Understandably anxious to explain persistent controversy over climate change, the media have discovered a new culprit: the public. By piecing together bits of psychological research, many news reporters, opinion writers and bloggers have concluded that people are simply too irrational to recognize the implications of climate-change science.
This conclusion gets it half right. Studying things from a psychological angle does help to make sense of climate-change scepticism. But the true source of the problem, research suggests, is not that people are irrational. Instead, it is that their reasoning powers have become disabled by a polluted science-communication environment.
Social-science research indicates that people with different cultural values — individualists compared with egalitarians, for example — disagree sharply about how serious a threat climate change is. People with different values draw different inferences from the same evidence. Present them with a PhD scientist who is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, for example, and they will disagree on whether he really is an ‘expert’, depending on whether his view matches the dominant view of their cultural group (D. M. Kahan et al. J. Risk Res. 14, 147–174; 2011).
The positions on climate change of both groups track their impressions of recent weather. Yet their impressions of what the recent weather has been are polarized, too, and bear little relationship to reality (K. Goebbert et al. Weath. Clim. Soc. 4, 132–144; 2012). But is this sort of cultural polarization evidence of irrationality? If it is, then how can we explain the fact that members of the lay public who are the most science literate, and the most proficient at technical reasoning, are also the most culturally polarized (D. M. Kahan et al. Nature Clim. Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1547; 2012)?
If anything, social science suggests that citizens are culturally polarized because they are, in fact, too rational — at filtering out information that would drive a wedge between themselves and their peers.
For members of the public, being right or wrong about climate- change science will have no impact. Nothing they do as individual consumers or as individual voters will meaningfully affect the risks posed by climate change. Yet the impact of taking a position that conflicts with their cultural group could be disastrous.
Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina. Is it a good idea for him to implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action.
Positions on climate change have come to signify the kind of person one is. People whose beliefs are at odds with those of the people with whom they share their basic cultural commitments risk being labelled as weird and obnoxious in the eyes of those on whom they depend for social and financial support.
“Positions on climate change have come to signify the kind of person one is.”
So, if the cost of having a view of climate change that does not conform with the scientific consensus is zero, and the cost of having a view that is at odds with members of one’s cultural community can be high, what is a rational person to do? In that situation, it is perfectly sensible for individuals to be guided by modes of reasoning that connect their beliefs to ones that predominate in their group. Even people of modest scientific literacy will pick up relevant cues. Those who know more and who can reason more analytically will do a still better job, even if their group is wrong on the science.
So whom should we ‘blame’ for the climate- change crisis? To borrow a phrase, it’s the ‘science-communication environment, stupid’ — not stupid people.
People acquire their scientific knowledge by consulting others who share their values and whom they therefore trust and understand. Usually, this strategy works just fine. We live in a science-communication environment richly stocked with accessible, consequential facts. As a result, groups with different values routinely converge on the best evidence for, say, the value of adding fluoride to water, or the harmlessness of mobile-phone radiation. The trouble starts when this communication environment fills up with toxic partisan meanings — ones that effectively announce that ‘if you are one of us, believe this; otherwise, we’ll know you are one of them’. In that situation, ordinary individuals’ lives will go better if their perceptions of societal risk conform with those of their group.
Yet when all citizens simultaneously follow this individually rational strategy of belief formation, their collective well-being will certainly suffer. Culturally polarized democracies are less likely to adopt polices that reflect the best available scientific evidence on matters — such as climate change — that profoundly affect their common interests.
Overcoming this dilemma requires collective strategies to protect the quality of the science-communication environment from the pollution of divisive cultural meanings. Psychology — along with anthropology, sociology, political science and economics — will play a part. But to apply the insights that social science has already given us, we will have to be smart enough to avoid reducing what we learn to catchy simplifications.
- Journal name:
- Nature
- Volume:
- 488,
- Pages:
- 255
- Date published:
- ()
- DOI:
- doi:10.1038/488255a
We have a few great comment in here.. I enjoy reading them.
Paster and Dr. Jean Smith
Emmanuel Baptist Church
You know There have been several "snowball Earth" episodes as well as extended hot periods such as the Cretaceous period during the rule of the dinosaurs. More and more, scientists are discovering that natural phenomenon, such as the solar output cycle ("sunspot cycle") namnlappar
Dan Kahan gets it part right when he talks of polarization and toxic, partisan meanings. But the science-communication environment has little to do with it and in fact, could do little to influence it. Rather it is the position of the Greens who morphed out of the left and are using the environmental crisis to advance an antibusiness agenda. Kahan cites South Carolina – coal country. The venue is representative and could be extended to anywhere where oil and gas dominate the economy (everywhere?). When scientific fact and opinion appear to be aligned with a radical left agenda in the minds of ordinary people, there is little scientists could do to alter people's opinions about the facts.
