The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scien-tifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a se-rious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is cha-racterized by the citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk percep-tions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.
Interesting data in the abstract, if I could figure out how to copy it over from a pdf I would.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. Mark Twain
Controversy over climate change is commonly attributed to a deficit in public comprehension of scientific information. The most straightforward explanation is ignorance:(a common "explanation I've heard here and the CSB) the public knows too little science to understand the evidence or to avoid being misled by distortions of it. A subtler account puts the blame on widespread cognitive biases and related limitations on the capacity of citizens to assess informa-tion about risk. In short, because members of the public do not know what scientists know, or think the way scientists think, they predictably fail to take climate change as seriously as perfectly rational risk-evaluators would.
The goal of this paper is to challenge this critique of the rationality of public opinion on climate change. Our motivation is in part to show how poorly supported the conventional picture of public dissen-sus is by empirical evidence: scientific examination does not bear out the premise that deficiencies in science education or defects in individual reasoning explain conflict over climate change.
But an even more fundamental objective is to advance a more precise diagnosis of the kind of ir-rationality that afflicts public deliberations on climate change. “Irrationality” describes a state of antagon-ism between an agent’s goals and the decision-making capacities that the agent uses to attain them. Ac-cordingly, it is necessary to specify who the agent is and what good he or she or it is trying to attain; only then can one identify and assess the performance of the reasoning processes being employed (Gigenrenzer 2000). The dominant critique of public rationality, we submit, doesn’t pay sufficient attention to these issues.
After presenting our data, we will suggest that the rationality question should be asked and ans-wered at two different levels (McMahon 2001). The first is individual. For reasons that make sense from a variety of psychological perspectives, individuals behave as if they were trying to maximize correspon-dence between their own perceptions of societal risks and the perceptions that predominate within the cul-tural groups to which they belong (Sherman & Cohen 2006; Kahan, Braman, Gastil, Slovic & Mertz 2007). Individuals need to use a variety of cognitive faculties to attain this correspondence. Judged within
this framework, the evidence suggests that individuals are displaying an impressively high degree of ra-tionality in the formation of their beliefs about climate change.
Nevertheless, public opinion can be understood to be irrational at the collective level. This pers-pective sees society as the agent and maximization of the welfare of its members as the goal. What makes collective decision-making irrational, moreover, has nothing to do with limited scientific literacy or wide-spread cognitive biases; on the contrary, the source of the problem is just how exceedingly rational socie-ty’s members are at the individual level: The reliable capacity of individuals to conform their personal beliefs to those that predominate within their respective cultural groups prevents those groups from con-verging on beliefs that make all of their members materially better off.
This conflict between individual and collective rationality is not inevitable. It occurs only because of contingent, mutable, and fortunately rare conditions that make one set of beliefs about risk congenial to one cultural group and an opposing set congenial to another. Neutralize these conditions, we will argue, and the conflict between the individual and collective levels of rationality is resolved. Perfecting our knowledge of how to achieve this state should be a primary aim of the science of science communication.
“How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety, or prosperity?”‐1.00‐0.75‐0.50‐0.250.000.250.500.751.00LowHighScience literacy/numeracyPIT PredictionActual VarianceGreaterLesserGreaterLesser
Figure 1. PIT prediction vs. actual impact of science literacy and numeracy on climate-change risk percep-tions. N = 1540. Derived from univariate regression (SI Table 3, Model 1). Contrary to PIT predictions, higher de-grees of science literacy and numeracy are both associated with small decreases in the perceived seriousness of cli-mate-change risks.. “Low” and “High” reflect values set at -1 SD and +1 SD on Science/Numeracy, a composite scale based on respondents’ science literacy and numeracy scores. Responses on 0-10 risk scale (M = 5.7, SD = 3.4) converted to z-score to promote ease of interpretation. CIs reflect 0.95 level of confidence. Both of these predictions were unsupported. As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. Mark Twain
Maybe the linked article -- which is a Working Paper -- does not show (or even claim to show) what you would like it to show:
Our data, how-ever, show that as individuals become more science literate and more proficient in the mode of reasoning featured in scientific inquiry, they don’t reliably form beliefs more in line with scientific consensus. In-stead, they form beliefs that are even more reliably correlated with those of the particular cultural group to which they belong.
At the same time, the beliefs that the typical member of the public forms about climate change will likely have an impact on how she gets along with people she interacts with in her daily life. A Hierar-chical Individualist in Oklahoma City who proclaims that he thinks that climate change is a serious and real risk might well be shunned by his coworkers at a local oil refinery; the same might be true for an Egalitarian Communitarian English professor in New York City who reveals to colleagues that she thinks that “scientific consensus” on climate change is a “hoax.” They can both misrepresent their positions, of course, but only at the cost of having to endure the anxiety of living a lie, not to mention the risk that they’ll slip up and reveal their true convictions. Given how much they depend on others for support—material and emotional—and how little impact their beliefs have on what society does to protect the phys-ical environment, they are better off when they form perceptions of climate change risk that minimize this danger of community estrangement.
