Abstracts

Communicating Climate Change: Why the Story Matters

by Anna Louise Breu

Understanding that how we think effects the way we communicate, and that the way we communicate has very important implications for how others think, the goal of this thesis is to show the ways that climate change narratives are both reacting and contributing to the multifaceted cognitive-psychology challenge that climate change poses to the human brain. Drawing heavily on the ideas of evolutionary psychology, this thesis will look at how our innate mental shortcuts, called cognitive biases, are having important impacts not only on the ways we write about climate change but also on how our language and rhetoric will be received.