WSU researcher finds future-oriented women most likely to fight global warming
PULLMAN, Wash. – Politicians who discredit global warming risk losing a big chunk of the female vote. A new study found women who consider the long-term consequences of their actions are more likely to adopt a liberal political orientation and take consumer and political steps to reduce global warming.
Jeff Joireman, associate professor of marketing at Washington State University, demonstrated that “future-oriented” women are the voting bloc most strongly motivated to invest money, time and taxes toward reducing global warming.
Previous studies have shown that women and those with liberal viewpoints are more likely to act to protect the environment than men and conservatives. Joireman’s model helps explain why this occurs and is the first to document the combined influence of gender and concern for the future.
The findings were published this month online in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Joireman (YOUR-man) said belief in global warming is positively linked to outdoor temperatures, so in light of recent record-breaking heat, people may have climate change on their minds during next week’s midterm elections, especially future-oriented women.
It just so happens that September was the hottest on record in 135 years, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects 2014 will likely break the record for hottest year.
This year’s political contests are also heated, with environmental ads surging to record levels. More than 125,000 political spots cite energy, climate change and the environment – more than all other issues except health care and jobs – according to an analysis by Kantar Media/CMAG.
Social dilemma
Motivating the wider populace to engage and take action on global warming, however, is an ongoing challenge, said Joireman.
“Decisions that affect global warming pose a dilemma between what is good for individuals in the ‘here and now’ versus what is good for society and the environment ‘in the distant future,'” he said.
“Unfortunately, it can take several decades for the lay public and lawmakers to realize there is a problem that needs fixing. This is clearly the case with global warming, as the consequences of our current lifestyle are not likely to be fully realized for another 25 to 50 years.”
Live for today or tomorrow?
Hoping to clarify another piece of the global warming psyche, Joireman investigated how the time element contributes to people’s willingness to address climate change.
For the study, he focused on the personality trait called “consideration of future consequences.”
Those who score high on the trait scale tend to be very worried about the future impacts of their actions, while those with lower scores are more concerned with immediate consequences.
Joireman and his team polled 299 U.S. residents, with an age range from 18 to 75. Forty-eight percent of the respondents were female and 80 percent were Caucasian.
Women scored higher than men on liberal political orientation, environmental values, belief in global warming, and willingness to pay to reduce global warming when their concern with future consequences was high.
But, it wasn’t a simple gender difference. Women scored lower than men on liberal political orientation and willingness to pay when their concern with future consequences was low.
Future-oriented women step up
Joireman said a specific chain of influences makes future-oriented women more likely to take action. First, they are more politically liberal and liberals are more likely to value the environment, which makes them more likely to believe in global warming. All together, these effects lead to a willingness to pay more in goods, services and extra taxes to help mitigate climate change.
“Future-oriented women, for example, might be more willing to pay higher prices for fuel-efficient cars, alternative forms of transportation and energy efficient appliances. They might also eat less meat, all to help lower greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
Appealing
The question for environmental advocates now, said Joireman, is to “figure out how to motivate all people to engage in behaviors that reduce global warming. To be effective, we will likely need to tailor persuasive messages to appeal to the consequences people value.”
“If people are not worried about future consequences, we have to try to appeal to their more immediate concerns – like encouraging them to buy a fuel efficient vehicle so they can instantly start saving money on gas.”
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I find it fascinating that alarmists care about the future but skeptics don’t . I actually think it’s the other way round. What world are we leaving our children if we impoverish the current generation with meaningless policies.
Global warming alarmism is the greatest moral dilemma of our time
Most women tend to be liberal, and vote democrat. So any good conservative Republican is wasting his/her time and money trying to curry favor with them. The best thing to do is tell the truth (and I know that is a rare thing for a politician to do).
Should’ve never given them the vote. 😉
I jokingly tell my wife that all the time. But I’m only half joking – without the women’s vote, Obama would not have been elected once, let alone twice.
Here is a pdf containing a PowerPoint presentation by the authors of the paper:
http://www.cbe.wsu.edu/~jjoireman/Joireman%20and%20Liu%20-%20CFC%20and%20GW%20-%20WarsawTalk.pdf
o
What hogwash.
I love the alleged difference between “immediate consequences” and “future consequences” bit. It is strangely similar to the “temperatures are currently stable” vs “we’re all gonna fry – sometime in the future” dichotomy.
IOW, sceptics are, by definition, uncaring about future consequences in their paradigm. You know, irresponsible, selfish, grandchildren-killing, planet destroyers. Whereas, those who fret about something that might happen long after they are gone are the good guys.
The entire construct is a tautology.
Their thinking will change 100% when the lights go out.
