feared losing its American buyers, who it believed bought the bikes for the noise. Orfield asked how Harley knew they liked loud. It had no research. Orfield interviewed riders, took them to a racetrack and measured the ride and the engine. Riders said they loved the loudness. Orfield told Harley that what they felt was low-frequency vibration, not decibels, so the company could meet the rules. The lesson for climate, he says: find the stimulus under what people say.

One participant said that even in the dark, they were translating a feeling into a spot on a scale, and asked whether the method had been checked against heart rate and other body signals. Halperin did not know for certain. He said Steve Orfield is a scientist's scientist with peer-reviewed papers, and big companies would not keep coming back if the method failed. He described one of the project's partners, a lab that studies chills, the shiver that lasts a moment. He said it can extend a chill with a small device worn on the back. The project is building an advisory group, from forestry to psychology.

Before the images, one participant asked for a trigger warning. Another said it felt like being a lab rat. Halperin said this was a demonstration: no names, no data kept, no analysis. In a real project, people know they are joining a jury, though not what they will rate, and the organizers know their demographics. This room knew too much for a clean test. He offered that they were still in the lab, maybe not rats. Asked about survivors of sexual assault or war, he said the images would stir emotion but held nothing graphic.

Several people said some images were visibly made by AI. They named a baby and a coral scene, and counted at least three. One said that the moment an image seemed generated, they stopped trusting it and pulled back from the exercise. Another said that once one looked fake, they questioned all of them. Halperin agreed the images were not up to standard. In a real project, he said, a great deal of time and money goes into lining up the stimulus, the cohort and the language, and these had not had it.

One participant said the negative images accumulated in their body, until even the positive ones felt overwhelming and the result was anxiety and detachment. Another asked how each image's answers could be kept free of the ones before it, the order effect survey researchers know. Halperin said he did not know, and that running several cohorts or varying the order might help. Then the room raised sensitivity. Twenty to thirty percent of people are highly sensitive, one said, so build cohorts around it. Another named the research: differential susceptibility, Elaine Aron's highly sensitive person, and the orchid hypothesis.

One participant said they felt anger at several images, particularly one of a child, and asked why it was missing. Halperin said the Orfield team does not know climate well yet, his team was less involved than usual, and the advisors were not in place to vet the words. Getting climate down to twenty words is hard. Another asked whether anger is even useful, from a method built to sell products. A third answered that outrage is among the strongest motivators and disgust paralyzes, which is why social media promotes outrage. Which emotion holds which, Halperin said, is a Russian nesting doll.

One participant said the test works by cutting out the senses, and daily life never does. How does that square? Halperin said the aim is not to copy life outside. The lab removes variables like smell, heat and cold so that only the stimulus drives the emotion. Every Orfield jury for about thirty-five years, he said, has had thirty-two people. He could not explain the number, since he is not the scientist, but from it the lab turns subjective answers into quantitative data. Some projects have surely failed, he added, but the big corporations keep coming back.

Asked why he and the lab were doing this without funding, Halperin said Orfield wants an impact beyond its corporate clients and sees climate as an existential, multigenerational crisis. He is drawn to how systems change. He has kids. But the push came from frustration. George Mason, Yale and Potential Energy do tremendous research, and it records what the public thinks. With civil rights, he said, the country reached a point where making Black people ride at the back of the bus was no longer acceptable. Climate needs that point. The project is pulling in the literature on how it happens.