Read Don't Even Think About It Online
Authors: George Marshall
Don't Even Think About It (4 page)
This admirable willingness to challenge things makes them feel somewhat superior to other people. They said that the reason people believe in global warming is that they aren’t logically minded and are “just not educated properly at school anymore.”
Like climate scientists, or environmentalists, these Tea Partiers stress the overwhelming importance of information. The problem is that it is so hard to get the right information—meaning they have to get it from people who share their values: “My favorite radio show host, Dave Champion, always says, ‘The government lies. It lies all the time, and it lies even when the truth would serve it better.’” So, all the conventional providers of information are corrupt and suspect, and, they say, scientists know all too well that “if you can get the population scared to death, they will be willing to write a check for their research.”
Passion
is a word they use frequently: “The passion is not that we cover our ears with our hands and don’t want to hear the facts. The passion is we don’t want to be controlled.” They are especially passionate about their independence. One man said, “I’m not with the environmentalists. I’m not with the oil companies. I did not come to take sides; I came to
take over
!” Everyone loved this, and the whole room erupted into laughter, claps, and cheers.
It is easy to focus on differences, and certainly rural Texan Tea Partiers are quite unlike urban liberal environmentalists. But the real surprise for me was to discover that being with them felt entirely familiar. They have exactly the same boisterous, opinionated, autodidactic, and tribal spirit as the grassroots environmental campaigners I have worked with in campaigns to save forests, stop open-pit coal mining, block new superstores, and, yes, demand action on climate change.
And they have plenty in common with environmental activists in their political instincts. They are outsiders driven by their values, defensive of their rights, and deeply distrustful of government and corporations: ExxonMobil and Monsanto both came up for attack in our conversation. Indeed, strange alliances had already been built around the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, which is opposed by environmentalists for its contribution to the carbon economy and by the Texan Tea Partiers for its use of eminent domain to seize land from property owners.
While the Tea Partiers had lots of questions, I left with just one of my own: What had led them to reject the one issue that, above all others, truly threatens the things that are most important to them: family, property, freedom, their beloved country, and God’s creation—one, what is more, that has reached this critical stage because of the thing they hate the most: government and corporate self-interest?
Is it because climate change feels too far away? Perhaps, though the Tea Partiers are quite prepared to agitate about other complex international issues that catch their fancy. Is it because they feel powerless to do anything about it? Probably not, as they seem to thrive under conditions of powerlessness. Is it because it is depressing and frightening? Hardly: The entire Tea Party movement is built on fear and the warnings of disaster.
Is it because it is scientific and technical? No, these are people who willingly seek out information. Is it because climate change is contested and uncertain? Absolutely not: To be honest, the Tea Partiers appear to be entirely capable of believing any number of uncertain things on very limited evidence.
The answer must lie elsewhere—not with the issue itself but with the way it has been told. It must be something about the way the story of climate change has been constructed and communicated, the people who tell it, and how it has attached itself to their values.
5
How Science Becomes Infected with Social Meaning
Professor Dan Kahan, the leading
light of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project, is an expert on how conflicting cultural values influence decision making. So when I notice that a garish plastic figurine of Gene Simmons from the 1980s übercamp rock band Kiss has taken pride of place on the mantelpiece of his sober Yale Law School study, I ask him if this is some ironic academic joke—maybe a comment on the disjuncture between Simmons’s support for George Bush and his anti-authoritarian stage persona? “Nah,” Kahan says, “I just like him . . . because he
rocks
!”
This is how Kahan speaks—at very high speed, in a hyperintelligent soup of cognitive jargon and hip slang. Clearly he is not someone who fears challenging conventions or crossing cultural boundaries.
For Kahan, the defining quality of climate change is not any lack of overall concern—he says there is plenty of that. Nor does he agree with the opinion of many activists that the key influence on attitudes is the politicization of the media coverage. “Face it,” he says, “even if it does get mentioned on MSNBC or Fox News, ten times more people will always be watching funny animals.”
Kahan is a cultural omnivore and is intrigued by funny animal videos. He urges me to watch “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” on YouTube because “it’s even more bad-ass than Gene Simmons.” More than sixty-five million people have watched that honey badger video. Over on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change channel, the climate scientists have a hard time reaching an audience numbering in the four digits with their decidedly un-crazy-ass slideshows.
For Kahan, the reason why people do not accept climate change is nothing to do with the information—it is the cultural coding that it contains. He argues that people obtain their information through the people they trust, or, beyond that, from the parts of the wider media that speak to their worldview and values. Most of the time, this is a highly effective shortcut and works fine, unless, in Kahan’s words, the information becomes “contaminated” with additional social meaning and becomes a marker of group identity.
Kahan cites gun control as a case in point. Polls in West Virginia show that 65 percent of people want more gun control but, he says, you would be a fool to run for election in that state campaigning for gun control. “What you don’t know—and no poll has told you—is that
85 percent
of people in West Virginia know that you can’t
trust
politicians who say that they want gun control.”
Attitudes on climate change, he argues, have become a social cue like gun control: a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us. Just because polling shows a high level of concern about the issue does not mean that there is an equally high level of support for the people who promote it.
