follow CCP

Recent blog entries
popular papers

Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing

What Is the "Science of Science Communication"?

Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem

Ideology, Motivated Cognition, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study

'Ideology' or 'Situation Sense'? An Experimental Investigation of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment

A Risky Science Communication Environment for Vaccines

Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government

Making Climate Science Communication Evidence-based—All the Way Down 

Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law 

Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
 

The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Science Literacy and Climate Change

"They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction 

Geoengineering and the Science Communication Environment: a Cross-Cultural Experiment

Fixing the Communications Failure

Why We Are Poles Apart on Climate Change

The Cognitively Illiberal State 

Who Fears the HPV Vaccine, Who Doesn't, and Why? An Experimental Study

Cultural Cognition of the Risks and Benefits of Nanotechnology

Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe? An Empirical Examination of Scott v. Harris

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy

Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in "Acquaintance Rape" Cases

Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect

Fear of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation of Sunstein on Risk

Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk

« Conditional probability is hard -- but teaching it *shouldn't* be! | Main | I ♥ Item Response Theory -- and you can too! »
Tuesday
Aug192014

"What exactly is going on in their heads?" (And in mine?) Explaining "knowing disbelief" of climate change

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.

The first is just to do it. 

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.

This is a hard thing to do! 

Item response curves for OCSIBut 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.

Now, however, I’ll try my hand. 

In fact, I don’t have an answer that I’d expect the questioner to be satisfied with. That’s because I still don’t have an answer that satisfies me.

But here is something in the nature of a report on the state of my ongoing effort to develop a set of candidate accounts suitable for further exploration and testing.

Consider these four general cases of simultaneously “knowing” and “disbelieving”:

1. “Fuck you & the horse you rode in on!” (FYATHYRIO).  Imagine someone with an “Obama was born in Kenya!” bumper sticker. He in fact doesn’t believe that assertion but is nonetheless making it to convey his antagonism toward a segment of society. Displaying the sticker is a way to participate in denigration of that group’s status. Indeed, his expectation that others (those whom he is denigrating and others who wish to denigrate them) will recognize that he knows the proposition is false is integral to the attitude he intends to convey.  There is no genuine contradiction, in this case, between any sets of beliefs in the person’s mind.

2. Compartmentalization.  In this case, there is a genuine contradiction, but it is suppressed through effortful dissonance-avoiding routines.  The paradigmatic case would be the closeted gay man (or the “passing” Jew) who belongs to a homophobic (or anti-Semitic) group.  He participates in condemnation and even persecution of gays (or Jews) in contexts in which he understands and presents himself to be a member of the persecuting group, yet in other contexts, out of the viewing of that group’s members, he inhabits the identity, and engages in the behavior, he condemns.  The individual recognizes the contradiction but avoids conscious engagement with it through habits of behavior and mind that rigidly separate his experience of the identities that harbor the contradictory assessments.  He might be successful in maintaining the separation or he might not, and for longer or or shorter periods of time, but the effort of sustaining it will take a toll on his psychic wellbeing (Roccas & Brewer 2002).

3. Partitioning. In this case, too, the contradiction is real and a consequence, effectively, of a failure of information access or retrieval.  Think of the expert who possesses specialized knowledge and reasoning proficiencies appropriate to solving a particular type of problem.  Her expertise consists in large part in recognizing or assenting to propositions that evade the comprehension of the nonexpert.  The accessing of such knowledge, however, is associated with certain recurring situational cues; in the absence of those, the cognitive processes necessary to activate the expert’s consciousness and appropriate use of her specialized knowledge will fail. The expert will effectively believe in or assent to some proposition that is contrary to the one that she can accurately be understood to “know.”  The contradiction is thus in the nature of a cognitive bias. The expert will herself, when made aware of the contradiction, regard it as an error (Lewandowsky & Kirsner 2000).

4. Dualism. The contradiction here is once again only apparent—except that it is likely not even to appear to be one to the person holding the views in question. 

Everhart & Hameed (2013) describe the Muslim medical doctor who when asked states that he “rejects Darwinian evolution”: “Man was made by Allah—he did not descend from monkeys!” Nevertheless, the Dr. can readily identify applications of evolutionary science in his own specialty (say, oncology).  He also is familiar with and genuinely excited by medical science innovations, such as stem-cell therapies, that presuppose and build on the insights of evolutionary science.

With prodding, he might see that he is both “rejecting” and “accepting” a single set of propositions about the natural history of human beings.  But the identity of the propositions in this sense does not correspond to any identity of propositions within the inventory of beliefs, assessments, and attitudes that he makes use of in his everyday life.

