Scientists Explain Why You Won’t Be Changing the Minds of Climate Deniers This Thanksgiving

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/scientists-explain-why-you-wont-be-changing-minds-climate-deniers-thanksgiving

Think that living through superstorms, heat waves or lake effect blizzards is enough to convince people that we’re undergoing a period of unprecedented climate change? Think again, say researchers at Michigan State. A new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, takes up the question of whether extreme weather can change minds where the science doesn’t, and basically comes up empty.

The study focuses on winter 2012, which was the fourth-warmest winter since at least 1895 — meaning it was one of the warmest in the subjects’ living memory. For the most part, people seemed aware that something was off: analyzing data from a March 2012 Gallup poll, the researchers found that respondents acknowledged that the winter felt warmer than usual. The more unusual the weather, the more more likely they were to notice.

Yet only 35 percent of people attributed those warmer-than-usual temperatures to global warming. As you might expect, it all came down to politics: “The more respondents perceive scientific agreement on climate change and the more they believe in the current onset, human cause, threat and seriousness of global warming,” the study found, “the more likely they report warmer local winter temperatures to be due mainly to global warming rather than normal yearly variation.”

As lead author Aaron McCright put it, ”Many people already had their minds made up about global warming and this extreme weather was not going to change that.”

[RiverLover]

1. They watch Fox. ~nt

[Thor_MN]

2. Conservatives tend to have binary thinking. Black/white, true/false.

And are able to dismiss just about anything to force the messy world into their mindset. Shades of gray (not the book) are anathema to them, hypocrisy comes easily to a person that has to alter reality to make everything fit into 100% right or wrong.

[underpants]

3. Good read

Rec'd

[Enthusiast]

4. Kicked and recommended!

If you mine coal, work in fracking or drill for oil for a living you most likely do not believe in global warming.

[caraher]

5. Don't be too smug that RWers are just dumber

It turns out smart people of all political persuasions are prone to using reason not to find truth but to reinforce their existing beliefs, perhaps to retain their status within a group meaningful to them. See, for instance, Chris Mooney's piece in Mother Jones, "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math"

Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don't realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their "numeracy," that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a "new cream for treating skin rashes." But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

[cantbeserious]

6. Fascinating - Thank You For Sharing

eom

[wyldwolf]

7. Or science deniers in general.