spawned a wave of activism, motivating businesses to go green and
governments to pass legislation and sign landmark agreements to protect
the planet. History teaches us that it sometimes takes a combination of
preaching, prosecuting, and politicking to fuel that kind of dramatic swing.
Yet by 2018, only 59 percent of Americans saw climate change as a
major threat—and 16 percent believed it wasn’t a threat at all. Across many
countries in Western Europe and Southeast Asia,
higher percentages of the
populations had opened their minds to the evidence that climate change is a
dire problem. In the past decade in the United States, beliefs about climate
change have hardly budged.
This thorny issue is a natural place to explore how we can bring more
complexity into our conversations. Fundamentally, that involves drawing
attention to the nuances that often get overlooked. It starts with seeking and
spotlighting shades of gray.
A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are shaped
by our motivations. What we believe depends on what we
want to believe.
Emotionally, it can be unsettling for anyone to admit that all life as we
know
it might be in danger, but Americans have some additional reasons to
be dubious about climate change. Politically, climate change has been
branded in the United States as a liberal issue; in some conservative circles,
merely acknowledging the fact that it might exist puts people on a fast track
to exile. There’s evidence that higher levels of education predict heightened
concern about climate change among Democrats but dampened concern
among Republicans. Economically, we remain confident that America will
be more resilient in response to a changing
climate than most of the world,
and we’re reluctant to sacrifice our current ways of achieving prosperity.
These deep-seated beliefs are hard to change.
As a psychologist, I want to zoom in on another factor. It’s one we can
all control: the way we communicate about climate change. Many people
believe that preaching with passion and conviction is necessary for
persuasion. A clear example is Al Gore. When he narrowly lost the U.S.
presidential election in 2000, one of the knocks against him was his energy
—or lack thereof. People called him dry. Boring. Robotic. Fast-forward a
few years: his film was riveting and his own platform skills had evolved
dramatically. In 2016, when I watched Gore speak in the red circle at TED,
his language was vivid, his voice pulsated with emotion,
and his passion
literally dripped off him in the form of sweat.
If a robot was ever
controlling his brain, it short-circuited and left the human in charge. “Some
still doubt that we have the will to act,” he boomed, “but I say the will to act
is itself a renewable resource.” The audience erupted in a standing ovation,
and afterward he was called the Elvis of TED. If it’s not his communication
style that’s failing to reach people, what is?
At TED, Gore was preaching to the choir: his audience was heavily
progressive. For audiences with more varied beliefs, his language hasn’t
always resonated. In
An Inconvenient Truth, Gore contrasted the “truth”
with claims made by “so-called skeptics.” In a 2010 op-ed, he contrasted
scientists with “climate deniers.”
This is binary bias in action. It presumes that the world is divided into
two sides: believers and nonbelievers. Only one side can be right, because
there is only one truth. I don’t blame Al Gore for taking that position; he
was presenting rigorous data and representing the consensus of the
scientific community. Because he was a recovering politician, seeing two
sides to an issue must have been second nature. But when the only available
options are black and white, it’s natural to slip into
a mentality of us versus
them and to focus on the sides over the science. For those on the fence,
when forced to choose a side, the emotional, political, and economic
pressures tilt in favor of disengaging or dismissing the problem.
To overcome binary bias, a good starting point is to become aware of
the range of perspectives across a given spectrum. Polls suggest that on
climate change, there are at least six camps of thought. Believers represent
more than half of Americans, but some are
concerned while others are
alarmed. The so-called nonbelievers actually range from cautious to
disengaged to doubtful to dismissive.
It’s especially important to distinguish skeptics from deniers. Skeptics
have a healthy scientific stance: They don’t believe everything they see,
hear, or read. They ask critical questions and update their thinking as they
gain access to new information. Deniers are in the dismissive camp, locked
in preacher, prosecutor, or politician mode: They don’t believe anything that
comes from the other side. They ignore or twist facts to support their
predetermined conclusions. As the Committee for
Skeptical Inquiry put it in
a plea to the media, skepticism is “foundational to the scientific method,”
whereas denial is “the
a priori rejection of ideas without objective
consideration.”
*
The complexity of this spectrum of beliefs is often missing from
coverage of climate change. Although no more than 10 percent of
Americans are dismissive of climate change, it’s these rare deniers who get
the most press. In an analysis of some hundred thousand media articles on
climate change between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate contrarians
received disproportionate coverage: they were featured 49 percent more
often than expert scientists.
As a result, people end up overestimating how
common denial is—which in turn makes them more hesitant to advocate for
policies that protect the environment. When the middle of the spectrum is
invisible, the majority’s will to act vanishes with it.
If other people aren’t
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