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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study by Daniel A. Chapman and Brian Lickel, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, claims that skeptics are less likely to contribute to a relief appeal for a natural disaster, if the appeal blames the disaster on climate change.
The abstract of the study;
This research examined whether framing a natural disaster as the product of climate change impacts attitudes toward disaster victims and humanitarian relief. Participants (n = 211) read an article about a famine caused by severe droughts, with one condition attributing the droughts to climate change and the other condition made no mention of climate change. All participants then responded to measures of justifications for or against providing aid, attitudes toward the possibility of donating, and climate change beliefs. As predicted, those high in climate change skepticism reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change. Additional moderated mediation analyses showed there was an indirect effect of climate change framing on attitudes toward donating through donation justifications.
Read more: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/06/15/1948550615590448.abstract
It seems obvious to me why this is happening. Charity is a leap of faith – you give, because you want to help, and because you believe the person asking for your help is credible. Asking a skeptic to help victims of climate change, is a bit like asking someone to help victims of the tooth fairy. It undermines the credibility of your appeal.
I bet that a solicitation from a KKK affiliated group for inner city education would have the same sort of problems.
Small sample size but a believable result.
Everyone knows that some of the money given to a charity will be spent on trying to prevent the next such disaster. That’s just wise.
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a woman to fish and she gets a bicycle, or something.
If you think they’ve got the cause wrong you’d be wasting your cash giving to that organisation.
There are others who attribute the impact of disasters to poverty and poor infrastructure. They may be more appealing.
“As predicted, those high in climate change skepticism reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change.”
Nice the way they phrased this. For myself, it isn’t a case of not wanting to “help” victims, it’s because I would never trust an organization attributing the disaster to climate change. There are many other organizations who use donations where intended and provide actual help to those in need, such as Salvation Army, without wasting donations on political matters and “administration costs”.
Stevan…very well stated
This seems like a way to label skeptics as greedy, people hating monsters. Nothing more than another attempt to smear and deflect, but also project your faults on your opponent. The Democrats are all the time telling us the rich need to give more and stop being so greedy, but when you investigate you find out that they give nothing to charity, literally. The same principle. The “charities” (used loosely) that promote AGW are probably pocketing most of the money for their selves, but a study like this deflects and calls those who don’t believe in CAGW greedy and selfish. The reality is the AGW believing charity is the greedy and selfish one.
Hu ? “there was an indirect effect of climate change framing on attitudes toward donating through donation justifications.” ?
thanks, Captain Obvious …
“help me, my house was blown up by climate change” pretty much sounds like “help me, my house was blown up by the giant spaghetti monster ” to a skeptic ear. I may help a lunatic, but surely not so easily.
“As predicted, justifications for helping or not the victims depended on whether the disaster was attributed to climate change when subjects had strong opinion on the issue.” sounds like a smear of skeptics. useless.
And shocking.
Definitely not: no, non, nyet, never The problem with giving is the subsequent tsunami of pleading for more, and more and more. Your name get passed around in a perpetual loop.
Can anyone translate that bit for me?
Moderated Mediation Analysis is a mathematically rigorous way to torture confessions from otherwise useless data. I believe there is an SPSS module that uses it. I’m not really in a position to say whether these researchers misapplied the method or not.
US Government Grant Application Request: Develop a study using any science available to make climate skeptics look bad. Funding will be generous. Guaranteed to pass peer review. Future career opportunities available.
I will be the first to arrive to help after a flood or tornado. However, when a person sues for whiplash, and they come to court with a neck brace and in a wheel chair, but they run out of court with bucks in hand? How can I have sympathy for that? The Global Warming sympathy plea is ambulance chasers on a larger scale. When a river floods? How stupid is it to build on a flood plain? When beach-front property gets storm surge? That’s what happens on the beach. Those people should have insurance, or in lieu of an insurance company that is gullible enough to insure high-risk areas, they should have a personal risk program that can cover costs. Those are business decisions, and I have neutral sympathy for other people’s business decisions, and I have no sympathy for ambulance chasers.
Well Duh! If a charity makes an appeal for donations for a disaster because of climate change then I’m going to assume that the charity is primarily a money siphoning scheme and not a particularly good charity. If I feel that disaster needs funding I’ll find a charity with a good through for money versus overhead and go that route but appeal for money based on climate change and I’ll cross you off the list of valid charities I’ll donate to.
Assuming that we can have knowledge of the charity and how much of its funds go to helping people then the given marketing points to part people with their wallets is largely meaningless. But if a fund is helping starving people that have lost their homes, then it hardly matters as to the what or why of it. They’re starving and homeless. But if a fund is helping victims of global warming, then I’d be inclined to call shenanigans on the charity if they weren’t providing solar powered cell-phone chargers and Schwinn powered local electrical generation devices. As otherwise, the people in need of aid will be burning all the local flora to stay warm.
It is easy to research charities in this day and age of the internet. But a solid indicator that the charity is not a good place to give money to help people is them claiming because global warming.