Recall the film “Three Days of the Condor” in which the CIA spook (Cliff Robertson) says “What happens when we run out? They’re not going to care how we get it, they’re just gonna want us to get it. [food, water, electricity]” To which Robert Redford replies “Boy, have you found a home!” Moral: The ends never justify the means, apparently even when survival of modern civilization is at stake.
Liberal environmentalist Gaian hogwash.
“First, they are more politically liberal and liberals are more likely to value the environment”
So, conservatives that actually spend time in the environment fishing, hunting, camping, etc. and typically wish for their kids and grandkids to be able to enjoy those same activities don’t value the environment?
The other evening there was a programme on the BBC regarding the Polish guy who could not walk after a serious knife attack. A British scientist who had been researching a possible treatment for reversing damage to the spinal chord for thirty years collaborated with a Polish surgeon and used a start of the art surgery and treatment appear to have brought life back to the lower limbs.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29645760
The amount of research money is a pittance for this field which relies on charity.
Imagine if the funds wasted on punching at the shadows of catastrophic man made climate change had been used for good purposes?
I think that most people of what ever political hue or gender when presented with cold facts supported by evidence will make the right decision, except of course in politics and religion, and there’s the rub:-)
Women and closed minded Liberal progressives are more easily frightened and cAGW is a narrative of unsubstantiated fear, ergo herding/stampeding the fearful with cAGW is a nobrainer.
BTW I do no some open minded progressive thinkers, both Conservatives and Liberals, they are not easily cowed.
“Future-oriented” is defined to arrive at the required conclusion. Someone who is future-oriented in that they worry about whether closing cheap reliable power generators and loading the grid with expensive unreliable renewable energy will adversely affect their children and grandchildren are excluded from the definition.
There are two kinds of people in the world,
the progressives,
and those who understand reversion to the means.
Now that may not mean much, but then neither does this study.
The information gathered by the researchers seems pretty naive. From the paper:
Political orientation is the answer to a single self-assessed question.
Environmental “values” are determined from three airy-fairy feel-good statements which are uninformative on a practical level.
The “Belief in GW Index” is determined by the unscientific opinions on whether it seems warmer now then earlier in the respondent’s lives. Note that none of the statements ask whether the possible warming was human-caused nor whether (particularly in the case that the warming might have a substantial natural component) any action might be effective in mitigating the effects. Nowhere do the authors try to determine how knowledgeable the subjects might be about the GW topic.
Willingness to take action is measured solely by whether they would agree to spend some money. The “willingness” of accepting serious changes to one’s lifestyles as advocated by environmental activists does not enter into the equation.
Concern with future prospects is measured by a set of 14 questions which can be found at the link here.
Finally, the data are analyzed with SEM methodology of the type used in the Lewandowsky conspiracy paper fiasco. The results from the whole business do not seem to have any practical value which might be relevant to reality.
Funny. Most of my answers to those questions would have put me into “Future-oriented” category.
But I’m a guy. The CAGW “science” might be even better plant food than CO2. I will hardly be voting as he would like me to do.
“Future-oriented”? I’m a Christian and I take that seriously. Tough to be more “Future-oriented” than looking at Eternity.
Hey, Gunga Din — me, too (as you already knew, smile)!
Thus, although I may not get to meet any of the other wonderful WUWT bloggers, YOU I will meet someday.
And that’s nice to know.
#(:)) (still grateful for all your support over the months…)
I wonder about Greg…. how about it, Greg? Will I meet you someday for sure? (in heaven, I mean, lol)
I wonder how the responses would have changed if the asked;
“I would be willing to pay an extra $1,700.00 per family memeber in taxes to reduce global temperatures 0.003K”,
“I would pay an extra $15,000 dollars for an electric car”,
“I would pack my kids into a Smart Car instead of a SUV to take them to soccer practice”
“I would gladly allow the electric company to shut off my air conditioner in the summer or furnace in the winter any time they needed to to fight global warming”
It’s easy to agree to something nebulous, let’s make it reality based.
Sorry, but I am a future-thinking woman – thinking about the future my son will have to live in, and how on earth is he going to make a living if I’ve been busy undermining his ability by voting for the government to steadily take away anything he might hope to make to throw large amounts of other people’s money at problems that may not even exist and certainly couldn’t be adequately fixed by gobs of government money if they did?
These are the same people who just spent over a decade spending gobs of other people’s money building an agency to respond to domestic security threats, including biological ones, and they don’t even know how to handle a single deadly disease when it finally gets here after over six months of being a large scale problem elsewhere.
Isn’t it odd how a US liberal will be the first to call for equality yet also be the first to divide people into groups and then pit those groups against each other?
