The first 15 years or so of my coverage of the greenhouse effect and global warming focused on geophysical and environmental questions, along with energy and forest policy. Around 2005 I started paying more attention to the internal climate ? meaning, how human perception, or misperception, of climate science and environmental risk influences the decisions, or indecision, of individuals and societies in the face of climate change.
One of my most valued guides in examining what I?ve taken to calling our ?inconvenient mind? (explained in my recent Princeton lecture) has been Dan Kahan of the Yale Law School. His august title there is Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School, but my favorite incarnation of Kahan is as the driving force behind the Cultural Cognition Project, which has shown empirically that powerful predispositions shape how we select and react to information. Kahan has posted a useful short blog entry today answering a simple question: ?What would I advise climate science communicators??
Here are some excerpts and a link to the full post:
This is what I was asked by a thoughtful person who is assisting climate-science communicators to develop strategies for helping the public to recognize the best available evidence?so that those citizens can themselves make meaningful decisions about what policy responses best fit their values. ?I thought others might benefit from seeing my responses, and from seeing alternative or supplementary ones that the billions of thoughtful people who read this blog religiously (most, I?m told, before they even get out of bed everyday) might contribute.
So below are the person?s questions (more or less) and my responses:
1. What is the most important influence or condition affecting the efficacy of science communication relating to climate change?
In my view, ?the quality of the science communication environment? is the single most important factor determining how readily ordinary people will recognize the best available evidence on climate change and what its implications are for policy. That?s the most important factor determining how readily they will recognize the best available scientific evidence relevant to all manner of decisions they make in their capacity as consumers, parents, citizens?you name it.
People are?remarkably good at figuring out who knows what about what. That is the special rational capacity that makes it possible for them to?make reliable use of so much more scientific knowledge than they could realistically be expected to understand in a technical sense.
The ?science communication environment? consists of all the normal, and normally reliable, signs and processes that people use to figure out what is known to science. Most of these signs and processes are bound up with the?normal interactions inside communities?whose members?share basic outlooks on life. There are lots of different communities of that sort in our society, but usually their members converge on what is known to science.
But when positions on a fact that admits of scientific investigation ?(?is the earth heating up??; ?does the?HPV?vaccine?promote unsafe sex among teenage girls??) becomes entangled with the values and outlooks of diverse communities?and becomes, in effect, a symbol of one?s membership and loyalty in one or another group?then people in those groups will end up in states of persistent disagreement and confusion. These sorts of entanglements (and the influences that cause them) are in effect a form of?pollution?in the science communication environment,?one that disables people from reliably discerning what is known to science.
The science communication environment is filled with these sorts of toxins on climate change. We need to?use our intelligence?to figure out how to clean our science communication environment up.
For more on these themes:
Kahan, D. Why we are poles apart on climate change.?Nature?488, 255 (2012).
Kahan, D. Fixing the Communications Failure.?Nature?463, 296-297 (2010).
2. If you had three pieces of advice for those who are interested in promoting more constructive engagement with climate change science, what would they be?
A.?Information about climate change should be communicated to people in the setting that is most?conducive to their open-minded and engaged assessment of it.
?How readily and open-mindedly?people will engage scientific information depends very decisively on context. A person who hears about the?HPV?vaccine when she?sees Michelle Bachman or Ellen Goodman?screaming about it on Fox or?MSNBC?will engage it as someone who has a political identity and is trying to figure out which position ?matches? it; that same person, when she gets the information from her daughter?s pediatrician, will engage it as a parent, whose child?s welfare is the most important thing in the world to her, and who will?earnestly try to figure out what those who are experts on health have to say. Most of the contexts in which people are thinking about climate change today are like the first of these two. Find ones that are more like the second.?They exist!
B.?Science communication should be evidence-based ?all the way down.??.
Yes, there?s more, but I?m going to ask you to click here for the rest so you can get the feel for Kahan?s blog and wider body of work. Please do return and engage here, of course.
One relevant piece from me is ?The Changing (Communication) Climate.? And as a closer, here is an embedded version of my Princeton University talk, ?An Inconvenient Mind?:
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