The Antarctic ice sheet is falling into the ocean, $1.1 trillion of investments are at risk due to a carbon bubble and the U.S. President is saying climate change is already affecting his country — by all accounts, you'd think the debate over global warming would be settled once and for all.

Yet it rages on. Recent polling shows public concern over climate change has fallen in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia over the last several years.

If there’s agreement among the world’s experts, why on earth is their disagreement among the world’s non-experts? And why is that disagreement so deeply polarized?

In a recent public lecture about polarized public discourse, DeSmog Canada founder and president Jim Hoggan posed the question: “Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?”

This is not a rhetorical question.

This type of question, however, does tend to be posed rhetorically, perhaps with your hands being thrown up in desperation, moments before walking away. But it’s a question that matters, because so long as we’re just shouting at one another, we fail to make progress on the world’s big issues.

So let’s take the question seriously — it deserves it and it just might get us somewhere.

Cultural cognition: we're all running in cultural packs

Sometimes, arguments aren’t really at all about what they appear to be about. So-called "debate" on environmental or economic policy, for example, can at times be more about articulating competing perspectives than it is about "debating" how we might make progress on important issues.

"Debates" like this can (and arguably do) remain on an entirely superficial level.

But if we’re not engaging in real dialogue, then what are we actually doing?

According to experts at Yale University, we’re engaging in the practice of “cultural cognition.” Simply put, cultural cognition refers to our tendency to conform our beliefs to the cultural packs that we run with. What we might be doing in a “debate” is actually articulating the position our cultural group has on an issue.

This becomes really interesting, according to the folks at Yale, when we’re looking at issues of scientific consensus — that is, issues that aren’t really up for debate.

Debates are as much about culture as about science

Climate change, the disposal of nuclear waste and gun control are all contentious issues that rely heavily on scientific research. Yet, these issues are also largely cultural, and of significant political importance. They tend to be issues for which there is high scientific consensus and low public consensus.

So, how can we better understand the deep running undercurrents of cultural polarization that happen as a result of "cultural cognition?"

According to Dan Kahan, a Yale law and psychology professor who works on the university's cultural cognition project, we’d need to explain how we develop our viewpoints, not based on the research of experts and scientists, but in response to our community, as a means of identifying with our social group.

In a recent paper, "Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk," Kahan and his colleagues outline how individuals develop opinions on scientific matters by identifying trustworthy experts. But just who passes the test of being a trustworthy expert varies widely between groups with opposing worldviews.

“We hypothesized that scientific opinion fails to quiet societal dispute on such issues not because members of the public are unwilling to defer to experts but because culturally diverse persons tend to form opposing perceptions of what experts believe,” the report states.

Overall, this leads to a sort of group-think confirmation bias.

“Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept as a result of a cultural availability effect that influences how readily they can recall instances of expert endorsement of those positions.”

A little more plainly, this means that sometimes we’re a little overzealous in our endorsements of those we like. If the right person says it, we’re a little too quick to listen. If it came from "our side," we’ll tone down the criticism.

We listen to the science — when it agrees with us

And it gets more interesting. Kahan ties the tendency to agree or disagree with scientific consensus into deep and opposing worldviews. He divides these into two basic camps: those holding "hierarchical and individualistic” views and those holding “egalitarian and communitarian” outlooks — more or less the groups falling on one side or the other of the left-right divide.

But, even more interesting than that, there was no argument to be made that groups on the "left" were any better at discerning scientific consensus than groups on the "right."

As Kahan’s team found, both groups diverged from scientific consensus and expertise (scientific opinion endorsed by the National Academy of the Sciences) “in a pattern reflective of their respective predispositions.”

It turns out, “both hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians are fitting their perceptions of scientific consensus to their values.”

That means taking a stand on issues like environmental policy is more a matter of personal identification than scientific “fact.”

For this reason, our belonging to a group (which, of course, we all do) can be problematic. We might buy into a group’s entire ideological system, rather than retain an open and nuanced view of a contentious political issue.

Maybe hold off on drinking the Kool-Aid

And, to make matters worse, groups often have internal inconsistencies. And what happens then, when we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and have adopted a wholesale perspective on an issue, instead of recognizing that a single group can be right on some things and wrong on others?

Advocating for any given environmental policy shouldn’t have to mean you immediately agree with every other supposedly progressive grassroots opinion emerging from that group.