Within that inventory, the “theory of evolution” he “rejects” and the “theory of evolution” he "accepts" are distinct mental objects (Hameed 2014).  He accesses them as appropriate to enable him to inhabit the respective identities to which they relate (D’Andrade 1981). 

Integral to the “theory of evolution” he “rejects” is a secular cultural meaning that denigrates his religious identity. His “rejection” of that object expresses—in his own consciousness, and in the perception of others—who he is as a Muslim. 

The “theory of evolution” he “accepts” is an element of the expert understandings he uses as a professional. It is also a symbol of the special mastery of his craft, a power that entitles those who practice it to esteem.  “Accepting” that object enables him to be a doctor. 

The “accepted” and “rejected” theories of evolution are understandings he accesses “at home” and “at work,” respectively.

But the context-specificity of his engagement with these understandings is not compartmentalization: there is no antagonism between the two distinct mental objects; no experience of dissonance in holding the sets of beliefs and appraisals that correspond to them; no need effortfully to cordon these sets off from one another. They are "entirely different things!," (he explains with exasperation to the still puzzled interviewer). 

It’s actually unusual for the two mental objects to come within sight of one another. “Home” and “work” are distinct locations, not only physically but socially: negotiating them demands knowledge of, and facility with, sets of facts, appraisals, and the like suited to the activities distinctive of each.

But if the distinct mental objects that are both called "theories of evolution" are summoned to appear at once, as they might be during the interview with the researcher, there is no drama or crisis of any sort. “What in the world is the problem,” the Dr. wonders, as the seemlingly obtuse interviewer continues to press him for an explanation.

So what should we make of the highly science comprehending individual who gets a perfect score on the OCSI but who, consistent with his cultural identity, states, “There is no credible evidence that human activity is causing climate change”?

I feel fairly confident that what’s “going on” in his or her head is neither FYATHYRIO nor “compartmentalization.”

I doubt, too, that this is an instance of “partitioning.”

“Dualism” seems like a better fit to me.  I think something like this occurs in Florida and other states, where citizens who are polarized on “climate change” make use of climate science in local decisionmaking.

But I do not feel particularly confident about this account—in part because even after constructing it, I still myself am left wondering, “But what exactly is going on in their heads?”

It’s not unusual—indeed, it is motivating and exhilarating—to discover that one’s understanding of some phenomenon that one is studying involves some imperfection or puzzle.

Nevertheless, in this case, I am also a bit unsettled. The thing to be explained took me by surprise, and I don’t feel that I actually have figured out the significance of it for other things that I do feel I know.

But after my talk at RMIT, I put all of this behind me, and proceeded to my next stop, where I delivered a lecture on “cultural cognition” and “the tragedy of the science communications commons.” 

You see, I am able to compartmentalize . . . .

References

D'Andrade, R.G. The cultural part of cognition. Cognitive science 5, 179-195 (1981).

Everhart, D. & Hameed, S. Muslims and evolution: a study of Pakistani physicians in the United States. Evo. Edu. Outreach 6, 1-8 (2013).

Hameed, S. Making sense of Islamic creationism in Europe. Unpublished manuscript (2014).

Kahan, D. M. Climate Science Communication and the Measurement Problem, Advances in Pol. Psych. (in press).

Lewandowsky, S., & Kirsner, Kim. Knowledge partitioning: Context-dependent use of expertise. Memory & Cognition 28, 295-305 (2000).

Roccas, S. & Brewer, M.B. Social identity complexity. Pers Soc Psychol Rev 6, 88-106 (2002).

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

References (1)

References allow you to track sources for this article, as well as articles that were written in response to this article.

Reader Comments (124)

@Joshua
"... the receiving individual employs a filter by determining which second-hand sources to use to get information."

Absolutely. Yet is also true that the second-hand source is filtering information prior to its distribution. This remains true even when there is no political bias involved (for source, for recipient or for both) although it may differ in kind from ideological filtering.

That's not to say that political (or social or whatever) bias does not or cannot come into play. Precisely because experience teaches that all humans are prone to bias and error of some sort, the scientific method has evolved (or was it intelligently designed?) to afford checks on the accuracy of proffered information.

Of course, climate science must run the scientific method's gauntlet just as any other research is expected to do. Indeed, each individual finding will have to navigate the gauntlet multiple times. Not just because new research challenges (or reinforces) existing hypotheses but also because changing inter/national policies and practices is not a simple, one-day process.