Ok, let’s look at the whole picture of charitable contributions. Numerous polls show that conservatives (in the US) contribute FAR more to charities than Progressives. Other polls indicate that a skeptic is more likely to identify as being a conservative, and a man-made global warmer, a Progressive.
The clear and logical conclusion is that skeptics are more likely to contribute to charities than man-made global warmers.
Notice that this study made no effort to compare the actual contributions of skeptics and believers. Otherwise, the result may very well have been, “Skeptics give less to disasters than they otherwise would if climate change is blamed, but still give more than non-skeptics.”
‘As predicted, those high in climate change skepticism reported’
case A: as predicted
we release a new paper
case B: not as predicted
doughnuts for everyone
but no new paper
case B2 not as predicted anyway
97 percent confidence +
3 percent peer review
new paper + doughnuts for everyone.
post realistic science.
Charity is a leap of faith – you give, because you want to help, and because you believe the person asking for your help is credible.
In addition to mentioning Global Warming as a hindrance to donations, the study should have included reference to the United Nations or any of the major Eco-Terrorist groups(Greenpeace, EDF, WWF etc.).
Catholic Charities is no longer a possibility for me. After the Pontiff’s Peoples Army has their workshops, speeches and exorcisms at the Star Studded Paris IPCC Gala I imagine more people will be likewise crossing Catholic Charities from their list.
The Red Cross is probably the only charity I would consider at this point and I’m not even sure about that.
While I can still comfortably ask the rhetorical question about what a bear does in the woods, I am no longer comfortable asking that other question about the Pope and his religious affiliation.
Best to give locally–to groups where you can get to know the people and observe how they work. Red Cross is a disaster, based on how much they squandered in Haiti:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/04/the-red-cross-had-500-million-in-haitian-relief-money-and-it-built-just-6-houses/
Of course they’ve pushed back on that story:
http://www.redcross.org/news/press-release/13-Facts-about-the-Red-Cross-Response-in-Haiti
It seems as if they’ve been overwhelmed with too much money to spend effectively.
Yep, non-profit ain’t what it is suppose to be.
After the revelations about how much of the aid given to the Red Cross for the relief effort in Haiti actually got to Haiti, any of my donations to the Red Cross with be specific to our local chapter.
I have given to the US organization National Center for Science Education in the past. No more, now that they’ve included AGW in their mandate. Idiots. They added Ben “Dark Alley” Santer to their Board to assist them with their propagandizing. They tried to add Peter “The Thief and Fraud” Gleick in 2012, but saw the light after his confession about his criminal behavior regarding the Heartland Institute (why isn’t he in jail?). Wish NCSE had stuck to fighting the public funding of teaching irrational beliefs (creationism) instead of encouraging it (AGW).
I’m waiting for the study that shows liberals and democrats donate less money to military veterans.
Got an email today from CatholicVote that tries to gin up support for the upcoming release of the Pope’s climate change encyclical. Sent it back requesting I be crossed off their list. Not only do I not give to charities that mention global warming, I refuse to have anything to do with organizations that support the man made global warming hoax.
“Skeptics reject charity appeals which blame disasters on climate change.”
Now that’s a good idea!! Some people might learn – there are more and more Skeptics
Didn´t just recently published that the US Federal government stated that the amount of relief funds will depend on the adoption of CAGW from a particular state?. English is not my mother language, but relief conditioned to political alignment is not blackmailing?
Blackmail is what governments do. a tax policy that taxes one set of behaviors more than another is likewise blackmail, but every government on Earth does this.
Stop linking natural disaster fund drives to the hoax, or stop whining when people use their good sense to avoid charities that mix human misery with propaganda.
If the charities are just looking for money from the Grubber Stupid, I guess it is not a problem.
Anyone remember the save the tigers television commercial? When it first came out the tigers were endangered by poachers and climate change. Shortly after they dropped the climate change.
Whether the appeal is sincere/honest or not, by tying it to “climate change” it leaves a taste of fraud by association.
Another ‘Lew paper ‘ style Pop-psychology to attempt to paint CAGW sceptics has not merely ‘wrong’ but ‘mad or bad’ has well.
But there is some basis in truth hear, frankly a charity that can spend thousands flying a journalist around the world to write poor BS articles about ‘climate doom’ , which has little to do with its claimed central mission, and yes I am talking Oxfam, is not one that really needs the money.
So my cash is likley to go elsewhere.
Voting with your pocketbook is the most effective tool for skeptics.
Don’t buy that can of Coke if it has a polar bear on it. etc. GK
“Skeptics are less likely to contribute to a relief appeal for a natural disaster, if the appeal blames the disaster on climate change”.
Might I propose that this is perfectly rational behaviour.
I will not donate money to anyone who cannot correctly identify the causes of a crisis.
If a person cannot correctly identify the causes of a problem then they are very unlikely to be able to identify the most reasonable solution. If they cannot identify the best solutions then the money donated is likely to be wasted on mitigating the effect of a falsely imagined cause, whilst the real cause remains unaddressed.
Hence such a donation is likely to be wasted.
But, maybe it’s even simpler than that.
The simpler explanation is that; people are reluctant to give their money to morons.