That’s an important distinction: you can say one thing, without saying all those other things. You can advocate environmental policy change without joining the entire club.

Why does that matter?

When we think of polarized debate, we picture opposed extremes talking past one another in a state of logic schism. Two groups, missing one another’s point, and depicting one another in an adversarial light.

How much of your thinking is done for you?

But there is another side to polarization. It’s not just about the two sides repelling one another; it’s also about what happens to each side individually. And it’s about us, as individuals.

The issue is one of how the individual sits within group mentality. Clearly, we share both a cultural and evolutionary propensity for grouping ourselves together. This has, and continues to, serve us well in many regards. But group mentality has a particularly adverse effect: if you’ve already decided which side you’re on, then a lot of your decisions are already made.

A lot of your thinking is done for you.

So, back to that original question: “Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?”

It’s not just because two sides are talking past one another. The problem with this image is that, in it, we fail to take responsibility for our own shortcomings, as if we were saying: "We’re right, but they’re just not hearing us!"

The challenge of overcoming “cultural cognition,” then, lies in our intentional open-mindedness and also our careful communication.

Keeping an open mind is for our own sake: so our thinking doesn’t become stagnated, so that we can remain open to those big ideas when they finally come to us.

If current climate science is any indication (and yes, we’re aware that we’ve chosen to identify with the world’s most prominent scientists), the stakes are high.

Photo: Screen grab from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Climate change debate

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Neil Young’s Honour the Treaties tour kicked off with a bang on Sunday when the ex-pat Canadian rocker ripped into the Conservative government’s management of the oilsands.

Calling the oilsands a “disaster” and a “devastating environmental catastrophe” at a press conference at Massey Hall in Toronto, Young stood by his earlier statement that the oilsands region resembles Hiroshima.

It wasn’t long before a war of words with the Prime Minister’s Office broke out. Young’s comments provoked a particularly fierce reaction in Calgary, the corporate headquarters of Canada’s oilpatch.

By Tuesday, the Globe and Mail had posted a cartoon depicting the House of Commons divided into two camps: “pro Neil Young” and “anti Neil Young.”

Talk about turning a complex issue into black and white. The more important question here is whether celebrity awareness-raising efforts like this one serve a valuable role in generating discussion or whether Young’s inflammatory language further divides the country into two opposite camps — moving Canadians further away from the solutions we so desperately need on the energy and climate file.

In an editorial on Wednesday, the Hamilton Spectator wrote:

“If there's a downside to Young's comments … it’s that the kerfuffle around Young might detract from the substance of his remarks. Some — including comparing the area to Hiroshima — are over-the-top silly. But about the pace of oilsands development and lack of environmental oversight, he's not wrong. The question isn’t whether or not oilsands development should take place. It should, responsibly. The question is how fast growth should happen, and whether the regulatory and monitoring infrastructure is in place to make sure environmental damage is mitigated.”

Agreed. You might not know it from reading the news headlines, but the vast majority of Canadians strongly believe the country needs an integrated approach to climate change and energy. In July, Clean Energy Canada released the results of a Harris-Decima poll, which found 87 per cent of Canadians surveyed agreed: “The nation needs a Canadian climate and energy strategy to plan its energy future.”

Canadians were asked to indicate to what degree they would prioritize a series of objectives for a potential Canadian energy strategy. What did Canadians most frequently rank as “high” or “top” priorities? Improving energy efficiency (80 per cent), creating more jobs in clean energy (73 per cent), reducing Canada’s carbon pollution to slow down climate change (67 per cent) and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal (61 per cent). In contrast, only 31 per cent of those surveyed called “exporting more of Canada’s oil and gas resources” a high priority.

So why, when there’s so much common ground in the middle, does the Canadian energy debate continue to rage around the edges?

Well, for one, that’s where the conflict happens and we all know the media loves a good ole’ dust-up. And since the media likes a brawl, it’s tempting for players on all sides to make polarizing statements because they chalk up media hits and social media shares.

However, in doing so, they’re playing a dangerous game. Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan, describes scenarios in which two opposing sides talk past each other, impeding meaningful dialogue, as a “logic schism.”

“In a logic schism, a contest emerges in which opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position and disconfirms their opponents’ arguments,” Hoffman told the University of Michigan Record. “Each side views the other with suspicion, even demonizing the other, leading to a strong resistance to any form of engagement, much less negotiation and concession.”

Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, who researches science communication and the application of science to law and policymaking (and who just so happens to be a fan of Neil Young's music), says debates like the one stirred by Neil Young become about much more than what they appear to be on the surface.

“People end up seeing questions of fact as kinds of symbols that are badges of who they are and stock that indicates their status in society,” Kahan says. “The kinds of dynamics that I find disturbing and sad are the ones that prevent people who really probably have the same goals, or at least pretty close to the same goals, from recognizing what the best available evidence is."

Which brings us to the state of debate in Canada today. When Young says the Canadian government is “trading integrity for money,” Harper’s spokesman says: “Canada’s natural resources sector is and has always been a fundamental part of our country’s economy.”

Logic schism, anyone? The fact is rapid oilsands development comes with tradeoffs. Now, people are free to make different value judgments on those tradeoffs, but to deny they exist is to deny Canadians a sensible conversation on natural resource issues.

Young responded to the PMO with this: “Our issue is not whether the natural resource sector is a fundamental part of the country, our issue is with the government breaking treaties with the First Nation and plundering the natural resources the First Nation has rights to under the treaties.”

Indeed, proceeds from ticket sales for the concerts are going to support the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in their legal challenges of oilsands projects. Unfortunately, as of right now, most of the conversation spurred by Young’s tour doesn’t appear to be of a substantive nature about the issues the First Nation faces.

Reading the PMO’s statement, you’d think there is nothing controversial going on up there. “Projects are approved only when they are deemed safe for Canadians and [the] environment,” MacDonald said.

That seems a strange thing to say given the federal government recently approved Shell Canada’s Jackpine mine expansion even though Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq said it is “likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.” (That's what's called a tradeoff, folks.)

And so it is that almost every environmental issue in our country plays out as a he said-she said in the media, and then goes on to one of two fates — stagnation or escalation, wherein both sides of the debate end up viewing the other as untrustworthy without much discussion of the real issues.

Roger Conner, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School who also runs a consulting practice specializing in consensus building and conflict resolution on contentious public policy issues, coined the term “the advocacy trap” for this point in the debate where both sides have a profound distrust of the other.

“There are a few profoundly evil people in the world, but if you think you’re surrounded by them, you probably need to change your own psyche,” Conner said in an interview with DeSmog Canada founder Jim Hoggan. “If you think that the whole movement of people for the pipeline in Canada is made up of people who are either evil or idiots, I can almost assure you with great certainty that’ s not accurate.”

The only way out of this trap, Conner says, is for advocates to police their attitudes so they can learn to push sometimes, pull sometimes, collaborate sometimes and remain limber enough to sway back and forth as the situation demands, like a light-footed boxer. To use the entire range of strategic options, a public advocate must be able to avoid thinking of others as foes, he stresses.

“Resentment is like a drug. It feels good to go home and say: ‘Those assholes! Those jerks! Those liberals. Those conservatives … I’m right, they’re wrong,’ ” Conner says. “The truth is we all have some degree of uncertainty and we go to this self-righteous place to protect ourselves from that uncertainty.”

In other words, while it might feel good to be self-righteous and demonize people on the other side of the debate, it's likely not helpful in advancing the energy policy solutions the vast majority of Canadians want for their country.

So long as civil society groups rely on ingenuity to do battle with companies with multi-million dollar PR budgets, celebrity activists are likely to continue to play a role in the debate. But if you're using this as a moment for self-affirmation, to dig your trench a little deeper, remember: if we’re going to make progress on energy issues in this country, we’re all going to have to stick our heads up, stop seeing the people on the other side of the debate as enemies and find some common ground in the middle. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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To overcome polarization on the issue of climate change, Yale professor Dan Kahan says in an interview with e360, scientists and the media need to frame the science in ways that will resonate with the public. A message that makes people feel threatened, he says, simply will not be effective.

By Diane Toomey

It’s a common refrain: If people only knew more about the science, there wouldn’t be so much polarization on the issue of climate change. But Dan M. Kahan’s groundbreaking work has gone a long way to prove that idea wrong. In fact, he’s found, it’s not the lack of scientific understanding that has led to conflict over climate change, but rather the need to adhere to the philosophy and values of one’s “cultural” group.

Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School, says “individualists” — those who believe individuals should be responsible for their own well-being and who are wary of regulation or government control – tend to minimize the risk of climate change. On the other side, he notes, those who identify with the “communitarianism” group favor a larger role for government and other collective entities in securing the welfare of individuals and tend to be wary of commercial activity – he sees them as likely to favor restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Diane Toomey, Kahan maintained that in order to break down this polarization, the issue needs to be reframed in a way that minimizes the likelihood that positions on climate change will be identified with a particular cultural group. “Are there ways to combine the science with meanings that would be affirming rather than threatening to people?” he said. “I think if somebody believes that there just aren’t any, I think that person just doesn’t have much imagination.”

Yale Environment 360: It’s been conventional wisdom in certain circles that people who discount the threat from climate change are not scientifically literate – they just don’t understand the evidence laid in front of them. But your research shows that this is not the case. In fact, polarization on climate change can actually be chalked up to which cultural group you belong to – “individualism” versus “communitarianism.” What do these opposing groups believe, and what does that have to do with one’s belief, or not, in the threat of climate change? 

Dan Kahan: The groups are defined by their shared understandings of how society should be organized. People who are more individualistic believe that individuals should be responsible for securing conditions that enable them to flourish without assistance or interference from any kind of collective authority or entity. People who are more communitarian think the collective is responsible for securing the conditions for individual well-being and sometimes should be able to take precedence over the interests of individuals if there is a conflict. People who are more individualistic are going to be more disappointed to believe that the consequences of activities that they like, such as a lot of commercial market activities, are creating harms that you would have to restrict. But if you believe that people who are engaged in commercial market activities are generating lots of inequality, it would be congenial for you to believe that this activity is really dangerous and ought to be restricted. 

So part of the theory is that people have a predisposition, based on their values and emotional engagement with the information, to understand it in a certain way… It’s important to recognize that that’s how people get any kind of information relating to science. People need to accept a lot more about what is known to science than they could possible figure out on their own. They are going to be looking to people like themselves, whose outlooks they share. 

e360: But we are talking here about a scientific question. Are you saying that people look toward scientists that they perceive are “like them”? 

Kahan: Most of the things that people are making informed decisions about that depend on science are not going to be ones they have consulted scientists for information about. Most of what people know – the decisions they make that are informed by scientists – is based on information that is travelling through all kinds of intermediaries. Scientists aren’t on television giving marching orders. That’s not a good model of how people come to know what’s known by science – from the mouth of the scientist to the ear of the citizen. People figure these things out because they are situated in networks of other people who are part of their everyday lives. And those networks ordinarily guide them reliably to what’s known. 

e360: In a study you and colleagues published in the journal Nature Climate Change, you found that as scientific literacy increases, polarization on climate change actually increases as well. Why would that be? 

Kahan: Once you have an issue that has become a signifier of your membership in and loyalty to the group, then making a mistake about that can be really costly to your membership in that group. If I marched around [the Yale] campus with a sign that said, “Climate change is a hoax,” even though I have tenure, my life wouldn’t be as good as it is.

You know, Bob Inglis, the congressman from South Carolina, he was like the Babe Ruth of conservative political ratings. Nobody did better than he did [in ratings from conservative groups] across all the issues that normally determine whether you are a conservative in good standing. And then one day he says, “Well, I’m concerned about climate change and what impact that could have on my constituents and other people in the country.” Soon after that, he is out of office because he is defeated in the primary. Now, imagine that you are a barber in the 4th District of South Carolina [which Inglis represented in Congress]. Do you think it is a good idea when somebody comes in for a shave to hand them a petition that says, “Save the polar bears” or something like this? I mean, you’ll be out of a job as quickly as he was. The impact of making a mistake relative to your group membership is large. The cost of making a mistake on the science is zero. 

So I think that people, because they generally process information in a way that is good for them, are going to predictably form views that connect them to their group.

e360: So, they’re being rational. 

Kahan: That’s a kind of rationality. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a climate scientist to do that with respect to climate change because it’s really obvious what position your group has. 

e360: Let’s talk about a fascinating experiment that you carried out. You asked people to assess a study on climate change after reading one of three articles. One article had nothing to do with climate change, another called for strict CO2 regulations, and a third advocated research on geo-engineering, the manipulation of the environment to offset the rise in CO2. You found that the group that read the geo-engineering article was less polarized over the validity of the climate change study. Why would that be so? 