To expect a "Get Out of Debate, Free" card is unreasonable because climate science is not Monopoly with real money. Yet even before addressing potential public policies, climate scientists engage in vigorous debate with each other over what they know and how well they know it. The stakes are high and the egos are huge but, hopefully, the messy process will continue to produce useful information. So that we can all filter the hell out of it.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterKent

Dan said-

"Again: whether the evidence is "clear" or "unclear" etc. doesn't affect any of the inferences I'm drawing on (1). I've explained why multiple times now -- maybe the problem is that people don't understand what I'm drawing inferences about (public opinon formation-- not whether the evidence supports human-caused global warming or whether scientists are biased, etc)"

Dan, what they are trying to point out is that whether the evidence is "clear" or "unclear" DOES AFFECT how the public forms it's opinions on it. Any inferences you draw about how the public forms it's opinions on global climate change SHOULD take into consideration whether or not the public views the evidence on global climate change to be "clear" or "unclear".

Let me ask you directly- Do you think, or does research show, that people form opinions about issues differently when the evidence/proof/argument about that issue are crystal clear and undeniable than they do when the evidence/proof/argument about that issue are fuzzy, not solid etc? Do people process information differently depending upon the credibility, consistency, solidity of that information?

If they don't, then have at it. But I'm guessing that that they do. And if they DO, then you would need to adjust your line of research to reflect that propensity. Correct?

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterSaudadia

Gavin
Clearly mainstream climate scientists have "moved on" regarding the veracity of AGW. The problem is that the data has not "moved on" and has been stuck for 17 years and 10 months without an appropriate explanation as to why. Let's all remember that we are talking about the "theory" of AGW not the "fact" of AGW. I treat it as a theory and the more I get berated for not being part of the "concensus" the more skeptical I become.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered Commenteredward

Gavin,

As per edward's comment, how do you personally define "mainstream climate scientists" so I can verify your statement that this particular group of scientists has "moved on".

Why is it that thousands of scientific papers are published every year in which it is discovered that some element of the atmosphere or Earth system doesn't actually act or react in the way that it was "believed" to prior?

Why is it that if 70% of the planet is covered by oceans, and we have only mapped/studied 12% of it, yet you can be confident that nothing we could possibly discover about the oceans in the future might be responsible for some, or even all of the warming of the past 50-100 years?

Why isn't mainstream science updating the calculations on how much hydrothermal energy (not to mention the vast amounts of toxic gases and Co2) is being pumped into the oceans 24/7 every time we discover a new hydrothermal vent system? Or explosive submarine volcano field? Why is a study done decades ago based on a handful of measurements and a boat load of extrapolation/assumption still being used as the basic measurement for the amount of volcanic activity taking place on Earth?

But if you only answer one thing for me, take on this one would you please?

Isn't it true, that due to thermodynamic principles and inertia etc, that it would take hundreds (?) if not several hundred years of prolonged atmospheric warming to cause the deep oceans to warm up due to atmospheric temperature increases?

Increases in temperature occur first in the atmosphere, then on land, and finally the deep oceans due to their physical properties. Correct?

So it is virtually impossible for any of the short-multi year temperature increases in atmospheric temperatures, followed by temperature decreases, to be responsible for any of the current warming that might be occurring in the oceans today. It would have had to have started hundreds of years before today...correct?

Now, since scientists tell us that there hasn't been as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is now for at LEAST the past 800,000 years....WHAT have you found that happened in the past several hundred years that could have caused the ocean warming we see today since it couldn't possibly have been high levels of atmospheric CO2?

Thanks

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterSaudadia

Dan:
You are interested in public opinion and how the public forms those opinions so it does seem that Evans point about the clarity of the evidence is quite relevant:
“ 1) people usually converge on the best evidence, 2) there is no convergence on the AGW issue, and 3) therefore the simplest explanation is that there isn't actually best evidence in regards to AGW on which to converge.”
There currently is no definitive empirical evidence (knockout punch level) that settles the debate for the highly scientifically literate public. There is no definitive proof either way so people continue to support the position of their identity group. Polarizing issues like fluoride and radiation probably had similar gaps before the science settled out. The gap is biggest along political lines in the public in the USA because this issue is aggressively being used a tool to divide the public and justify major changes.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBill

@Bill: I addressed Evan's points. Twice. Both times as clearly as I could. I think the problem is that everyone but Evan seems not to have noticed.

August 22, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

Saudadia,

Your last two comments: they deserve clear, concise and straightforward replies. I wonder if that will happen. You can still see the wood for the trees if you work your way through this meandering thread, but it's getting difficult.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJaime Jessop

Dan,
Just looking at your new post now. So just to confirm:

1) The figure on the right in the new post (subtitled N=1153) is the correct results for what we were discussing until now?

2) The respondents who answered "(b)" include both respondents who answered (b), and respondents who didn't answer that question, but answered "no solid evidence of [global warming]"?

If so, I guess that this might change things a bit.

However, I think a lot of the discussion so far still holds.

For instance, reviewing my earlier comments, if the bits where I said "respondents who answered (b)" were modified to say "respondents who answered (b) or 'no global warming'", I think the basic idea of most of my arguments still hold. I'll have to double-check carefully though, when I've a bit more time.

E.g., 70-80% of the "global warming" answers for the "high OCSI" scores in the N=2000 sample still seem to be a consequence of political views. It's just that this is no longer just an "attribution" question - it also includes "no global warming" respondents.

The error bars for the highest and lowest OCSI ConReps unfortunately seem quite large, and the trend is not as clear-cut as in the original graph. So, I'm not sure that there's a clear enough signal in the N=1153 sample for a proper discussion yet. What does everyone else think?

Nonetheless, although the exact framework of the discussion has slightly changed, I think much of the discussion related to the original graph is still relevant. And I know I've found it an interesting discussion!

Maybe we should continue discussing the original graph... with the proviso that some of the respondents (mostly in the ConReps sample) answered that there wasn't "solid evidence of [global warming] in recent decades"? What do you all think?

By the way, was N=2000 or 1769 in the original graph? (since N=1769 for the figure labelled "Figure 5" in your new post)


P.S.

@Ronan:

The Figure is, as you (I think; or someone, anyway in this debate) suspect, mislabled... very embarrassing. It reports probability of selecting "mostly caused by humans" vs *either* "no warming" in recent decades or "warming mostly caused by natural cycles."

Not sure how that bears on the particular debate going on in comments -- but that's the data.

Joshua should probably also share credit for that. I noted that your results (as then labelled!) exclusively referred to respondents who agreed there has been "global warming". However, Joshua was the one who actually asked about the "no warming" respondents.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterRonan Connolly

Dan-

"Again: whether the evidence is "clear" or "unclear" etc. doesn't affect any of the inferences I'm drawing on (1). I've explained why multiple times now -- maybe the problem is that people don't understand what I'm drawing inferences about (public opinon formation-- not whether the evidence supports human-caused global warming or whether scientists are biased, etc)"

Again-you seem to be saying that the way the public forms it's opinions is NOT based on, or has NO relation to, whether or not the evidence they are forming their opinions about is "clear" or "unclear"! That makes absolutely no logical sense to those of us who keep harping on it.

If the evidence does not PROVE anything definitive, then of COURSE people are free to form whatever opinion about it they WANT TO. For example-the situation in Ferguson. The evidence so far proves several things definitively (such as the video of the robbery just prior to the shooting, and that the cop sustained a serious injury prior to shooting Brown etc), but so far those smaller truths have yet to be brought together in a manner that establishes a definitive resolution to the entire situation as a whole. So some people are siding with the cop and some are siding with the Browns based upon they personally view the evidence so far. Once the whole situation comes together, and a definite sequence of events has been processed and verified-some people's opinions are going to HAVE to change or they'll be defined as fringe, irrational, incapable of changing their viewpoint based upon the evidence that convinces everyone else.

The EXACT same thing is happening with climate science. We can prove that CO2 absorbs and re-radiates long wave radiation. We can prove that global temperatures are increasing. We can prove any number of smaller truths and agree upon them. BUT....no matter what the AGW crowd SAYS or INSISTS, the whole sequence of events has NOT been processed and verified as one whole situation. That's WHY people are still taking sides and arguing over how all those little truths might come together in the end. When they actually HAVE come together, then some people's opinions are going to HAVE to change or they'll be defined as fringe, irrational, incapable of changing their minds in the face of irrefutable evidence.

YOU and others seem to think that there has been some kind of "closure" in the actual science when there hasn't been. You cannot understand why people are still taking sides when in the minds of the AGW believers, the grand jury has met, examined ALL the evidence and declared a judgement! Problem is, at no point in the past has society agreed upon who would constitute a climate science grand jury, or vet them, or submit to their authority or judgments. And normal, average, rational human beings instinctually RESIST authority or declarations made by people they have not willingly submitted to. Not for political reasons, or party affiliations....simply out of self preservation/cautionary principles!

AGW might think that the IPCC constitutes some kind of grand jury, but others view the IPCC with suspicion because they are really more of a stacked jury that states in their own manifest that they will ONLY examine the evidence that can be attributed to their pre-selected perpetrator-humanity.

So Dan, whether or not the science is settled or scientists are biased may not matter to your research, but both certainly and absolutely factor into how the public has formed it's opinions ON the science. And if the inferences you draw about how they form their opinions about climate science doesn't take that into consideration, your research will be viewed as just one more flawed study that doesn't resolve anything.

