Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Study rules out stupidity as a cause of disbelief in climate science

"The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses," said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. "The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public's limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first," he said.
"Cultural cognition" is the term used to describe the process by which individuals' group values shape their perceptions of societal risks. It refers to the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong.
The results of the study were consistent with previous studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls.
Read it at Environmental Economics
Study rules out stupidity as a cause of disbelief in climate science
(h/t Mark Thoma)

Another way of putting this is that facts are non-neutral and are formed by the consensual reality of the group to which a person belongs.

4 comments:

wilwon32 said...

@Tom

'Another way of putting this is that facts are non-neutral and are formed by the consensual reality of the group to which a person belongs.'

I would prefer to substitute 'beliefs/interpretations' for 'facts'. However, these sorts of misguided and/or misinterpreted studies are all too frequently of culturally significant/political significance.

Matt Franko said...

but Tom look at this excerpt:

"studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls."

The disagreement is over RISKS not FACTS.

RISKS are subjective.

10 dogs after nine bones is FACT. It is a FACT that only nine can get a bone and 1 will go without... FACT.

If you had data that showed how measured earth temperatures are going up over time and showed that to someone and then that someone denied that FACT, then that person
WOULD BE STUPID (moron) imo....

Resp,

Ryan Harris said...

Humans aren't good at assessing risk and are even worse at judging scales outside their normal experience. When asked to estimate their ability, an individual tends to believe that she is more accurate than everyone else. But if you give 3 or 4 common risks like pesticide/organic food, driving an auto, taking a prescription, and climate change and ask a person to rank the risks posed by each they will get the ranking wrong. If you ask them to assess the absolute value of the risk, they can't even get within a thousand or 10,000 times the accurate risk. Funny thing then to trust those around you for their enlightened opinions when they are just as likely flawed and arrogant about their ability.

Leverage said...

Well, the problem is that is risks which are the endemic problem as well as the origins of these changes. Same happens with nuclear power btw.

So your typical 'anti-climate change' (btw, the climate is ALWAYS changing, and has been doing since the origin of the earth) guy will tell you that these changes are neglectable, or are not anthropocentric in nature.

So basically there is nothing you can do (correlation does not imply causation, it's impossible to prove these changes are due to human actions and you should not be doing nothing) and you shouldn't be doing nothing because these changes are irrelevant. The argument has been evolving more to this line of thought as facts are no longer deniable.

So it's very interesting what Matt is quoting because at the end in a sense of responsibility towards future generations and a problem of egoism. The same sort of people who creates reckless financial crisis is the same sort of people don't give a crapp about this. They simply don't care, so looking at the problem from 'what is apparently rational' won't solve anything anyway, they will do what they please. And most probably they can argue that's just rational, and screw who comes later.

Is the mentality of the sociopath, and nothing you can do about it. And even so, societies where there is agreement about this issue, no one is doing nothing to change the dynamic, not trying even hard enough, the dynamic of the system keep an inertia of heading to the abyss anyway.

I'm pretty deterministic about this things (just like with financial/economy issues tbh), nothing will be done and nature will force our hand at some point. Well, it already is doing, via pollution and various illness. Unfortunately "violent" (painful) resolutions are apparently unavoidable, but goes in hand with the nature of our universe, which is NOT a wonderful paradise, is a beautifully violent universe where action (life) is born from pain. Stoicism was right after all, and such is the nature of the beast (including humanity).