Key Insight
During my trip to Australia, I presented The Measurement Problem twice in one day, first at Monash University and then at RMIT University (slides here). I should have presented two separate lectures but I’m obsessed—disturbed even—by the results of the MP study so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to collect two sets of reactions. In fact, I spent the several ... Read more
During my trip to Australia, I presented The Measurement Problem twice in one day, first at Monash University and then at RMIT University (slides here). I should have presented two separate lectures but I’m obsessed—disturbed even—by the results of the MP study so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to collect two sets of reactions.
In fact, I spent the several hours between the lectures discussing the challenges of measuring popular climate-science comprehension with University of Melbourne psychologist Yoshi Kashima, co-author of the very interesting study Guy, S., Kashima, Y., Walker, I. & O’Neill, S. Investigating the effects of knowledge and ideology on climate change beliefs. European Journal of Social Psychology 44 , 421-429 (2014).
The challenges, we agreed, are two.
If you want to figure out what people know about the mechanisms of climate change, asking them whether they “believe in” human-caused global warming definitely doesn’t work. The answer they give you to that question tells you who they are : it is an indicator of their cultural identity uninformed by and uncorrelated with any meaningful understanding of evidence or facts.
Same for pretty much any question that people recognize as asking them to “take a position” on climate change.
To find out what people actually know , you have to design questions that make it possible for them to reveal what they understand without having to declare whose side they are on in the pointless and demeaning cultural status competition that the “climate change question” has become in the US—and Australia, the UK, and many other liberal democracies.
But once accomplished, the second challenge emerges: to make sense of the surprising picture that one can see after disentangling people’s comprehension of climate change from their cultural identities.
As I explained in my Monash and RMIT lectures, ordinary members of the public—no matter “whose side” they are on—don’t know very much about the basic mechanisms of climate change. That’s hardly a surprise given the polluted state of the science communication environment they inhabit.
What’s genuinely difficult to sort out, though, is how diverse citizens can actually be on different sides given how uniform their (mis)understandings are.
Regardless of whether they say they “believe in” climate change, most citizens’ responses to the “Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence” (OCSI) assessment suggest they are disposed to blame human activity for all manner of adverse climate impacts, including ones wholly at odds with the mechanisms of global warming.
This result suggests that what’s being measured when one disentangles knowledge from identity is a general affective orientation, one that in fact reflects a widespread apprehension of danger .
The only individuals whose responses don’t display this generic affective orientation are ones who score highest on a general science comprehension assessment—the “Ordinary science intelligence” scale (OSI_2.0). These respondents can successfully distinguish the climate impacts that scientists attribute to human activity from ones they don’t.
This discriminating pattern, moreover, characterizes the responses of the most science-comprehending members of the sample regardless of their cultural or political outlooks.
Yet even those individuals still don’t uniformly agree that human activity is causing global warming.
On the contrary , these citizens—the ones, again, who display the highest degree of science comprehension generally & of the mechanisms of climate change in particular—are also the most politically polarized on whether global warming is occurring at all.
Maybe not so surprising: what people “believe” about climate change, after all, doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.
But still , what is going on inside their heads?
This is what one curious and perceptive member of the audience asked me at RMIT. How, he asked, can someone simultaneously display comprehension of human-caused global warming and say he or she doesn’t “believe in” it?
In fact, this was exactly what Yoshi and I had been struggling with in the hours before the RMIT talk.
Because I thought the questioner and other members of the audience deserved to get the benefit of Yoshi’s expansive knowledge and reflective mind, too, I asked Yoshi to come to the front and respond, which he kindly—and articulately—did.