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterSaudadia

@Ronan:

Yes, the 2d figure in the post is probability that rspt will indicate belief in human-caused global warming as opposed to either no warming or natural warming. I've broken down probability of "warming" from any cause vs. "no warming" in in today's post. The panel on the right shows how likely it is that someone will, conditional on political outlooks & OCSI, believe that warming is caused "mostly by" humans rather than "by natural cycles" assuming that person believes global warming is happen at all.

I haven't followed every in & out in the comments, but I also don't think it's likely any positions are affected. But sorry if I have pulled the rug out from anyone by being unclear that the original figure was "belief in AGW" vs. anything else.

The larger error bars on "belief in" AGW vs. natural cause is a consequence of over 50% of the "conservative republicans" (the subjects who scored above the mean on the right-left outlook index) being dropped as a result of having selected "no warming" on the first question! That's why one can be more confident about the degree of polarization & its relation to OCSI when one is looking at AGW vs. anything else.

Notwithstanding the lesser degree of precision in the more fine-grained estimates (the larger CIs), I think we can be very very very confident(1) that CRs & LDs who "believe in" climate change are still polarized on whether the cause is "mostly" human activity" or not; (2) that the difference is not a consequence of differences in "climate science literacy" as measured by OCSI; and (3) that indeed as OCSI goes up, polarization increases. The size of the CIs means only that the sample size constrains our ability to estimate exactly how big those differences are. (All of this assumes, of course, the validity of the various measures.)

One last point: I'm happy if you like to post differences in probability of selecting either (a) no warming, (b) warming most due to human activity, and (c) warming due mostly to natural as a function of political outlooks & general science comprehension too.

Those data would show greater polarization on "warming vs. no warming" & "human vs. natural conditional belief in warming" w/ even greater precision-- b/c the "ordinary science intelligence" (OSI) instrument is more discerning than the OCSI (latter definitely needs enhancement).

But the contribution that greater "science literacy" makes to increased polarization on climate change is old news, and it is also worthwhile I now realize (I didn't before!) to investigate differences in climate science comprehension, specifically, if one wants to solve the puzzle of cultural polarization on climate change.

August 22, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

@Saudadia:

One is certainly free to believe whatever one wants if the evidence is unclear. Free to do that even if the evidence is clear, for that matter.

But if one fits one's assessment of unclear evidence to one's cultural predispositions, then one will have beliefs that are more failthful to one's tribal identity than to the truth. That's really just true by definition.

Someone who cares about truth more than tribal identity will want to assess the evidence on the basis of criteria related to truth. Cultural predispositions aren't; they are about how one would like to live, an important matter, but one that doesn't tell the world how to behave.

If the evidence is unclear, then someone who bases his or her beliefs on evidence will conclude the evidence is unclear -- not that the world is whatever happens to be congenial to his or her cultural outlooks.

It is very much the case, I think, that many of the comments seem to miss this point -- seem, to think, that is, that it's consistent w/ science's way of knowing for people "to form whatever opinion ... they WANT TO" in the face of uncertainty.

I couldn't disagree more.

August 22, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

Thanks yet again Dan for your time and patience. I feel as if I am on the credit card here asking a third time, but here goes anyway:

"If it can be shown that individuals w/ competing predispositions opportunistically adjust the weight they assign to one and the same piece of evidence conditional on its consistency with the position that prevails in their cultural group...then they are evincing an inability or unwillingness to update their existing beliefs based on new evidence. They will disagree no matter how unclear the present evidence & continue to do so no matter how compelling it gets"

I see the first part of this...but how do you make what seems to me to be a very large leap to your idea that they will disagree no matter how compelling the evidence gets? If it stops snowing in here in my home state of Nebraska, I think it highly likely that everyone here would be on the AGW bandwagon in an instant. If average global temperatures dropped down to 1900 levels, I think even the most strident environmentalist would be re-thinking the AGW theory.

A quick summary of the relevant evidence I am seeing here:

1) People filter new evidence to fit their established opinions on a subject
2) This filtering can be motivated by ideology for politically charged subjects
3) For the concealed-carry issue, the partisan split is very similar to the split on climate change, and in line with the expectations from points 1 and 2.
4) The science on the effectiveness of concealed-carry is considered to be too uncertain to make conclusions
5) Political ideology (AMS survey on climate views) is a stronger predictor that a climate scientist thinks observed global warming is mostly from human activity than his or her expertise.

Given these pieces of evidence, it makes much more sense to me that the climate science issue is the same as the concealed carry issue (people lining up by ideology in the face of uncertain evidence), with the exception that motivated reasoning has biased expert assessment of the science for climate (characterizing it as more certain than it really is). Would be interested to hear your thoughts, if the credit card is not yet maxed out :-)

August 22, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterEvan

@Evan:

No leap. Just logic & empirical proof.