Kahan: We examined whether people, in judging the validity of evidence on climate change, would be more or less open-minded based on whether they had just previously been exposed to information either about geo-engineering or carbon limits. Logically speaking, whether the information on climate change is valid doesn’t depend on whether you can do carbon emissions limits or geo-engineering or anything else. There either is a problem or there isn’t. But psychologically, the hypothesis was that these two kinds of stories would determine the meaning that people attached to the evidence on climate change. The meaning of the carbon limit story was the one that tends to make more individualistic people resist evidence on climate change. It’s kind of like a game-over message. The geo-engineering story, on the other hand, has in it certain kinds of themes that people who have an individualistic world view are moved by and find inspiring – the fact that we use our ingenuity to overcome and deal with limits, including the limits that themselves might be generated by the use of our own ingenuity. So just knowing that geo-engineering was a possibility, the hypothesis was that that would generate a meaning for the subsequent evidence we showed them on climate change that wouldn’t be nearly as threatening. And measuring the outcome here is simple: Are you engaging the information in a more open-minded way? And we found that they were, and because they were, there was less polarization. 

e360: It’s hard to imagine Bill McKibben, for instance, tweaking his message as he campaigns against the Keystone XL pipeline. McKibben, I imagine, is going to continue to call for exactly what he believes in: no pipeline. I’m wondering, as far as climate change goes, maybe these positions have been too entrenched for too long to hope for any reduction in polarization. 

Kahan: I’m not sure about Bill McKibben. I haven’t talked to him, so I don’t know what he thinks. But I do know [climate scientist] James Hansen thinks that you ought to have nuclear power. We did the same experiment where we used nuclear power [instead of geo-engineering] and we got similar effects. 

I think the only thing that is certain not to work would be a style of framing the issues and presenting information that continues to accentuate the perception that the sides on the debate are identified with particular groups. I believe there are ways – in fact, many ways – of presenting the information about climate and science that don’t have that effect. The question is: Which ones are like that, and how could you deliver them? The point is, are there ways to combine science with meanings that would be affirming rather than threatening to people? I think if somebody believes there aren’t any, I think that person just doesn’t have much imagination. 

e360: You do offer some examples at the local level – Florida, for instance – where adaptation to climate change has taken place without running into the cultural identity obstacle. Why wasn’t the individualism/communitarianism dynamic at work in those instances? 

Kahan: The reason there is potential to promote engagement there is that the meanings are entirely different. People in Florida have had a climate problem since they got there. It’s a bad climate. It gets overwhelmed by water and hurricanes. It’s not like this is news to them. I can find materials that were distributed in the 1960s that are not all that much different from what they are using now to try to explain to people why you have to worry

These are decision-makers who are getting information from scientists and trying to make sense of it.”

about saltwater penetration into the aquifers. Every few years you have to do things since sea level rises. They are used to talking about this, and they’re used to talking about it with their neighbors. They may be red and blue when talking about certain national issues, but they’re all just property owners. The insurance guy is there saying one thing, and so is the power company. Now, people are going to squabble because choices always have to be made in politics. But for purposes of this debate, they are all on the same team. You don’t have to come up with clever framing messages. Just use the way that people already talk about these issues. 

e360: Are you saying that in Florida they talk about the threat of climate change without actually using the words “climate” and “change?” 

Kahan: People talk about climate and climate change in Florida, but really what they talk about is: How do we deal with the problem we’ve always dealt with? I don’t know that there is a taboo on mentioning the word “climate.” What they’re talking about is: What do we do here in Florida? 

e360: I understand that you have a project on the ground in Florida right now, in which you are looking at science communication on the issue of climate change. 

Kahan: We’re advising different municipal actors who are part of the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. Those groups are working together from Florida’s four most populous counties to implement a directive that was actually passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor in 2011: that everybody should update their comprehensive land-use plan to reflect the most recent information on sea level rise and other kinds of adverse climate impacts. We’ve been talking about how to create a science communication environment in which the members of the public will be receptive to the type of information that travels to them. But, of course, a lot of time what you’re communicating is: How about the estimates from this model about exactly how much sea level is going to rise? And how about that model and what if we made this assumption? 

These are decision-makers in administrative positions who are getting information from scientists and are trying to make sense of it and understand the trade-offs and the costs and benefits. What we try to do is help the members of the compact understand what the best evidence is on the ways to communicate the science. 

Orignially posted on Yale Environment 360.

Image Credit: Polarization photos by Andrew Davidhazy.

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