Understanding Climate Denial, Continued: Motivated Reasoning

authordefault
on

In a recent post, I sought to explain, from a motivational standpoint, why it is that climate deniers can reject the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing the Earth to warm. We already have reason to think their motivations are not scientific, e.g., not driven by a quest to understand the truth about the atmosphere. Rather, climate denial seems closely linked to conservative and libertarian politicsโ€”the sense that the free market simply couldnโ€™t have made such a mess of things; and the deep distrust of large scale government solutions that involve intervening in theย economy.

We also know that the selective attention to biased information sources plays an important role. ย For instance, watching Fox News correlates closely with being less trusting of climate scientists, and with being misinformed about whether scientist think the Earth isย warming.

But thereโ€™s another key factor.ย And it happens to be the subject of a major feature story of mine that just came out in Mother Jones magazine, entitled โ€œThe Science of Why We Donโ€™t Believe Science.โ€ Here, I discuss a phenomenon referred to in the political psychology literature as โ€œmotivatedย reasoningโ€:

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on aย key insight of modern neuroscienceย (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call โ€œaffectโ€). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of millisecondsโ€”fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before weโ€™re aware of it. That shouldnโ€™t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. Itโ€™s a โ€œbasic human survival skill,โ€ explains political scientistย Arthur Lupiaย of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to dataย itself.

Weโ€™re not driven only by emotions, of courseโ€”we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slowerโ€”and even then, it doesnโ€™t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking thatโ€™s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great dealย about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creationโ€”a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientistย Charles Taberย of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new informationโ€”and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. โ€œThey retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,โ€ says Taber, โ€œand that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what theyโ€™reย hearing.โ€

In other words, when we think weโ€™re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologistย Jonathan Haidt: We may think weโ€™re being scientists, butย weโ€™re actually being lawyersย (PDF). Our โ€œreasoningโ€ is a means to a predetermined endโ€”winning our โ€œcaseโ€โ€”and is shot through with biases. They include โ€œconfirmation bias,โ€ in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and โ€œdisconfirmation bias,โ€ in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we findย uncongenial.

Yes, thatโ€™s right: The mental processes that lead to climate denial, and to cleverly arguing back against any new study that comes out supporting the scientific consensus, may be largely automatic and rooted in subconscious emotional responses, which in turn call to mind, from memory, a battery of standard argumentsโ€”and which also motivate new ones. The emotions would be generated by oneโ€™s strong political perspectiveโ€”and, notably, intelligence is notย  necessarily any protection against motivated reasoning. Quite theย contrary:

Republicans who think they understand the global warming issue best are least concerned about it; and among Republicans and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the issue doesnโ€™t increase oneโ€™s concern about it. Whatโ€™s going on here? Well, according to Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook, one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues. โ€œPeople who have a dislike of some policyโ€”for example, abortionโ€”if theyโ€™re unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand,โ€ says Lodge. โ€œBut if theyโ€™re sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counterarguments.โ€ These individuals are just as emotionally driven and biased as the rest of us, but theyโ€™re able to generate more and better reasons to explain why theyโ€™re rightโ€”and so their minds become harder to change.ย 

Clearly this applies to the rejection of climate scienceโ€”but motivated reasoning can occur on any topic where there are strong beliefs and motivations, and even (or perhaps especially) in oneโ€™s personal relationships. No one is immune. In the article, I further use motivated reasoning to help explain diverse phenomena ranging from vaccine denial to the persistence of the belief that Iraq had weapons of massย destruction.

But if this is really whatโ€™s going onโ€”climate change is an emotional issue, e.g., highly politicized, and thatโ€™s driving the generation of skeptic argumentsโ€”then it follows that refuting skeptics scientifically might not always work. Rather, we may need to depolarize the issue, come up with solutions that they can acceptโ€”and get everybody to calmย down.

Thereโ€™s much more about motivated reasoning, and the implications, at Mother Jones. From now on, because I think thereโ€™s real explanatory power here, Iโ€™ll be including references to motivated reasoning in much that I write about climate changeย denial.

Related Posts

on

UCP pledges to abandon the provinceโ€™s net zero targets, and remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant.

UCP pledges to abandon the provinceโ€™s net zero targets, and remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant.
on

Speaking at the UCP annual general meeting, the Premier took shots at the federal government and vowed not to โ€œbudge an inch.โ€

Speaking at the UCP annual general meeting, the Premier took shots at the federal government and vowed not to โ€œbudge an inch.โ€
on

One candidate has sworn off taking money from regulated companies

One candidate has sworn off taking money from regulated companies
on

Findings by InfluenceMap highlight mismatch between communication agencies' climate pledges, and their work on behalf of major polluters.

Findings by InfluenceMap highlight mismatch between communication agencies' climate pledges, and their work on behalf of major polluters.