One of the key social and political drivers of climate denial is political polarization: most conservatives see the issue as a liberal concern, and therefore don’t care. It’s a heuristic, a mental shortcut the brain uses to maximize efficiency and speed in decision-making. Any information they hear about the subject gets filtered through that lens, making it all but impossible for the GOP to treat the issue seriously. This has long been a key strategy of organized denial, and explains why the far right still reference Al Gore at bizarre and unrelated times.
Since there’s little chance of changing deeply held ideological beliefs like this, it’s been a tough spot for climate change activists. But two recently published studies provide something of a common sense answer of how to get people to care about climate change: find a way to make them engage with the science, impacts and solutions.
One study, published in PLOS One last week, had research subjects participate in a mock UN climate negotiation with an interactive climate policy simulator. The researchers found that the simulator led to a greater understanding of the issue, more feelings of hope and urgency, and a desire to find out and do more about climate change.
Notably, the authors write in the abstract that improvements in perspective “were just as strong among American participants who oppose government regulation of free markets–a political ideology that has been linked to climate change denial in the US–suggesting the simulation’s potential to reach across political divides.”
Through the process of role-playing as negotiators, participants were allowed to tinker with emissions trajectories to see what sort of pathways lead to what levels of warming. This forced them to think about the issue deeply and at length, leading to greater levels of understanding and concern, even among anti-regulatory conservatives. The process meant conservatives could not merely use their ideology as a heuristic, but instead had to go through the process of truly considering the impacts of GHG emissions and reckoning with emission reductions.
The second study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, takes a different tack but also shows pathways for reducing political polarization on climate.
In this study, researchers started with a graph of sea ice from NASA, which shows a decline over the long term with a slight jump up in the last year of data (2013). Because of the graph line’s bounce off the bottom, 25% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans (wrongly) predicted that the trend shows sea ice cover going up.
After an initial assessment, the subjects were assigned to one of three different artificial social networks to discuss the graph with other participants, then reassess their prediction about the trend. In one group, each user’s political affiliation was shown through their social contacts. In a second, users were anonymous but an elephant and a donkey were used to symbolize political affiliation. In a third, there was no political information and people were anonymous.
In the anonymous group, people actually discussed the chart rationally, resulting in 85% of both Republicans and Democrats correctly believing the sea-ice trend was going down. The other two groups, where political identity was a factor, did not show this score change. In other words, people wouldn’t listen to members of the other parties.
Unfortunately, in the real world it is often nearly impossible to separate a social network’s user from their political affiliations. American flags, “X”’s, red roses, a raised fist: there are all sorts of markers we use to identify ourselves to our tribe, and generally for good reason. In the world where our brains spent thousands of years developing, recognizing one’s own tribe could mean the difference between victory and death.
The world has changed, but our brains have not.
Now, sadly, recognizing one’s tribe may still mean the difference between victory and defeat. Except ignoring tribal partisanship that may be our only hope at victory, and the inability to do so is leading to defeat.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: