Unconfounding knowledge from cultural identity-as big a challenge for measuring the climate-science literacy of middle schoolers as grown ups - Cultural Cognition of Health

A friend (of the best sort—one who has “got your back” to protect you from entropy’s diabolical plan to deprive you of the benefits of advances in collective knowledge) sent me a very interesting new study:

Stevenson, K. T., Peterson, M. N., Bondell, H. D., Moore, S. E., & Carrier, S. J., Overcoming skepticism with education: interacting influences of worldview and climate change knowledge on perceived climate change risk among adolescents, Climatic Change, 126 (3-4), 293-304 (2014).

I very much like the SPBMC  paper.

One cool thing about it is that it tests the influence of cultural predispositions on the global-warming beliefs of middle schoolers .   It’s not the only study that has adapted the cultural cognition worldview measures to students, but it’s one of only a few and the only one I know of that is applying the measures to kids this young.

Consistent with research involving adult subjects, SPBMC find that cultural outlooks—in particular “individualism”—predicts skepticism about climate change.

SPBMC decided not to use (or at least not to report results involving) the hierarchy-egalitarianism worldview measure (maybe they figured some of the items weren’t suited for minors; I could understand that).

Instead they used a “social dominance” one and found that it didn’t predict anything relating to climate change attitudes—also interesting.

But of course the most important & interesting thing is what  SPBMC have to say about the relationship between climate-literacy & acceptance/belief in human-caused global warming, & the influence of cultural individualism on the same.

I found this part of the paper extremely valuable & informative.  I have a strong feeling that they have mined only a portion of the rich deposits of knowledge that their data contain.

Nevertheless, I found myself unconvinced (at least at this point) that the results they reported had the significance that they attached to them.

SPBMC present two principal findings. One is that acceptance of human-caused climate change in their student sample was associated with higher climate-science literacy.

The other is that climate-science literacy had a bigger impact on kids who were relatively individualistic.  That is, as those kids display higher levels of climate science literacy, the change in the probability that they will believe in human-caused climate change increases even more than it does in kids who are relatively “communitarian” as their science-literacy levels increase.

SPBMC infer from these findings that “[c]climate literacy efforts designed for adolescents may represent a critical strategy to overcoming climate change related challenges, given stable or declining concern among adults that is driven in part by entrenched worldviews.”

For adults, worldviews are well entrenched and exert considerable influence over climate change risk perception. During the teenage years, however, worldviews are still forming, and this plasticity may explain why climate change knowledge overcomes skepticism among individualist adolescents . . . .

For adults, worldviews are well entrenched and exert considerable influence over climate change risk perception. During the teenage years, however, worldviews are still forming, and this plasticity may explain why climate change knowledge overcomes skepticism among individualist adolescents . . . .

I myself strongly agree with SPBMC that climate-science education can make a big contribution to overcoming cultural polarization on climate change—although for reasons that I think differ from those of SPBMC.   But put that aside for a second.

The problem, in my view, is that the measure of climate-science literacy that SPBMC constructed fails to address what existing research teaches us is the biggest challenge in measuring public understanding of climate science.

That challenge is how to unconfound or disentangle genuine knowledge from the positions people take by virtue of their cultural identity. An assessment instrument must overcome this challenge in order to be a valid measure of climate-science literacy.

In general, people’s perceptions of risk reflect affective appraisals—positive or negative—of the putative risk source (nuclear power, guns, vaccines, etc.).

For most people most of the time, these feelings don’t reflect their comprehension of scientific data or the like. On the contrary, how people feel is more likely to shape their assessments of all manner of information, which they can be expected to conform to their pro- or con-attitude toward the putative risk source.