Essay by Eric Worrall
According to climate research, Democrats are more likely to accept reassurance from those who claim to be experts. Republicans don’t trust claims of expertise, they want to see proof.
How to talk about climate change: Highlight harms – not benefits – to change behavior
Eugene Y. Chan, Toronto Metropolitan University
Published: July 11, 2022 11.31 a.m. EDT…
In one recent paper I co-authored with Jack Lin, a student at California State University Northridge, who found that emphasizing the “severity” or “importance” of climate change can lead to counterintuitive results. sense.
We randomly selected 762 Americans and had them read a passage outlining the effects of climate change. However, in the passage for half of the participants, we added words like “severe” and “severe” to emphasize the importance of climate change harms.
We then asked the participants about their likelihood of engaging in various sustainable behaviors such as eating locally grown foods, using public transport, and using less water.
You would think that saying climate change is serious would promote more sustainable behavioral intentions. Instead of, We found that the use of the adjectives “serious” and other similar adjectives reduced behavioral intentions to create sustained efforts. This effect is especially pronounced among participants identified as pro-Republican.
Word choice can activate your free will
How can these results be interpreted? Good, Republicans are generally higher on “psychological response.” That is, they are often more averse to restrictions on their personal freedoms and free will. So, to say that the effects of climate change are “severe” are seen by these people as an attempt to influence their perceived views on climate change. Conservatives in other parts of the world also tended to score higher on psychological reactivity.
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Whether a conservative or a liberal, research found that Highlighting losses is better at motivating behavior than highlighting gains. For example, it is more effective to point out the harms to people, animals, and the environment by inaction than it is to point out the benefits of taking action. Other research have also found that using pie charts to communicate statistics and figures is better at promoting comprehension than writing those figures in text form.
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Summary of the study;
Political thought and psychological response: How serious must climate change be?
The climate changes episode 172Number of Posts: 17 (2022) Quote this post
abstract
Splits in how people with different political views act on climate change are clear, with conservatives generally less able to act to limit the effects of climate change. Typical communications intended to convey the importance of climate change and its impacts on both the environment and human health often emphasize the “severity” of those impacts. In the present study, we suggest that the use of such adjectives can actually exacerbate the left-right division. This may be because, we suggest, Conservatives higher in psychological reactivity, and so they see communications that convey the “gravity” of climate change as a limitation of their free will, thus producing behaviors that are the opposite of what those communications are intended. We found support for our hypothesis in two studies of Americans with both temporal and situational psychological responses. Our results provide new policy implications regarding suggesting how a typical communication tactic might actually thwart the goal of such communications.
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Read more: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-022-03372-5
The problem with having to give evidence of harm, of course, is that someone else can present counter-evidence.
For example, climate harm claims look wobbly in the context of NASA’s evidence the world is green. So far, the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere has been beneficial and has accelerated plant growth across the planet.
What about possible future global warming?
Evidence from much warmer periods in the past demonstrates that primates and other mammals thrived in very warm conditions. Our primate ancestors thrived and spread across the planet during that time Maximum thermal Eoceneone of the warmest periods on ancient record – a period that could have been up to 14F (8C) warmer than it is today. Primates thrived in past periods of extreme global warming. If our small-brained monkey ancestors found a way to thrive during extreme global warming in the past, I’m pretty confident that Big-Brained Humans could figure it out.
Evidence of current global greening, and evidence of past abundance during warm periods, is a rather difficult mountain to climb, for those looking to convince decision-makers to rely on on the evidence that just 1.5-2C warming is a climate crisis.
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