Kahan’s extensive work on understanding people’s resistance to vaccination forms a direct analogue for how they form their opinion on climate change. There are few issues in which the science has become so contaminated so rapidly. In Britain a single research paper in 1998 arguing that the combined mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism in children was accepted as proof by one-quarter of the public, and immunization rates plummeted. Scientific data was soon abandoned in the dirty public battle that contrasted the cold, mechanistic approach of the scientists with the raw emotional appeal of the parents convinced that their children had changed immediately after their immunization shot. Fifty percent of people took the presence of a media-generated debate as evidence that the science was in doubt.
In the United States, there was a similar disaster when the state of Virginia decided that the package of compulsory vaccinations for entry into middle school should include one against human papilloma virus, a very common sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer.
So, you have the government knocking at the door of a conservative Christian community, saying, according to Kahan, “You know your twelve-year-old daughter? Well, she’s going to be having
sex
in the next year and getting a venereal disease, so we’re going to give her a shot. And if you don’t like that, she can’t come to school.” This was a toxic brew of government interference, moral challenge, and offensiveness.
The lessons for climate change are clear. First, rational scientific data can lose against a compelling emotional story that speaks to people’s core values. As I discuss later in the book, these cultural meanings become deeply attached and therefore cannot be removed by applying more scientific argument.
Second, communications from people’s family, friends, and those they regard as being like themselves (their peers) can have far more influence on their views than the warnings of experts’.
Third, attitudes toward climate change fit into a larger matrix of values, politics, and lifestyles. Thus, as Kahan, Leiserowitz, and others at Yale argue, there are identifiable “interpretive communities”: people who believe or disbelieve in climate change—and one can predict with some accuracy who they are, how they live, who they trust, and where they receive their information. Over the past ten years, detailed profiles have emerged.
Homo credens
(the convinced) are most likely to be middle-age, college-educated liberal Democrats. Women are more likely to be believers, which is consistent with the observation that women tend to be responsive to other health, safety, financial, and ethical risks.
Homo negator
(the unconvinced) are almost always strongly conservative in politics—very few are not—and tend to be from the more affluent and powerful social groups. They are very likely to be men and may display a low level of risk perception in other areas. This is a familiar group to risk researchers, who have named the “white man effect” after the danger that men in this group can seriously distort their social research.
Putting it together, one could predict that middle-age male motorbike riders are not well disposed to believe in climate change even before reading a Canadian survey that found that, indeed, two-thirds of them did not accept climate change.
Many other studies have identified further attitudinal subgroups (one study names them the Cautious, the Doubtful, the Alarmed, and the Disengaged) each with their own sociopolitical demographic and distinct values.
The fact that attitudes to climate change can be predicted by such specific cultural characteristics is further evidence for Kahan’s argument that the science has become polluted with social meaning. Understanding how attitudes to climate change are acquired and held—and how they might be changed—therefore requires understanding how people’s social identity comes to have such an extraordinary hold over their behaviors and views.
6
How We Follow the People Around Us
In the early hours of
the morning of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was assaulted and then stabbed repeatedly in a densely populated residential area of Queens, New York. Thirty-eight people (one of them ironically named Joseph Fink) said they had heard her screams and done nothing to intervene. One man lamely shouted, “Let that girl alone,” out of his window before going back to bed. Another pulled a chair up to the window and turned out the light to better see what was happening. No one thought to call the police until it was too late.
Rather than being a sad testament of a broken society—as the newspapers of the day suggested—this lack of response actually revealed the strength of social conformity. People read the social cues. They saw that no one else was taking any action and decided that it was in their best interest to keep out of a potentially dangerous situation. Knowing that others had heard the cries, they diffused responsibility, assuming, quite wrongly, as it turned out, that someone else had called the police.
The tragic Genovese incident launched a rich and still expanding body of research into the importance of social cues in defining what issues people respond to and what ones they ignore. It is a fascinating feature of this
bystander effect
—as it was subsequently named—that the more people we assume know about a problem, the more likely we are to ignore our own judgment and watch the behavior of others to identify an appropriate response.
A string of experiments confirmed the power of the bystander effect. In one particularly entertaining experiment, an actor faked having a seizure over the laboratory intercom. The last words heard from him were “I could really—er—use some help, so if somebody would—er—give me a little h-help uh er er . . . I’m gonna die,” followed by a choking noise and silence. Of fifteen participants in the experiment, six never got out of their booths, and five others only came out well after the “seizure victim” apparently choked.
Of course, you can only run these kinds of experiments for a few years before your subjects start to get wise to the trick, especially if they are psychology students. Years later, when a subject in a psychology experiment had a real epileptic fit, the other participants were convinced that it was being faked for the experiment and refused to get off their chairs.
Climate change is a global problem that requires a collective response and so is especially prone to this bystander effect. When we become aware of the issue, we scan the people around us for social cues to guide our own response: looking for evidence of what they do, what they say, and, conversely, what they do
not
do and
do
not
say. These cues can also be codified into rules that define the behaviors that are expected or are inappropriate—the social norm. If we see that other people are alarmed or taking action, we may follow them. If they are indifferent or inactive, we will follow that cue too.
