Critical thinking about public opinion on climate change - Cultural Cognition of Health

A Washington Post Poll found that “70%” of Americans support regulation of green house gases.

The first thing to do, always, is take a close look and see if one accepts that a survey item of this sort is indeed worded in the manner that supports how its results are being characterized.

After that, the question to ask is, “What is the survey item actually measuring?”

The answer is usually “nothing,” or nothing of consequence.

If the item refers to a policy that members of the public don’t know or think about–something that doesn’t figure in their everyday interactions with other ordinary people–then the survey is not modeling anything going on in the world we live in.

Consider: About half the respondents in a general population survey won’t know — or even have good enough luck to guess– the answer to the multiple-choice question “how long is the term of a U.S. Senator?”

Are we really supposed to base an inference about what people with that level of political engagement are thinking from the responses of the 1,000 who get weirdly transported out of their everyday worlds and asked (by aliens, it must seem) to indicate whether they “approve” of, say, “the NSA’s metadata collection policy?” (“hell, I’m for it– college athletes are there to be educated!”)

The Washington Post tells us that an “overwhelming majority of Americans” support regulating CO2 emissions.

But given that only 58% (+/- 3%) of a general population telephone sample know that “carbon dioxide” rather “hydrogen,” “helium,” or “radon” is the “gas … most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” what exactly did the “overwhelming majority” of the weird-lottery winners called by “Langer Research Associates” understand “greenhouse gases” to be?

There’s zero correlation between responses to the “which gas” question and party affiliation.  That’s how one knows that it isn’t measuring the same thing as a survey item asking ordinary people whether they believe in human-caused global warming.

That’s a question fraught w/ meaning — not as a matter of policy or science, necessarily — but as an element of their social world.

It’s one of those things — along with abortion and gun control — that separate “us” from “them.”

Indeed, the issue has split people right down the middle — about 50% have answered “yes” & 50% “no” to the “human-caused global warming” item –for many years. And no, that has not changed recently: 48%, in a nationally representative Cultural Cognition Project survey conducted last month.

What are we supposed to think when told that an “overwhelming majority” of Americans said they “support” a policy that regulates human activities responsible for climate change even though Americans are divided 50-50 on whether human behavior is even causing global warming?

But even that takes responses to the the Washington Post survey item waaaaaaaaaay too seriously.

What valid public-policy survey items measure is an affective orientation — a feeling that is either positive or negative, strong or weak.

Such orientations can be of extreme importance.

They can propel people to disregard serious health risks (e.g., lung cancer from smoking) & shrink in terror from non-existent ones (autism from vaccines).

They can determine who they vote for for President (or for the House of Representatives or for anything else)–or who they marry or try to kill.

Often, such affective sensibilities are an expression of a vital element of the respondent’s self-conception, one more convincingly seen as a cause than as a consequence of how that person makes sense of all manner of evidence and information, from raw data to brute sense impressions.