climate change: beliefs and biases

I was checking out psychology-related tumblrs today as part of my recent strategy of justifying my social networking addiction by folding in more psychology-related sources (something I've been doing on twitter as well). I came across an interesting post on Scipsy attempting to explain why people continue to deny the reality of climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.

"Dr. Scipsy" writes that politicians and journalists deny climate change for self-serving reasons, and doesn't go into the dynamics of that. Without it being spelled out, the implication seems to be that such people are cynically espousing this viewpoint purely for personal gain, that they are not convinced of it themselves and thus that the mechanisms allowing them to do so are self-evident and don't need further explication. (It's possible I'm reading too much into this and Dr. S doesn't mean to say this, but it seems implied by the different way s/he treats people in power versus regular folks.) Let's just leave that aside for now.

Dr. S goes on to discuss how the psychology of risk perception, helped along by anti-intellectualism, influences regular people's lack of belief in climate change. The idea is that when people are frightened and confused by an idea, such as climate change, they turn to sources of information they see as safe and preferably, sources which they believe will discount a negative assessment of the situation. This is where anti-intellectualism comes in, insuring that scientists will not be seen as a safe source of information by many Americans.

I think there's some truth to this argument, but it also has some problems. First, it tends to efface the biases held by people who do accept the veracity of climate change claims. Everyone has vested interests in holding certain viewpoints and everyone trusts different sources of information, and the two are integrally related. You could speculate that conservative Americans would be less likely to believe in climate change and that they are more likely to hold anti-intellectual biases and/or to distrust scientists. Well, according to Gallup, conservatives are not only less likely to believe climate change is already beginning to occur (according to data from 2010), they are actually less likely to believe this than they were two years earlier. (The reasons for this shift seem even more mysterious than the overall question. Why would belief in climate change decrease during this period? It's not as if these ideas have been challenged in any meaningful way during the last two years. Though perhaps a challenge I find meaningless would actually be salient to someone with a different political bent. Perhaps a challenge like "Climategate"?)

What about the question of anti-intellectualism among conservatives? This may be a stereotype with a great deal of truth, or it may not. But this may be rather beside the point. Confirmatory bias seems to operate no matter what your political views. There are a multitude of examples in this Mother Jones piece, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science." Basically, new findings in neuroscience suggest that despite any biases we might hold toward science in general, we're a lot more likely to believe in findings that support our previously held views than those that do not, regardless of our overall regard for such sources.

Which has all sorts of implications for how we respond to many different sorts of claims. For example, the "birther" controversy. As Brian Montopoll writes for CBS News, the Birthers' critical reaction to the release of President Obama's birth certificate shows that "birtherism, in all its forms, is essentially an ideological movement seeking a concrete foundation - and when that foundation doesn't hold, birthers either chose a new one or simply ignore the cracks."

But this may be just a slightly more blatant example of the sort of confirmatory bias we all carry. We might relish in stories about fringe beliefs like Birtherism because they make us seem objective in comparison, but we all have our filters. There's lots more that could be said about this, but I'll leave it there for now. I'm sure I'll be talking about variations on these ideas further in future posts, as my lab is currently working on some related issues around biases and political beliefs. And probably due to its being an election year, it's a topic that's on a lot of people's minds right now.

what I'm doing here

I hate writing introductions, so as you might imagine, I haven't been looking forward to my first blog post. I much prefer the part where you've already got some momentum, when some context has built up. But you can't have a middle without a beginning, so I'm going to use this opportunity to explain in a bit more depth what I see as the purpose of this blog.

Years ago, when I was beginning my master's thesis in media studies, I started a blog where I promised to write at least a few lines every day that were in some way related to popular music, which was one of the central topics of my thesis. In retrospect, I probably started it more out of a desire to feel like I was doing something, anything, that might lead to progress on my thesis. I had an absentee advisor at the time and wasn't sure how to get started, so I just needed to do something. But in the end, some ideas I developed there and that eventual commenters shared with me did end up changing what my thesis looked like. 

I had this experience in the back of my mind as a beginning student in my new program, which is a very different discipline: counseling psychology. Publishing in this field is a very different prospect than it was in media studies, so much so that I am still in the process of getting a grasp on the sorts of publications that are possible. I think these differences might be related to the disparity between how engaged both disciplines seem to be in online communities. Media studies blogs seem to be everywhere I look, but psychology blogs with an academic perspective are (from what I've seen so far, at least) less common. I don't think there's any reason this needs to be the case, though. I may not be able to discuss in great detail some of the research projects I'm currently working on in my lab, but there is plenty to discuss nonetheless. It seems like every other day I stumble across an article worth commenting on or something else that gives me an idea for a future research project. If I made a concerted effort, who knows how many I might find. 

This is also a place for me to get in the habit of writing frequently. I learned a lot while writing my master's thesis, but sometimes I think my writing skills are atrophying a bit now that I am back into coursework and doing much more reading than I do writing. This sort of writing also seems to help me organize my thoughts and think of new ones, which is never a bad thing. 

So, yeah. That's the plan. Here goes nothin'.