Reasoning about climate change

Abstract

Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change widespread despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely-held explanation involves politically motivated (“system 2”) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior factual beliefs, and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior factual beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants’ extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results challenge the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account: Rather than exacerbating the impact of partisanship per se, engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior factual beliefs about climate change - a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning. Thus, we challenge the dominant cognitive account of climate disbelief, and suggest that interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.

Understanding the effects of partisan identity on climate change

“…Partisan and ideological identities are strong predictors of the belief in the anthropogenic causes of climate change [2**,3], especially in English-speaking countries [3]. For example, US Republicans are six times more likely to dismiss the role that humans play in climate change than Democrats [4]. While there is a similar link between right-wing ideology and climate change skepticism in several countries, in many other countries, this link is either much smaller or does not exist (e.g.…”

“…Sharing a group identity encourages the enactment of group norms (i.e., the shared understanding about what conduct is both common and appropriate in a group [16]). People are very sensitive to normative information, and therefore behavior change interventions that specifically target descriptive norms (i.e., information about which behaviors are typical) have relatively large impacts on promoting or dissuading behaviors, including a variety of proenvironmental behaviors (see [4,5,16]).…”

Understanding the effects of partisan identity on climate change

“…Partisan and ideological identities are strong predictors of the belief in the anthropogenic causes of climate change [2,3], especially in English-speaking countries [2]. For example, US Republicans are six times more likely to dismiss the role that humans play in climate change than Democrats [4]. While there is a similar link between right-wing ideology and climate change skepticism, in several countries, in many other countries, this link is either much smaller, or does not exist (e.g.…”

“…Sharing a group identity encourages the enactment of group norms (i.e., the shared understanding about what conduct is both common and appropriate in a group [16][17][18]). People are very sensitive to normative information, and therefore behavior change interventions that specifically target descriptive norms have relatively large impacts on promoting (or dissuading) behavior, including a variety of pro-environmental behaviors (see [4,5,18]).…”

“…Future work needs to bridge the basic research we have reviewed and evaluate the causal relationships underlying actual pro-climate and sustainable belief and behavior. For instance, although there is a strong relationship between partisanship and climate change beliefs [17], it may be largely due to differences in prior beliefs, rather than motivated cognition [4]. Evaluating the link between political identity, motivation, and reasoning is complicated and some current experimental designs potentially undermine causal inference [54].…”