Reasoning about climate change
Bence Bago, David G Rand, Gordon Pennycook Author Notes
PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 5, May 2023, pgad100,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad100Published: 02 May 2023 Article history
Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change common despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely held explanation involves politically motivated (system 2) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover the 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 beliefs about the world and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior 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 provide no support for the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account over other accounts: Engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior beliefs about climate change—a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning—and did not exacerbate the impact of partisanship once prior beliefs are accounted for.
Issue Section: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Editor: Michele Gelfand
Significance Statement
It is commonly argued that reasoning exacerbates political bias via identity-protective cognition. This theoretical account has had a particular influence on the explanation of partisan differences in the context of global warming. According to this account, people exert mental effort to defend their political identities by disputing identity-inconsistent information. However, our results provide no support for this account over other accounts. Beyond raising theoretical questions about how people reason about climate change, our findings suggest a potential alternative pathway for addressing it. Instead of focusing on interventions that try to decrease partisanship saliency when communicating about science, interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.
Introduction
Skepticism about climate change and its human origins represents a major impediment to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies (1–3). One of the most commonly cited reasons for climate change denial is political partisanship or ideologies (4). In the United States, for example, people on the political right are more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax or that it is not caused by human activities (2, 5–8). What is more, people with greater numerical ability and cognitive sophistication show more pronounced partisan differences in climate change beliefs, rather than greater agreement with the scientific consensus (9–13). That is, having stronger cognitive ability appears to not protect against climate misperceptions but instead bolster views that align with one's political identity.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/5/pgad100/7147350?login=false
