Steve Watson

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled1. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk2. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they [the most scientifically and technically competent] were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

Their conclusion is, of course, that those who are more scientifically literate are using their ability to deal with scientific material ‘dishonestly’ to justify positions that are culturally convenient for them to hold.

A long-established body of work examining motivated cognition supports this conjecture. Both to avoid dissonance and to secure their group standing, individuals unconsciously seek out and credit information supportive of “self-defining… values [and] attitudes”, such as the shared world-views featured in the study of cultural cognition. The predictive power of cultural world-views implies that the average member of the public performs these tasks quite proficiently.

Our data, consistent with that observed in other settings, suggest that those with the highest degree of science literacy and numeracy perform such tasks even more discerningly. Fitting information to identity-defining commitments makes demands on all manner of cognition—including both system 1 and system 2 reasoning. For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions.

And their recommendation is that climate science needs to be presented to the more technically literate in such a way that it does not culturally alienate them. This needs to be done because

Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.

There are a couple of alarming aspects to this:

1. Firstly, the idea that you can simply dismiss the arguments of those who disagree with you as being motivated by bad faith is extremely dangerous to the conduct of rational argument. It may or may not be the case that people tend to reject a certain position when that is against their interests, and to present arguments against it (and vice versa, of course) but it is still necessary to respond to their actual arguments.
2. The authors claim that one party is arguing dishonestly. That party happens to be the party that is rejecting a claim to which they are very much attached. (That is an assumption on my part, but I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t true; and it doesn’t matter for the argumentative point anyway.) They claim to know that this is possible because there is evidence that people will believe things that will support their interests, and notwithstanding the truth of things. But isn’t it equally open to their enemy party to claim that the only reason they believe the way that they do is because it’s in their interests to do so? Since we now both deny an interest in the truth to the other party, we must find other non-rationally persuasive means of making them do what we want. This doesn’t bode well, does it?
3. Have they considered the possibility that climate scientists are in exactly the same position as the rest of us wrt the effect of interests on the things that they will come to believe? This is one of the standard claims of CAGW resisters: all the non-truth-related incentives for climate scientists are on the side of support for one position whatever the truth of the matter might be. If there were in fact no CAGW, how could we trust them to resist those incentives and discover the truth? And if we can’t – because they are subject to the same psychological pressures that are supposed to be distorting our cognition – then what grounds do the authors have for accepting their claims?