The crux of the author's argument is disingenuous and/or irrational: it is not rational to believe something that is, given the bulk of scientific evidence, untrue – even if disbelief is contrary to the beliefs of one's social group. Rather, it is more rational to believe the scientific evidence and (for lack of a better term) "keep you mouth shut." Yet most deniers don't adopt such a stance – confidential polls indicate that they really do disbelieve in man-made climate change.
That this article was published in the front pages of a journal so prestigious as Nature is obscene.
The public's rationality on scientific issues has been pointed out before – eg, over the MMR vaccine. Instead of trying to evaluate the science (and who can blame members of the public for thinking that's too hard?), parents thought, "There may be some harm to my child if we have the vaccination, but as long as herd immunity applies, there's no harm in not having it." So the rational thing, from the individual's point of view, was not to have it. At the societal level, as vaccination levels have dipped below herd immunity, it's not surprising that we've seen a rise in measles in the UK as a result.
Of course psychology applies, in whatever area. Having said that, climate change is different in that specific action by members of the public won't alter the outcome – we need governments to act, to do that. But as a science journalist, I wonder what we can do except point out the huge disparity in weight of scientific opinion on each side of the scales.
I wonder whether there's any research on how much credence the public gives to an expert's opinion, when they're speaking about something outside their area of expertise. Given the way in which Nobel laureates are asked for their opinions about all sorts of things, I suppose we assume they'll carry more weight whatever they're talking about. Last week I listened to the commentary on the last (cricket) test match between England and South Africa. One of the expert presenters talked about the weather, and how it looked like rain although none had been forecast. "If they can't even get it right for the next day, how can we trust what they say about the next decades?" he asked (not in those exact words). Does this make cricket fans more likely to be sceptical about climate change?
It's hard tp answer, Robert Bressette, who asks in the first comment :
"(how fast do we cool) with and without incoming solar and cosmic radiation"since starlight is less than a part per million of the solar constant .I have a major in Environmental Science from one of the most prestigious schools in the US. I can say with conviction that there IS NO CONCENSUS in the scientific community about the degree to which mankind may be impacting climate change. If you study the history of the Earth, it's been proven over and over that there have been several large climate swings over the eons, well before humans arrived on the scene. There have been several "snowball Earth" episodes as well as extended hot periods such as the Cretaceous period during the rule of the dinosaurs. More and more, scientists are discovering that natural phenomenon, such as the solar output cycle ("sunspot cycle"), has a lot to do with the temperatures on earth. (During little ice ages during human history, astronomers did not observe many of the tell-tale sunspots that indicate the sun's activity.) Also, it's a fact that in the last 10,000 years, we've been coming out of an ice age, meaning we're probably not back to the actual average temperature that the planet has maintained for, say, the last billion years. It's just an unfortunate, unforseen problem that humans settled in large cities in coastal areas during a time when sea levels were low. This will inevitably change.
The "social scientists" findings are probably wrong....see http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 entitled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".
CliSci controversy exists because it is a typical "science war" -- and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that these wars can go on for years and years — a group of scientists posit a theory to explain some observed phenomena and then set out to prove it is true. It is almost invariably 'proven' at first because of confirmation bias and poor study design (they set out to find the positive existence of something instead of to disprove their hypothesis). They find a correlation, back it with "P-value" that [falsely] proves their result significant (see William Briggs at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2118 ), then extrapolate the actual findings far out beyond the reasonable interpretation of their results (even if they had been true), predict the 'end of the world as we know it', and then make political demands. Of course, there are other scientists that do nearly the same, but to the opposite on the scientific point. Meanwhile, the popular press has a field day with the catastrophic predictions and the outcry from skeptics.
Current science wars are The Obesity War, the Salt War, the Reef Wars, the Fracking War, the Vaccination Wars, the BPA War, the Autism War, and in NYC, the Soda Wars....there are several others.
