Motivators of Action - Uncertainty and Happiness

In his interview, psychologist Dan Gilbert describes how humans do not have a great understanding of uncertainty. They usually cannot differentiate between 2% and 5% chance of an event happening. This is similar to the observation that people cannot easily comprehend large numbers, such as the difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion. As a result, appealing to statistics of uncertainty may not be the best motivator for human action (e.g. toward counteracting climate change). Instead, Gilbert states that the best way to convince the general public to take action is to directly tell them what they should do. To better understand the incentives of these direct commands, we can consider the connection between prediction and happiness. Gilbert claims that even if you can perfectly predict the future, you will not always know how much you will like it. This suggests that rather than sharing statistics of uncertainty, understanding what makes people happy and convincing them that certain actions will maximize their happiness can potentially help to motivate concrete action toward problems such as climate change.