Why Are We Reluctant to Act Immediately on Climate Change?: From Ontological Assumptions to Core Cognition

Drawing on the findings from cognitive and developmental psychology, I argue that the wait-and-see approach to climate change originates from a misconception that heat is a material-like object. This ontological assumption exemplifies a general cognitive bias—we prefer to treat various ontological entities, including processes, as objects. The object bias is ultimately associated with our core cognition of objects, a system of representations that consists mainly of spatiotemporal information. To persuade people to act immediately on climate change, we need a special conceptual change to abandon the well-entrenched object bias and the related misconception of the nature of heat.