You quote me as saying


"They will disagree no matter how unclear the present evidence & continue to do so no matter how compelling it gets"

The words that come after "gets" & that you cut off from your quote are "unless they stop reasoning in this closed-minded way."

It is just logic to say that evidence won't promote convergence if those on opposing sides selectively weight the evidence in a manner that confirms their priors. There won't be convergence no matter how clear the evidence unless they stop reasoning in that biased way.

That's the logical part.

The empirical part consists of experiments.

As I said in previous response, experiments show that even when evidence on the sorts of issues in question is clear, people construe that evidence in a manner that is consistent with their cultural predispositions. They will do this whether the clear evidence consists of experiment results in a 2x2 contingency table problem or images of behavior captured in a video.

And again, I don't believe all issues have this character.

Nor do I believe that ones that do are bound to have that quality forever.

But where people construe the evidence in a manner that conforms their assessments of it to their cultural predispositions, then culturally diverse citizens won't converge, no matter how clear the evidence is.

--Dan

August 23, 2014 | Unregistered Commenterdmk38

The most off-base comment here is the one by Gavin claiming that the mainstream science has moved on in the midst of a 17 year hiatus that was predicted by nobody. The scientists in most of the hard sciences would never have the temerity to make such a claim. This is after Gavin claimed there is no explanation for 1910-40 because of lack of data. The preponderance of data in recent years not prevent the epic fail of climate modeling over the last 17 years.
It is clear that those who assert ownership of the truth are the ones who should be forced to produce reliable predictions based on that supposed truth, which has not been produced by the likes of Gavin and others on that side of the debate.
There is an easy explanation for the subject of the blog post, and it is the fact that conservatives evaluate uncertainty differently. Leftists were certain that centralized economic control would increase the wealth of society as a whole. Instead it produced widespread economic failure. Leftists tend to ignore uncertainty, they view the world as nothing more than a range of possible outcomes based on a range of possible variables, all of which are known and measurable. Conservatives and libertarians in particular do not see the world this way. A leftist like Gavin is capable of ignoring 1910-40, and ignoring 1997-2014, and repeat the same arguments while doing so. A conservative will rightly claim that those things undermine the arguments presented and cannot simply be waved away by concocting new theories with no supporting evidence, or by simply claiming that with more data we could easily concoct such a new theory. Conservatives know such things are in fact evidence that the anthropomorphic theory is wrong in one way or the other, perhaps by being too simplistic and ignoring the negative feedbacks of increased co2, or wrong by making erroneous judgements in the quantity of warming, or wrong because of otherwise unknown climate processes that overwhelm any warming produced by co2, or wrong in many multitude of ways because of the vast number of things that are not understood, such as solar and cloud influences that are hardly understood at all. Conservatives are also aware that evidence that one theory is wrong need not go hand in hand with an alternative theory. Conservatives understand that would flip the burden of proof in the scientific method. Conservatives are simply willing to acknowledge the uncertainties and the opposing evidence that does indeed exist, while liberals are willing to wave such things away as things to be explained later or things to be ignored.

August 23, 2014 | Unregistered Commenterscf

If in the mid 90s you had surveyed climate scientists with the question of whether global temperatures would remain constant for 17 years in the face of rising global co2 emissions, the vast majority would claim that such a scenario is inconceivable, due to the soundness of their theory.

The inconceivable has happened and these same people now claim increased certainty in their theory.

The skeptical minority who did not follow this pattern are called deniers.

August 23, 2014 | Unregistered Commenterscf

Thanks for your response Dan and for your time and efforts. I have been a reader here for a while and have learned a great deal.

August 23, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterEvan

@Evan:

If/when culture is prior to facts, then perception of facts as "clear" can't be expected to dispel cultural conflict; changing of cultural meaning is necessary to enable perception that facts are clear.

Classic case is cigarettes & cancer. See United States. Public Health Service. Reducing tobacco use : a report of the Surgeon General (Dept. of Health and Human Services Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., distributor, Washington, D.C., 2000), ch. 2; & Kahan, D.M. The Cognitively Illiberal State. Stan. L. Rev. 60, 115-154 (2007), pp. 136-39.

Your queries & others have motivated me to address the issue a bit more in today's post.

August 23, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

Yes, thanks Dan for addressing this and putting up with us! I appreciate your time and thoughts as well.

August 23, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterSaudadia

@Saudadia:

Welcome!

How about in return forget climate (if possible; I hope it is for you-- to me thinking about for more than 1/2 hr starts to become like tinnitus) & tell me what you think is going on with the Pakistani Dr?

Does he seem real/recognizable to you?