In such circumstances, that is exactly what is likely to happen. A long-standing body of work in social psychology suggests that individuals are motivated to fit their beliefs to those of people with whom they are intimately connected (Sherman & Cohen 2002; Chen, Duckworth & Chaiken 1999; Kunda 1990). Both to avoid dissonance and to secure their standing within such groups, they predictably seek out and credit information supportive of “elf-defining … values [and] attitudes” (Giner-Sorolla & Chaiken 1997, p. 85), among them the shared worldviews featured in the study of cultural cognition of risk (Kahan, Braman, Gastil, Slovic & Mertz 2007).
* * *
The motivation to fit information to identity-defining beliefs shapes all manner of cognition—including the types associated with both System 1 and System 2 reasoning (Chen, Duckworth & Chaiken 1999; Giner-Sorolla & Chaiken 1997). It should therefore come as no surprise that the highest degrees of expressive rationality are found in members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and numeracy. As ordinary members of the public learn more about science and develop a greater facility with numerical information, they become more skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if neces-sary explaining away—empirical evidence relating to their groups’ positions on climate change and other issues. Their reward is even greater convergence between what they believe about how the world works and what they desire to be true.
Our study results belie the conventional view that controversy over policy-relevant science is rooted in the public’s lack of scientific knowledge and its inability to engage in technical reasoning. As ordinary people learn more science and become more proficient in modes of reasoning characteristic of scientific inquiry, they do not reliably converge on assessments of climate change risks supported by scientific evidence. Instead they more form beliefs that are even more reliably characteristic of persons who hold their particular cultural worldviews. Indeed, far from a symptom of how poorly equipped ordi-nary individuals are to reach rational conclusions on the basis of complex scientific data, disputes over issues like climate change, we’ve argued, are evidence of how remarkably well equipped they are to dis-cern what stances toward such information satisfy their expressive interests. The high degree of rationality individuals display in forming risk perceptions that express their cultural values can itself inhibit collec-tive welfare rationality by blocking citizens from converging on the best available scientific evidence on how to secure their common interests in health, safety, and prosperity.
Resolving controversies over climate change and like risk issues requires dispelling this tragedy of the risk-perception commons (Hardin 1968). A strategy that focuses only on improving transmission of sound scientific information, it should be clear, is highly unlikely to achieve this objective. The prin-cipal reason people disagree about climate change science is not that it has been communicated to them in forms they cannot understand. Rather, it is that positions on climate change convey values—communal concern versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the heroic pursuit of reward; hu-mility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it—that divide them along cultural lines. Merely amplifying or improving the clarity of information on climate change science won’t gener-ate public consensus if risk communicators fail to take heed of the cues that determine what climate-change risk perceptions express about the cultural commitments of those who form them.
The essential point appears to be that "as individuals become more science literate and more proficient in the mode of reasoning featured in scientific inquiry," "they become more skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if neces-sary explaining away—empirical evidence relating to their groups’ positions on climate change and other issues," and they "form beliefs that are even more reliably characteristic of persons who hold their particular cultural worldviews."
In other words, if I am following the reasoning of the article competently, as people become more scientifically literate, they become more firmly entrenched in whatever positions "their particular cultural worldviews" have predisposed them to. And they become more adept at articulating and supporting those positions.
But as far as I can tell from the article, the dominant trend is not -- and perhaps no such trend exists at all -- for people to be persuaded by scientific evidence. People apparently use their scientific literacy not to challenge their own preconceptions but merely to bolster them.
And that seems to me rather a shame ....
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
The science of climate change is well-nigh irrefutable. More CO2 will ultimately lead to a warming of the planet. The timing and the extent of the warming are a matter of considerable debate. It appears now that the polar regions are going to be affected disproportionately.
But the important question is how this "acceptance of scientific fact" will affect a person's views on the next logical step.
The fact is that China and India and the third world are going to be using more and more carbon-based fuels in the coming decades, and nothing that the U.S. or the U.N. does is going to change that. China and India are building coal-fired electric plants with reckless abandon, and they are giddy with the thought of driving cars in the same proportion as Americans do.
So anything the U.S. does to reduce our carbon output will have minimal effect. Negligible.
So does it make any sense whatsoever to cripple our manufacturing base, double the cost of our electricity, start buying rickshaws, and throw away our gas-powered lawn mowers?
Fuck, no.
I'm not a "climate change denier," I just don't want the U.S. to jump off a cliff for no reason. More poignantly, I'm not going to make any unnecessary economic or lifestyle sacrifices on the altar of a reduced carbon footprint. On the other side of the debate, those who want the U.S. to make great sacrifices have proven themselves to be, shall we say, insincere. What they really want is more government control over the industrial economy and utilities. They couldn't care less about climate change.
And while I'm a "B.A." person and not a "B.S." person, I think I can grasp the science of it a little better than the average Amurrican.