The general public has already noticed that the original exaggerations of the Climate Alarmists have not come to pass. None of the awful things that were predicted to happen by 1990, 2000, 2010 by Gore, Hansen, McKibben, etc actually came to pass. What did happen is that there was a step change in the metric "Global Surface Temperature" --> a step up of about 0.6° C, which has been steady for the last ten or 12 years --> in other words, we are in a warmer phase of the whole-earth climate. If it is caused by CO2, it is acting in a way not predicted and not understood by the promoters of this theory — the "Global Surface Temperature" should be steadily rising with rising CO2. Because there is no acceptable explanation for this and because the scary predictions have all proven false, the level-headed, independent-thinking general public has been falling away from support of the whole of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and its illegitimate step-child Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.
There is, of course, something to be said for the idea that those who generally do not think for themselves — the bumper sticker believers, PC mavens and the lock-step mental mirrors — accept the views of their peers without any attempt at critical thinking, often picking views on subjects based on their social popularity.
None of this has any bearing on the veracity of any of the various competing versions of the CO2 causes rising temperatures theory.
Excellent. Those who think facts – their set mind you – ought to lead to consensus are the irrational ones.
Caveat: one can chose to belong to no social groups except (1) the whole society (2) that of the people one truly knows personally and cares deeply for. Some add (3) all humans.
There is no real reason to try to 'belong' to whatever bunch ones choices have put one in physical, financial, or social proximity to – in fact, the ones you don't know are strangers and as likely to be helpful or harmful as folks who would likely be characterized as members of other, or even competing or opposing, groups.
"So whom should we â€ঋlame’ for the climate-change crisis?"
There is no climate-change "crisis." That's precisely why we have a standoff. Zealots have created a religion and established the Church of Climate Change. Normal, rational people aren't going to join. It's as simple as that.
I don't agree with climate change because the models have been highly inaccurate in their predictions. If your models can not make predictions we should not set policy by it.
In 1972 “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, predicted that the world would run short of much needed commodities : aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. The models they used predicted a dark future ahead, and that most of these elements would be gone by the 1990s.
Here we are 40 years later, having mined many more millions of tons then the book predicted, and yet there are still many more millions of tons left. What happened?
The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Good thing we did not set policy by this book. Just as we should not set policy by incomplete models of climate change.
Scientists are utterly dependent on a small peer group for both money and prestige. The danger of dissent is well known.
The problem is that you've overstepped the bounds of what could be called "science" when you bring in petitions and "doing something about ____".
Science doesn't tell us what to do. It tells us that B happens after A. It doesn't tell us what B "means". That's why we still have liberal arts and social studies and politicians. Trying to prove the benefit or detriment of B is beyond scientific capability.
The big issue with is science pretends it is something new, uniquely driven by humans, when that is not the case at all, climate change has always been around and will always be around, maybe instead of convincing the populations about climate change and how its the consumer's fault, it would be better to educate people on mass extinctions and the inevitability of this happening to the human species. Huge questions just in this, are mass extinctions written into 'the' genetic code somehow and it is our prerogative as the human species to avoid such an event by becoming independent from the planet we come from? Lastly, why does science find evolution to be such a beautiful concept in theory, but so horrible and unacceptable in practice? I just noticed a comment reference the date 800, 000 years ago, do you not realize that is a blink of an eye in the general timescale of things? There are surely climatic cycles that span millions of years?
The editorial misses the major problem caused by the tight inter-mingling of policy discussion with science. It is very hard to explain that you agree with the science while completely disagreeing with the recommended policies. Those who opposed Kyoto policies were called climate deniers, yet many just disagreed with the policy methods chosen. The attitude toward science will suffer when science is viewed as taking sides on policy, rather than just clarifying the situation and risks.
Editors <em>think</em> they are being rational in banning from publication subjects such as cold fusion and Intelligent Design. But their reason for doing this is that they think these subjects have been discredited, but then they appear to be discredited because there are very few publications in such areas in major journals, which is because editors ... ... , a clear vicious circle, which I believe has had serious consequences in the case of cold fusion especially. Had supportive evidence for this not been blocked by major journals such as <em>Nature</em>, the evidence would have been properly discussed, with the probable result that it would have been accepted before too long that the Fleischmann-Pons heat claims were well founded, but that this excess manifests itself only under suitable conditions, and even then not with 100% reproducibility. Nuclear physicists might have learnt from materials scientists that materials do not always behave reproducibly, so it would be unsafe to infer, as many did, that failure to reproduce some effect implies that that effect does not exist.
