University of Exeter researcher Ben Lyons has a trio of new studies that offer a mix of good, bad, and ugly news about extreme weather and climate beliefs, belief in conspiracy theories, and how we can go about correcting people’s mistaken conspiracy beliefs.
The good news on conspiracy theories, per Lyons’s first study, is that it’s possible to keep people from believing in them--so long as you do so before they fully buy into the conspiracy. The bad news is that it’s hard to correct these false beliefs if they dovetail with pre-existing biases. In the study, for example, people who already distrusted Big Pharma or the media were more likely to believe a fake conspiracy about Zika and vaccines.
The ugly news is that decades of oil industry propaganda have created biases that make it impossible to completely inoculate the public against climate denialism. The damage has been done.
On extreme weather, the good news is that events like droughts or the polar vortex can make people more willing to accept the reality of climate change. In this study, Lyons documents some indications that extreme weather-climate communications are improving, particularly around hurricanes. Additionally, the study shows that climate-fueled extreme weather events can be motivating for liberals to prioritize climate. The bad news is that this was not true for conservatives. Hurricanes, along with floods and other types of extreme weather, didn’t appear to change their beliefs, despite the well-defined climate connection.
The ugly news is that one’s perception of extreme weather and climate is filtered through political biases, so liberals appear overly eager to accept the connection and claim to have experienced an event, while conservatives remain mired in denial.
For his third study, Lyons delivers the bad news that there appears to be little value in using certain thought experiments to help people see past their own biases and preexisting beliefs to examine an issue on its merits.. Having people do little mental exercises reduce the idea that your political affiliation defines you by re-affirming their self-worth (and mitigate the defensiveness that leads one to retreat to the comfort of social biases) or their multiple social identities (invoking other social groups to which a subject belongs) doesn’t appear to actually work in reducing polarization, the study finds.
The ugly news is that this punctures what was one of the few possible avenues available for getting conservatives on board for climate action.
The good news is that this means folks don’t have to waste their time trying to get Republicans to think about themselves as Americans, or Christians, or other identities first, and instead can focus on just getting a few Republican leaders to speak honestly about climate change to change the party’s own internal perspective. Or, as the study concluded: “We may be best served by harnessing group affiliation rather than trying to momentarily erase it.”
Find a way to put an ugly yoke on the bad beast of partisanship, and it might just get some good work done.
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