While claiming their group is superior.
It’s the natural order taken to its logical conclusion. Too many women and men seem blissfully unaware that fitness is not a species function. The minority which denigrates individual dignity and devalues human life is not their ally. It is grand promises of dissociation of risk which are the opiate of the masses and elites. Well, history repeats itself. It seems there is at least one known perpetual motion process.
Money, sex, and ego. It’s ironic that liberal-oriented women are also most likely to abort their children. Not exactly “future-focused”. They’re probably concerned about saving their “souls,” or something. The end is nigh! Donate, vote, and pray. Yeah, it’s a cult.
These are the same women who maintain a faith that evolution of a human life following conception is equivalent to evolution approaching a natural, accidental, or premeditated death, in order to rationalize an extreme “present-focus” on money, sex, ego, and power. I am more than a little skeptical of their intentions and motives. They will not even acknowledge that spontaneous conception is not an article of faith, but a fraudulent myth told by “future-focused” people choosing relief from the “burden” and personal responsibility.
Climate is not weather, but temperature even more so than politics is local. New England has had a gloriously mild summer, followed by a gloriously mild Autumn. So in this region at least, I do not know where this record-breaking heat is other than in the tortured, strangled, averaged, extrapolated temperature collections of various agencies which is beyond anyone of either gender to “feel”. The masses are being told that it is getting hotter and hotter, the reality in everyday lives is quite different.
Even in regions that may have had wamer than usual summers, has it been noticably so? I don’t think anyone keeps vivid memories of temperatures unless it is an extreme. About 20-25 years ago I remember a horribly hot summer that for where I live has not been matched since. I have no clue how the intervening 20-25 summers were temperature wise.
There is a quite disturbing social psychosis cultivated by political agendas and propaganda such as this study. A study as usual that is extremely poorly executed but unfortunately effective as a piece of propaganda with it’s ingrained assumption of climate doom.
Climate propaganda continually warns people it has been and will be getting hotter and hotter and then puts in their heads that if they do not want it to get worse than the hottest summer they could ever remember, they need to pay more taxes. Only social psychosis explains the idea that more taxes could possibly affect climate in any realistic, measureable or remotely significant way.
The “record breaking heat” reference is probably from that recent NOAA announcement from an isolated data set which conforms to no-one’s experience. It speaks to the doomsters’ desire to stampede people in the desired direction. On that topic, we’ve recently had an election here in New Zealand — the format here is to have one month of campaigning before the election (eat your hearts out USA). So this year at the outset the Left hijacked the campaign with hacked emails and painted the National party (i.e. Republicans-like) as unethical and so tried (with the full co-operation of the complicit MSM) to stampede the NZ public into voting left-wing. However, the NZ public completely ignored all of that and returned the National government with as good a margin as before. So the quote comes from another left-wing wet dreamer.
This is hardly a gender issue. Mr Pentti Linkola has supplied the strongest evidence so far on the mutual exclusivity of conserving the environment and protecting the civil liberties.
“Politicians who discredit global warming risk losing a big chunk of the female vote”
We’ll see if that’s true in about a week on election day.
Don’t know about all women, but there is no need to underestimate ladies. A wind electricity salesman’s argument was that wind electricity can be supplied from the grid separately and ordered exclusively for an extra charge. Wonderful, my 80-year old mum replied with her disarming demeanor, then may I have nuclear only please.
+10
This is the kind of “research” you get when science has turned into religion. Hard to read without getting sick.
Other studies have found that single women tend to look to big government to provide for them. Sorry, that’s a paraphrase and not an exact quote and no, I don’t have a reference. Other studies have shown that liberals in general believe global warming (meaning AGW, I presume) believe it’s a big problem that needs immediate attention.
In other words, nothing new to see here. Move on.
The outright lies in that article are rather startling even for the warmunist crowd. It will be interesting to see if the last man standing in theCAGW hoax will actually be embarrassed at the end.
So if the stories premise is that “Forward Looking Women” are most concerned about Global Warming, then would it be fair to say that “Backward Looking Males” are least concerned about Global Warming?
Progressive (Forward Looking) women vs Conservative (or Reactionary) men? 🙂
“To be effective, we will likely need to tailor persuasive messages to appeal to the consequences people value.”
Oh heck, I know how to do that – lie to them! It’s funny to see this coming from a marketing professor. Let’s look at the corollaries over the years:
‘New and improved’
– our latest computer models show
‘More dentists (doctors etc.) choose brand x over any other brand’
– 97% of climate scientists agree
‘According to most surveys customers prefer…’
– passed more peer review
I wonder if what is going on in this study is similar to what Briggs recently described in a recent blog post of his;
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=14336