He is to me ... Actually, he is too to many U.S. teachers of highschool & college evolution I've talked to, although in their experience enabling knowing by someone to whom "disbelief" expresses identity is a tightrope act & apparently this is not so in Muslim countries...

What is going on in his head? Why, despite my ability to recognize him, can I not understand what's going on?

August 23, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

scf you stated: ""If in the mid 90s you had surveyed climate scientists with the question of whether global temperatures would remain constant for 17 years in the face of rising global co2 emissions, the vast majority would claim that such a scenario is inconceivable, due to the soundness of their theory.

The inconceivable has happened and these same people now claim increased certainty in their theory.""

You need to change it to ""in the mid 2000's AR4 stated that even if man was to immediately stop GHG emissions that for the next 2 decades that 0.1 to 0.2 C warming was already committed.""

For Dan and others, this is part of what Dr. Curry has been trying to point out. This was a prediction by IPCC on the state of their certainty and capability. Gavin and others are ignoring this example of the usefulness of the "concensus."

This also provides the basis for concluding at present that about half is anthropogenic and half natural variation. The part that people should familiarize themselves with from AR4 is that what could not be explained by natural variation, at the time this prediction was made, was used for the expert opinion of the iconical 3C ECS in AR4. In other words the natural variation and the assumed response gave the authors confidence in the 3C ECS when the models and paleo supported this number.

Further, another prediction was made about natural variation in AR$. It concerned the amount of variation possible in degrees, based on the expert inferencing above, by the year 2030. This was falsified about 2010.

As many have tried to point out. Explanations of this by the "concensus" ex post facto is not support of the work, but invalidation of its usefulness.

The policy question revolves around usefulness. This is an area where Dan (Florida post on local response) has a good article.

August 24, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJohn F Pittman

Dan asked-
"... tell me what you think is going on with the Pakistani Dr? Does he seem real/recognizable to you?"

I read Everhart and Hameed 2013, and it seems that the authors did NOT have the problem with the results that you apparently do. They reference the work of Geertz (1973) and Knorr (2007) that "argue that many of us interact regularly with multiple cultures (or cultural elements). This interaction both brings meaning to concepts and also causes those concepts to have a proliferation of meanings".

"Indeed, most participants took the meaning of the theory of evolution to be fluid. This fluidity of meaning allowed the participants to evaluate their concept of evolution in relation to the contexts provided by the interviewer (for example, religion, practical applications, etc.). This is not to say that the participants in this study did not properly understand the meaning of evolution, but rather that evolution is a theory that has outgrown a univocal epistemological meaning. It is not the case that our participants displayed ‘hybrid epistemologies’ (Kitcher 2008), but rather that the theory of evolution may possess meanings outside of the realm of epistemology."

From their conclusion-
"At the same time, we find that there is a dynamic and fluid interaction between their scientific views and their own religious and cultural context. Almost all of these doctors (20 out of 23) saw the relevance of evolution to medicine, including those who rejected evolution."

This is all very recognizable to me.

Evolution, like Climate Change, has many facets...parts...ingredients that are put together to produce a "whole" concept. Let's call it a recipe. I can see and accept JUST those individual parts that are valid, true, unchanging, solid WITHOUT accepting all the little bits and pieces that are estimated, postulated, or assumed by someone else. The recipe example:

I want to make a dessert cake. It used to be that in order to produce something defined as a "cake"-I had to make something that involved flour, sugar, eggs, milk, a leavening agent like baking soda and the flavoring of my choice. And I had to use pretty specific amounts of those things because people defined a dessert cake within a certain, limited range. TODAY, there are flourless cakes, and vegan cakes and gluten free cakes etc. People have broadened their definition of what can be called a "cake" to whatever suits their particular tastes/needs/expectations. The "theory of cake making" has "evolved" and changed as different things have been developed and added or subtracted from the end result. No one I know suffers from cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort when presented with someone else's interpretation of a "cake". It doesn't threaten their identity or force them to partition/fragment etc!

In the same way, I can accept and agree with certain concepts within the theories of both evolution and climate change that are whole in and of themselves, solid, unchanging etc. Like I said before...that Co2 absorbs and re-radiates LWR. Or what water molecules are made out of. Or how energy moves between different bodies etc. I AGREE with the scientific statements on such things. BUT...that does NOT mean that I HAVE to accept how scientist A, B, C...or even all THREE of them combine those ingredients, and accept that their "CAKE" is the only way that CAKE can be defined or accepted!

But because I can dissect the necessary/vital/factual parts from the whole, I don't feel compelled or forced or even uncomfortable rejecting how someone else puts those parts together as a "whole".

