Americans Surprisingly Rational about Climate Change, German Study Finds

 [This is a transcript with links to references.]

I am fascinated by science deniers. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, it’s just amazing to see how badly the human brain can malfunction. Of course, it’s not just a brain problem, it’s also a social problem. In particular, the fraction of climate change deniers differs strongly by country, and it’s especially high in the United States.

According to a 2020 survey from YouGov, about 21 percent of Americans think that climate change is either not happening or we’re not causing it. In Germany it’s about 10 percent and in the UK six percent. So you see that’s quite a difference. But just why do people keep on believing something that conflicts with bulks of evidence. And why Americans in particular. Do they have alternative facts? Or alternative brains, maybe?

Well it turns out I’m not the only German who is interested in what’s wrong with Americans. A group of Germans recently set out to study the matter. The results are just in and they’re quite surprising.

You see the leading hypothesis for why people refuse to accept evidence that climate change is happening and caused by humans is what psychologists call motivated reasoning. This doesn’t mean people are super motivated to give reasons for what they’re doing. But rather it means that they have motives for coming up with reasons. They seek out information to confirms beliefs that they want to hold on to.

And sure, there are good motivations to not want to believe in climate change. If you don’t believe that we are causing climate change, there’s no need to worry about how much carbon dioxide your old Pickup truck is pumping into the atmosphere, and all that talk about sea level rise is bullocks until the water’s in your basement.

But about that new paper. To see if motivated reasoning is behind climate change denial in America, the authors recruited 4000 American adults, had them fill in questionnaires about their political orientation, and then put them into groups of about 800 people each.

In the first part of the experiment the participants of groups one and two received 20 dollars each. Those in the first group could either donate the money to an organization fighting climate change or keep it for themselves. What do you think how many of them kept the money? About 41%. In the second group they could only choose between two different organizations to donate to, but not keep the money.

After the participants had chosen what to do with the money, they were asked which percentage of climate scientists they think doubt that climate change is human caused. The authors expected that people wo kept the money would say that more climate scientists doubt the evidence, so that they’d justify their action. However, the replies were almost the same in both groups.

In the second part of the experiment they did the same thing with the money for groups three and four. But afterwards, the researchers asked the participants to watch a video about climate change. The participants had a choice between one video that explained the situation according to the scientific consensus and another one that other downplayed the influence of humans. The researchers wanted to see if the participants who kept the money would seek out information to justify climate scepticism, but again it didn’t happen.

They checked if the results were dependent on the income of the participants but found it wasn’t. The researchers conclude that Americans don’t seem to use motivated reasoning to justify their climate beliefs, and they also don’t seem to be seeking out information to support their beliefs. Hey hey, Americans are more rational than Germans thought.

But the researchers did find a strong correlation, and that was with political orientation. A full 60 percent of Republicans chose the video downplaying climate change while only 39 percent of Democrats did. The researchers say this suggests that climate change denial in the United States has little to do with reasoning to begin with and is instead strongly tied to political orientation and identity.

This political polarization was just recently mapped in a new study that clearly shows climate change denial is particularly strong in those US states which lean Republican.

I find this very interesting because from my interaction with climate change deniers, I’m sure that most of them misunderstand the science. And I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think they’re honestly confused. Because the science is difficult and it’s hard to find good explanations. I say this because it has taken me quite some time to at least roughly sort out what the science says. And I have a PhD in physics and a friend who’s a climate scientist.

Psychologists say facts don’t change minds. But maybe that has to do with the way that facts are presented in their studies. Because in the real world, facts do change minds. If they didn’t why should we worry about scientific misinformation? Because that could, I dunno, change people’s mind?

I believe that many science communicators just want to believe that facts don’t change minds so that they don’t have explain how we know the facts are facts. Then again that’s just what I believe.