8 Scientific Reason Why People Are The Worst

4. You Don€™'t Really Care About The Economy, The Future Or The Polar Bears

Climate change is a Bad Thing, probably one of the worst things that is ever going to happen to humanity. But, if you're honest with yourself, it's probably not something that keeps you up at night, is it?

A researchers at NYU designed an experiment in which participants were given a sum of money and the option to "invest" it in preventing climate change. If, as a group they were able to hit the target, then they would recieve an additional $60 reward, but if they didn't then they would get nothing (and those who did invest would lose their investment). They also varied the amount of time the participants would have to wait between their investment and their reward and (perhaps unsuprisingly) found that the longer that time was, the less willing people were to part with their cash. They found that most people would would not invest and hope that the rest of the group would hit the target anyway.

In one version of the experiment, the reward for investing their money was that the $60 was spent on planting oak trees to absorb carbon emissions and not a single person put their money towards it. This selfishness is a really good survival instinct, but unfortunately it paints a pretty bleak picture of our ability to come together as a species.

The experiment shows how catastrophically bad we are at delayed gratification and has serious implications for how we tackle inter-generational problems such as climate change (or the economy, or education or anything really). All of this talk about "investing in future generations" is just talk. What we actually need to do is get off our high horses and admit that what we really want are immediate and tangible rewards for our efforts. Short of a species-wide personality change, owning our own selfishness will ultimately benefit the future generations more than pretending we care.