And theoreticians might have reluctantly accepted that one cannot safely extrapolate from the extremely high temperatures of thermonuclear experiments to the conditions in cold fusion (extrapolations frequently used to discredit the phenomenon). With less prejudiced publication policies, the mere visibility of the supportive evidence would have changed everything. Then, again, attempts to generate useful amounts of energy from low energy nuclear reactions (the scientific term for cold fusion), which at present appear to be having a degree of success (e.g. possibly, though the situation is not as yet completely clear, the Rossi reactor, which pretty well all scientific outlets except for the Swedish technology journal Ny Teknik have ignored), might many years ago have yielded fruit, and partly contributed by now to the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Similar things might be said regarding other controversial/taboo subjects such as memory of water, but I will stop there.
A related factor (more relevant in the context of religion as referred to by Nicholas Beale above) is what might be called 'the Denning phenomenon' or, as I have referred to it previously, <em>Pathological Disbelief</em>. In disallowing the 1980 appeal of the Birmingham Six, who were later acquitted, Lord Denning said, 'If they [win], ... [the outcome would be] such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further'. Similarly, I suggest, the idea that Intelligent Design might, in some form or other, be a valid concept is cognised as so threatening that the possibility that this might be so cannot be entertained; similarly the possibility that Andrea Rossi's E-cats might actually be generating significant quantities of power by a cold fusion process is so appalling, because of the light that awareness of this would throw on the activities of editors etc. who have systematically attacked cold fusion, that its very existence cannot be mentioned in journals such as <em>Nature</em>.
In saying the above I am not suggesting that editors think consciously in these terms; rather, some unconscious defence mechanism takes over and produces ways to rationalise non-publication. Analogously, the memory of water phenomenon demonstrated by Jacques Benveniste in 1991 and others throws up, by way of defence mechanisms, interesting non-refutations, concerning which space does not permit going into detail here.
A major reason for this polarisation is the aggressive anti-religious bias of some prominent scientific commentators. They claim, quite falsely, that science requires people to abandon their faith. As a result they spread massive public distrust of science. The scientific community should distance ourselves from these people, who are generally 5th rate scientists at best.
There is no call to put "consensus" in quote marks. Even 2 years ago about 97% of climate scientists believed that the present rising trend in average global temperatures is due to human activity, and the numbers who don't are falling. As a Londoner I am not keen on the "business as usual" plan for energy use, with a substantial probability of leading to over 900 ppm CO2 levels and an eventual rise in temperature and sea level liable to drown large parts of London, among many other coastal cities (New Orleans, Amsterdam, Venice, New York etc etc) and huge tranches of Asia, leading to hundreds of millions of refugees. Not to mention predicted major falls in global food production, water availability, biodiversity...we know all this. And 200 years is a very reasonable time to consider, since that is the time over which human numbers have risen from under 1 billion (sustainable) to over 7 billion (not sustainable at Western consumption levels). We have a lot to do for the survival of our children and grandchildren, and not much time to do it.
Ice core data going back 800,000 years clearly shows that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are much higher than at any time in that period. The science relating carbon dioxide levels to temperature increases is quite solid.
The biggest problem I have with the "consensus" on climate change is the fact that the climate "scientists" cherry-pick their data to create the illusion that the current situation is unprecedented. They chose to ignore the evidence that human carbon footprint is detectable for over 5,000 years, related to re-purposing land from forest to agriculture. They ignore the fact that world temperatures are somewhat BELOW the average for the past 10,000 years, by looking only at data from the past 200 years or the past 4,000 years. They totally ignore the paleoclimate record, which suggests that a warmer climate is actually supportive of biodiversity. They totally ignore the fact that historically, CO2 levels have far exceeded the thresholds projected for the next couple of centuries at various times in earth's history.
Trying to present a picture of a 4 billion year old process with only data from the most recent 200 years is like trying to describe a continent based on a single grain of sand found on a beach.
The climate is going to change, independent of what any of us do. We are better off with a warmer world than with a new ice age. Messing around with a process that is not well defined could push things in the wrong direction- like into a new ice age.
Instead of wasting money on hair-brained schemes like space-based sun shades or carbon sequestration or carbon credit trading (i.e., creating "value" out of air!), why not just accept that it is happening, and direct the resources at accommodating the changes anticipated?
Most people think of climate as weather and so to for most models. Until Science can develop the energy balance of earth in the black box of the universe (how fast do we cool) with and without incoming solar and cosmic radiation, climate change communications are doomed to the world as you describe supporting cultural group values with no agreed to point of reference. In that line, from my view, if we have seen decreased solar heat flux over the last decade or so, could not crustal cooling account for everything reciently that some would like to attribute to Global Warming? When is the next "Ice Age?" There must be someone out there that can do the Global Heat/Energy Balance to give us that point of reference.