For example, if I believe that God is omniscient AND omnipotent...I believe He knows everything there is to know and has the power necessary to use that knowledge to the fullest potential possible. That would mean that I believe that God is smarter than all collected scientists together, AND capable of manipulating nature according to His desires. What humans call science, is really just humanity attempting to figure out how all of it was set in motion and how it currently all works together. What we discover...some believe is just a grand accident or unknown "bang"...and others believe was initiated by a supernatural force. I understand and accept that we don't have to agree upon the same SOURCE of it all, to agree upon the actual bits and pieces that are provable, knowable, solid.

Here's where I think you are getting stuck. In your study, you asked your subjects to classify/identify themselves by political affiliation, and they did. BUT....most people I know, and I suspect it applies to the broad population as a whole, WOULD NOT say that their political party affiliation is the most important, defining cultural group they belong to! For example, if you asked me to make a list of all of the cultural sub groups that I identify with personally, AND ASK ME TO list them based on which ones I identify myself with the most, and the most often, my list would look something like this:

Human, US CItizen, wife, mother, neighborhood/state citizen, age group, intelligence, ethnic group, and THEN my political group. In other words, my political affiliation is one of the groups that I identify with the LEAST.

If you asked me to re-rank them based on which identity is the most relevant to my views on climate change, I'd say-intelligence, human, mother, neighbor, wife, age, US citizen, ethnic, and then political party.

You can see that how I filter different things changes based on what I'm thinking or learning or discussing. But my political party affiliation is always at the bottom of my list. So the odds of my political party/identity causing me to accept or believe or reject things related to climate science or evolution are very, very small compared to all of the other cultural groups I belong to.

My point here is that maybe it's not me, or the Pakistani Dr, or even Republicans that are the outliers here. Maybe it's YOU Dr. Kahan....
How do you view what I just said?

August 25, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterSaudadia

The author has spent a lot of time pounding upon a straw man.

Virtually everyone agrees that global temperature has risen somewhat and that humans have played a role.

What almost all skeptics reject is any proof of a 3x multiplier of the effects of CO2 which would create a catastrophic situation. In fact the evidence appears to show a negative feedback mechanism.

Further we reject that politicians have the capacity to do anything that would significantly reduce the planet's temperature, and if they did it would destroy the world economy.

Finally a modest amount of warming would have a largely beneficial effect.

If you disagree, please explain by what tiny fraction of a degree, has California's Cap-And-Trade laws reduced world temperature, and tell us how much it has cost its citizens in terms of lost jobs and higher prices for everything.

No Warmist I know has ever even attempted to answer such a basic cost/benefit question, because they either lack the knowledge, or because the truth would make them look incredibly foolish.

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterFreedomFan

@FreedomFan:

Would you say 66% is "virtually everyone"? That's the percentage of the rspts in the nationally represenative sample in this study who said they believe that global temperatures had increased in the last few decades.

About 30% said they don't believe that. They "disbelieve" in global warming period, whether from "natural cycles" or "human activities."

That's perfectly in line w/ surveys conducted by all manner of researchers & professional polling firms. What's more, the probability that someone will say he or she doesn't believe there is evidence of the temperature of the earth increasing at all goes up as he or she scores higher on the "climate science literacy" assessment if he or she has political outlooks to the right of center.

Do you mean that "virtually everyone" who says he or she doesn't believe the temperature of the earth has increased in recent decades (especially the ones who score high on the OCSI test) also knows that what they believe isn't true?

If that's what you mean, then I gotta say, that that straw man is one tough fellow ...

September 7, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan

@Saudadia:

Yes, I agree with you. Seriously. I suspect I've been missing something important.

But now that I know you are exactly the person about whom I'm asking the question, I still have it.

I honestly don't think there is anything wrong with what you describe & I didn't mean to say there was anyting wrong w/ it when I posted this blog entry.

I'm just saying that I still don't think I really understand the cognitive operations involved (have a reliable picture that enables me to explain, predict, and do things) that make it possible for you to "filter different things changes based on what [you are] thinking or learning or discussing" in a way that allows you both to believe & not believe, know & not know something.

You can see in my response directly above to @Freedomfan that I'm still unable to believe what I guess I now know to be true about this kind of ability to engage in "knowing disbelief."

One clarification: I don't think people define themselves by their party affiliation. I think party affiliation is an indicator or proxy -- and a pretty crude one -- of affiliations that that are very important to people's identities, whether they consciously think about the matter that way or not.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer to my question.

(Oh-- & I don't identify myself as a "Dr." I have to admit that it's kind of odd, really, for any member of US society other than a physician (an MD) to expect people to refer to him or her by that title.)

September 7, 2014 | Registered CommenterDan Kahan
Member Account Required
You must have a member account on this website in order to post comments. Log in to your account to enable posting.