Anti-vaccination advocates and climate skeptics have a lot in common. Both sets of people tend to have a paranoid view of the world, distrust scientists (at least on the issue at hand), and refuse to accept evidence. So a recent study on communicating with “anti-vaxxers” may shed some light on ways to communicate better with climate deniers:
[R]esearchers conducted a new study designed to test out the effectiveness of one potential intervention aimed at changing people’s anti-vaccination attitudes: highlighting factual information about the dangers of communicable diseases. After recruiting 315 volunteers, the researchers used questionnaires to probe their views on a variety of divisive subjects, including vaccination.
Participants were then randomly split into three groups that received different study conditions. One group was provided with scientific literature that refuted common vaccination myths. The second, a so-called “disease risk group,” was given various materials highlighting the risks associated with three vaccine-preventable diseases: measles, mumps and rubella. These included stories from parents whose children had suffered such diseases, images of infants with the infections and information regarding the potential consequences of failing to vaccinate. The final group was a control that was given unrelated reading material.
At the end of the study, participants’ attitudes were reassessed to see whether the intention to vaccinate their children had changed. Encouragingly, the researchers report, they found that the second intervention successfully changed people’s vaccination attitudes in a positive manner; even those with the strongest anti-vaccination beliefs could be countered with this technique.
If climate advocates were to take a similar approach to communicating with climate “skeptics,” they would focus on the likely impacts of climate change, just as this study focused on the likely impacts of not vaccinating. Stories seemed key in the vaccine study, so testimonials from residents of the arctic on melting sea ice or Hurricane Sandy victims might have a comparable influence on opening minds.
Perhaps a study like this has already been attempted on climate deniers. But if not, I’d be curious to find out if this approach might work in that context.
A new study from researchers at Princeton, Yale, and George Mason University finds that repeatedly communicating the “97% scientific consensus” that human actions are warming the planet may help breakdown climate denier resistance to accepting the science:
After being presented with the consensus message, people on average increased their estimate of the percentage of scientists who agree about climate change by 12.8 percent. And the paper further found that when people up their estimate of the percentage of scientists who accept that global warming is caused by humans, they also increase their own belief in the science, and their own worry about it, becoming more likely to want the world to take climate action.
But Yale public opinion researcher Dan Kahan is skeptical of the report findings:
If this is the strongest case that can be made for “97% consensus messaging,” there should no longer be any doubt in the minds of practical people–ones making decisions about how to actually do constructive things in the real world– that it’s time to try something else.
Kahan argues instead that discussions of geoengineering are actually better at getting climate deniers to start thinking constructively about how to solve climate change, mainly because geoengineering as a solution doesn’t involve government intervention into the economy through taxes or regulations on fossil fuels. And it’s the fear of this solution or policy response that seems to motivate climate deniers to reject the underlying science that could justify them.
My feeling is it can’t hurt to try both approaches, provided there’s no evidence that either message could actually backfire. In fact, I found it reassuring that the 97% message didn’t cause a backfire, knowing how people with false beliefs can really get their backs up when others cite science that disagrees with them.
Ultimately though it will take a big cultural shift to truly kill off the anti-science beliefs, the same way the American South came around (largely anyway, or at least publicly) to reject legal segregation based on race. Some of that requires changing of the generations, but a lot of it requires changing events (like more extreme weather) and the relentless dialogue and discussions of the subject, even in the face of obstinate attitudes that seem impossible to change. Whether we start with geoengineering or the 97% message, the conversations just need to keep going, and the tide will keep turning.
