Is This Really the Best They Can Do?
Another look at what academics think of climate change ‘deniers’
Posted on 31 Jul 24
by John RidgwayIn Uncategorized
Aficionados of this website will have learnt a long time ago that I have a pronounced distaste for psychologists who try to explain climate change ‘denial’ by using taxonomies of cognitive bias. Personally, I’d throw all such research into a deep pit, were it not for the fact that it would have to be bottomless in order for it not to overflow. It just never occurs to these people that the reason why we haven’t all swallowed the authorised narrative in all its glory is because we think we can see technical flaws in it. On the contrary, they don’t have to even think about such a possibility because they already have their answer: To disagree with a scientific consensus is irrational, and so those who do so must be cognitively challenged in a way that no one else is. For example, in his piece, ‘Roots of Climate Change Denial’, climate activist David Selby, approvingly observes:
In Don’t Even Think About It, George Marshall devotes very little space to the science of climate change. What science there is appears in a four-page add-on chapter at the very end of his 260-page book. His motive here is to underscore that the climate change challenge is not primarily techno-scientific but rather psychological.
And when Selby refers to a psychological challenge, what he means is that cognitive bias is the root cause of ‘denial’. Providing frameworks for overcoming such bias is what the psychology profession is here to do.
Quite apart from the arrogant presumption on show here, what I find particularly troublesome is the failure to recognise the universality of cognitive bias and how it affects everyone’s deliberations, notwithstanding the extent to which an individual’s conclusions do or do not ultimately align with the socially accepted view. They are heuristics that have evolutionary benefit and if you want to understand how they operate you need to appreciate what they are actually good for and the circumstances in which the heuristic can nevertheless mislead. Simply focusing upon one group of people who you deem to be incorrect and observing how a bias manifests itself in their particular case does not give you the cause of the bias. For the full picture, one also has to consider how the same bias can play a role in arriving at an alternative view, and thereby recognise that the bias itself does not necessarily explain differences of opinion. It is because this basic principle is so rarely acknowledged that the vast bulk of the material written on this subject is selective at best and, at worst, opinionated nonsense. It is this failure that has resulted in a preoccupation with the psychology of the contrarian and a complete neglect of the psychology behind a blind trust in authority.
https://cliscep.com/2024/07/31/is-this-really-the-best-they-can-do/
