Cook: How do you respond to people who don’t accept the science of climate change?
Attenborough : *long sigh*
Lewandowsky: One crucial question that society is confronting is how to deal with the expressions
of denial that are so common on the internet and on blogs, and the answer to that, I think,
is that it is absolutely essential to be driven by data, by research, by empirical findings
and to look at what the data in cognitive science and psychology, what they tell us
about the problem. One of the reasons why it’s very difficult to change the mind of
people who are committed already to rejecting the science—one of the reasons that’s
very difficult is because you’re challenging their world-views if you are trying to change
their belief about climate change.
Hamilton: In my experience, it's really hard to convert real believers on anything, that
you will just type yourself as an unreliable source if you contradict the things they really cherish.
Lewandowsky: people reject the science in the first place because it is incompatible
with their deeply held world-views. Most people who reject climate science do so because they
fear not for the planet but for the interference with the economy, with the free market.
Kerr: some people are not interested in either evidence or reason, it's just ideology. So
there's an ideological or personal psychological barrier there.
Sherwood: There’s also a lot of people that have already made up their mind as almost
part of their identity, that they’re not going to accept it, and those people you kind
of can’t do anything with.
Attenborough: It's very difficult if they won't take notice, if they won't believe the
figures, what can you say? It seems to me an extraordinarily offensive thing to do,
to say to a scientist "your figures are wrong."
Alexander: There are some people who, I think, the more you give them facts the more they
will hold onto the beliefs that they already had. So, in those cases, I'm not really sure
what benefit there is in having a conversation, because it's not actually a conversation.
Lewandowsky: Now if you then, as a researcher or communicator, present them with more evidence
that climate science is real, then chances are that the recipients of the message are
digging themselves deeper into their existing position and actually believe even more strongly
that that is not the case. We have the experimental data to show that in a lot of different circumstances.
It doesn’t just have to be climate science. It’s whenever people’s world-views are
at stake, then presenting them with corrective information can have a so-called “backfire
effect” of making them believe the mistaken information even more strongly.
Ecker: And if you have a belief that is really central to your identity, so if you have a
really strong belief, then you will defend it. You're defending your identity, who you
are. If someone comes along and challenges it, what happens is that you're not going
to be convinced by what they say because they're challenging your world-view. You're actually
more likely to become even more extreme in your belief.
Lewandowsky: So that is another reason why engagement with people who deny climate science
is inadvisable because you’re just strengthening and reaffirming their belief if you’re not
careful with your message.
Ecker: And also you need to accept the fact that there's people out there who will not
change their mind whatever evidence you give them, but also, consider the fact that that's
just a very small minority. Most people, you can talk to them and they might change their
mind if you present your case.
Lewandowsky: In order to do the one thing that matters, which is to mitigate climate
change—in order to do that, you don’t have to change the minds or opinions of five
percent of the population. It’s absolutely unnecessary, politically unnecessary. It is
a waste of resources to try and communicate or convince people who reject scientific evidence
because the reason they reject the scientific evidence is not because they’ve evaluated
the evidence rationally. It is because they are motivated to reject it by other variables
England: Max Planck came out and said look, you know you can't convince your opponents
of an idea, that it's true. Unfortunately you just need to teach the next generation
as they come through the system, how this physics works.
And they'll grow up understanding it, and that's cool.
Hamilton: In any survey or any election campaign, you know there's a huge group in the middle
that is not committed and that can be swayed in the—these are the independent voters,
the uncommitted voters that you hear so much about in the run-up to an election.
Donner: There's kind of like a climate change swing-voter, right? There's people in the
middle that, depending on the conditions, and those conditions might be a change in
temperature, but they might be other current events as well. Whatever else is going on
in the news. They may say 'oh, you know what, I am concerned' or 'I am worried about climate
change now' whereas the next year they may not be. We call them "climate change swing-voters"
but as far as I understand there are other papers that have done analyses like this and
have found that people that are sort of in the independent part of the political spectrum,
so neither Left nor Right, those are the ones whose opinions are most likely to change with
temperature.
Ecker: So focus your attempts to convey your message on the majority of people who are
willing to engage in conversation.
Trenberth: When I try to deal with the public in general, I'm really trying to reach, I
suppose what you might call the large uniformed masses. Maybe that's a derogatory term, but
you know, many people are just not very well informed about climate change. The small percentage
of the deniers, I'm not going to convince them.
Lewandowsky: It is important to talk to the other 90 percent of people who are not denying
that the climate is changing, and it is important for them to know, first of all, that they’re
in the vast majority themselves. They also have to know that there is a vast consensus among
scientists because it turns out that telling people about the consensus makes them more
aware of the science and it makes them more accepting of the science.
