Presenting facts as “consensus” bridges political divide over climate change
rather than challenging them with blunt scientific data, encourages a shift towards mainstream scientific belief - particularly among conservatives.”
For van der Linden and his co-authors Drs. Anthony Leiserowitz and Edward Maibach from Yale and George Mason universities in the United States, social facts such as demonstrating a consensus can act as a “gateway belief”: allowing a gradual recalibration of private attitudes.
“Information that directly threatens people’s worldview can cause them to react negatively and become further entrenched in their beliefs. This ‘backfire effect’ appears to be particularly strong among highly educated U.S. conservatives when it comes to contested issues such as manmade climate change,” says van der Linden.
“It is more acceptable for people to change their perceptions of what is normative in science and society. Previous research has shown that people will then adjust their core beliefs over time to match. This is a less threatening way to change attitudes, avoiding the ‘backfire effect’ that can occur when someone’s worldview is directly challenged.”
For the study, researchers conducted online surveys of 6,301 U.S. citizens that adhered to nationally representative quotas of gender, age, education, ethnicity, region and political ideology.
The nature of the study was hidden by claims of testing random media messages, with the climate change perception tests sandwiched between questions on consumer technology and popular culture messaging.
Half the sample were randomly assigned to receive the ‘treatment’ of exposure to the fact of scientific consensus, while the other half, the control group, did not.
Researchers found that attitudes towards scientific belief on climate change among self-declared conservatives were, on average, 35 percentage points lower (64 percent) than the actual scientific consensus of 97 percent. Among liberals it was 20 percentage points lower.
They also found a small additional negative effect: when someone is highly educated and conservative they judge scientific agreement to be even lower.
However, once the treatment group were exposed to the ‘social fact’ of overwhelming scientific agreement, higher-educated conservatives shifted their perception of the scientific norm by 20 percentage points to 83% - almost in line with post-treatment liberals.
The added negative effect of conservatism plus high education was completely neutralized through exposure to the truth on scientific agreement around manmade climate change.
“Scientists as a group are still viewed as trustworthy and non-partisan across the political spectrum in the US, despite frequent attempts to discredit their work through ‘fake news’ denunciations and underhand lobbying techniques deployed by some on the right,” says van der Linden.
“Our study suggests that even in our so-called post-truth environment, hope is not lost for the fact. By presenting scientific facts in a socialized form, such as highlighting consensus, we can still shift opinion across political divides on some of the most pressing issues of our time.”
— Read more in Sander van der Linden et al., “Scientific agreement can neutralize politicization of facts,” Nature Human Behavior (11 December 2017) (DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0259-2)
