Lies, Cynicism, and the Asymmetry of Trust: How a Documentary Can Damage a Movement . . . or Not

By Scott Slovic

There has been much discussion lately, among scholars and activists concerned with global climate change, of Michael Moore’s new movie Planet of the Humans, described by one activist as a “bomb in the center of the climate action movement.” The film, which includes extensive footage of author and 350.org founder Bill McKibben and author and former vice president Al Gore, suggests that leading climate activists are benefitting financially from their relationships with big business and that their enthusiasm for alternative, renewable sources of energy is misplaced, essentially trading fossil fuels for other technologies that are equally damaging to the planet.

Writing for Yale Climate Connections, Dana Nuccitelli argues that director Jeff Gibbs and co-producers Ozzie Zehner and Michael Moore may have succeeded in sowing doubts within the climate change movement precisely because the filmmakers purport to be progressive, knowledgeable environmentalists, concerned about the ravages of unchecked industrial activity and suspicious of green panaceas, such as wind turbines and solar panels. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Planet of the Humans is not the misinformation presented in the film, based on badly outdated science and the filmmakers’ failure to heed pre-release interventions from such experts as McKibben and Naomi Klein, but the ad hominem critiques of several leading voices of the climate movement.

Because of the psychological phenomenon known as the “asymmetry of trust,” it is considerably easier to destroy trust than to build it. Leaders of the campaign to mitigate climate change rely on the trust of fellow activists in building their movement. As McKibben puts it in his response to Planet of the Humans, “Movements only really work if they grow, if they build. If they move. And that’s always an additive process. The trick, I think, is figuring out how to make it possible for more people to join in.” The great damage caused by Moore and his colleagues in the new film is how the film has quickly succeeded in “build[ing] cynicism, indeed a kind of nihilism,” McKibben writes. The effect of the film is “to drive down turnout—not just in elections, but in citizenship generally. If you tell a bunch of lies about groups and leaders and as a result people don’t trust them, who benefits?” Paul Slovic discusses the social implications of the asymmetry of trust in his article “Perceived Risk, Trust and Democracy” from The Perception of Risk (2000). I have applied this idea to climate change communication in “Science, Eloquence, and the Asymmetry of Trust: What’s at Stake in Climate Change Fiction,” which appeared in Numbers and Nerves (2015).

Awareness of this concept—the ease of fracturing trust, the difficulty of building it—may not have deterred these filmmakers from producing what Nuccitelli calls “Their misleading, outdated, and scientifically sophomoric dismissal of renewable energy,” which is “perhaps the most dangerous form of climate denial, eroding support for renewable energy as a critical climate solution.” As McKibben suggests in his response that appeared in Rolling Stone, it probably wasn’t Moore’s conscious goal to cultivate mistrust in leaders of the climate movement: “I think his goal was to build his brand a little more, as an edgy ‘truth teller’ who will take on ‘establishments.’ (That he has, over time, become a millionaire carnival barker who punches down, not up—well, that’s what brand management is for.) But the actual effect in the real world is entirely predictable. That’s why Breitbart loves the movie. That’s why the tar-sands guys in Alberta are chortling.”

The truth is, though, that dismantling trust works in multiple directions. Those who once turned to Michael Moore as a truth teller on such issues as gun violence and a broken health care system in the United States will now see him and his colleagues as self-serving, ill-informed propagandists. In my article on the asymmetry of trust for Numbers and Nerves, I point to Michael Crichton’s 2004 novel State of Fear as an engaging narrative (stocked with villains and heroes) that dangerously peddles a misleading representation of climate activists. Planet of the Humans, as many respondents have pointed out in the first weeks after its release on YouTube for free viewing on April 21, 2020, the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, is based on similar mistruths (yes, fictions), though its makers have sold it as a “documentary.”

Bill McKibben writes in his May 1st response to the film, “It hurts to be personally attacked in a movie. It hurts more to see a movement divided.” It remains to be seen how much damage to the climate movement will occur as a result of the film. McKibben himself points to the fact that the movement now has many new leaders as a sign of hope, a reason why it may not matter so much if early leaders like himself are attacked, their reputations soiled. The continuing fallout from Planet of the Humans will be a test to see how strong the movement remains, despite the asymmetry of trust.

Photograph of Michael Moore by David Shankbone.