On Monday, the journal Environment and Behavior published a new study from the Yale Climate Communications team (and GMU’s Ed Maibach) that found what a certain individual thinks the people around them think about climate change plays an important role in that individual’s perception of the issue.
That sounds complicated, but it isn’t, really. What the idea boils down to, as lead author Matthew Goldberg tweeted, is that “Beliefs of friends and family play a HUGE role in climate change beliefs, worry, and policy preferences—especially among conservatives.”
Because conservative minds are generally more deferential to group unity than independent-thinking liberal brains, the study posits, conservatives are particularly prone to agreeing with their peers when they think everyone thinks the same thing. So conservatives who believe that all their friends and family accept the reality of climate change are much more likely to do so themselves compared to those who don’t believe there is a social consensus about climate science.
This makes sense: it’s a lot harder to believe your wife or neighbor is a covert communist agent as opposed to a random scientist you’ve never met. The study also found that a conservative’s family more than their friends was an indicator of their own beliefs. This adds a national perspective to the recent study showing conservative fathers in North Carolina were particularly persuadable by their daughters.
So while the perennial guides for arguing with your cranky denier uncle are helping, this study suggests that it might be even more effective to keep the conversation around him, but not involving him. If the whole table is casually taking the consensus for granted in a discussion that is merely conversational rather than confrontational, it normalizes the issue in a way that conservative brains are especially hard-wired to respect and follow.
One of the key findings, according to the study, is that the ideological resistance to climate concern was weakest when respondents “perceived that their friends and family thought it was important for the respondent to take action on global warming.”
So not only is it important for families to talk about the issue if they want to wear down Dad’s denial (let’s be honest, it’s always going to be Dad), but it’s also crucial they share their own feelings about how they expect him to join in the fight and do his part.
And again, all this makes sense. Although the study doesn’t necessarily get into it, there is a personal identity hierarchy that applies to all of us. While deniers may be interpreting climate information through the lens of their (conservative) political identity, that’s perhaps not as strong as their identity as a resident of a town or state.
If those two identities come into conflict, that cognitive dissonance is apt to be resolved in favor of alignment with the more immediate circle: their neighbors. And of course everyone is inclined to consider their position in the family as key to identity, particularly parents, and even more so the sort of man who considers his place as the Head of the Household to be a defining feature of his identity.
In short, it comes down to: “Dad, who do you care more about? Your children, or Fox News pundits?”