From DUKE UNIVERSITY and the department of Mannian screaming and insults, comes this attempt to yet again, find the perfect message to sway climate skeptics.
Messages that conflict with audience’s partisan identity fail, exacerbate opposition
DURHAM, N.C. — Political advocates who support action on climate change have long sought “the perfect message” for swaying skeptics. If the issue can be framed correctly, they believe, the battle can be won.
A new Duke University study suggests it may be more complicated than that.
“Because climate change has become polarized along party lines, it’s no longer just an issue of finding ‘the right framing’ to convey relevant facts,” said study author Jack Zhou, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in environmental politics next month from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “It has become a matter of political identity, particularly the political party we feel closest to.”
Even efforts to frame climate change around seemingly win-win issues such as economic growth, national security or poverty alleviation are likely to backfire, Zhou’s study finds, if the communication conflicts with the partisan identity of the targeted audience.
“These efforts don’t just fail in terms of being unconvincing,” he said. “In most cases, they actually trigger a significant negative effect — or backfire — that polarizes the audience even further.”
Zhou published his peer-reviewed study this month in the journal Environmental Politics.
In a 2014 survey experiment, Zhou asked more than 470 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to read one of four randomly assigned messages that framed climate change as an issue society needs to deal with and is worth caring about.
One message framed climate change as an economic issue; one as a national security issue; one as a moral justice issue; and one as a natural disaster issue. The first two messages were written to tap into Republican identity; the last two targeted Democratic identity. To further test the power of partisanship, the four messages were then randomly attributed to one of two sources: a fictional Republican congressman or a fictional Democratic one.
The hypothesis, going in, was that Republicans would be more open to an in-party message from an in-party source and least receptive to on out-party message from an out-party source. Instead, Zhou found that regardless of the source, all eight vignettes backfired when compared to the control group, who were asked to simply think about climate change as a political issue.
The study also showed that Republican respondents, after exposure to framing, became more opposed to governmental action on climate change and less willing to take personal action on the issue.
“When asked to read information that clashed with their partisan identities, respondents reacted with motivated skepticism,” he said. “Not only was there greater opposition after reading the framed messages, there was also less attitudinal ambivalence. This means that people dug in and became more sure of their negative opinions.”
These backfire effects doubled or tripled in size among individuals who reported a high personal interest in politics, which functions as a measure of intensity of political identity. These individuals make up roughly one-third of the respondents in the study and one-third of all U.S. Republicans.
“I want to be clear: This reaction is not a matter of intelligence or education. It’s not totally irrational. It’s just a natural reaction — people want to justify and defend their identities,” Zhou stressed. “I would expect if I asked Democrats to read framed messages about how climate change is a hoax, I would also see strong backfire effects.”
The take-away message for climate communicators, he said, is that to avoid backfire, they need to take care to target their audience’s values and understand how polarization affects their evolving sensitivities and identities.
“I’m not saying it’s totally impossible to frame climate change across party lines but it might take more time and resources than advocates imagine, and a much greater degree of care,” Zhou said. “Communication that doesn’t work perfectly — if such a thing even exists — could polarize these audiences further from where you want them to be.”
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Funding for the study came from the Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics.
CITATION: “Boomerangs Versus Javelins: How Polarization Constrains Communication on Climate Change,” Jack Zhou. Environmental Politics, April 19, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2016.1166602
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Wow. Over 470 Republicans. Nice work, Duke. Your sacrifice for science is … paltry. The fact that there would be any public announcement of such a study reduces Duke’s esteem, and I’m truly glad my degrees are not from there.
The truth: We have spent a lot of time and money to make computer programs that model the earth’s climate and extrapolate it a hundred years into the future, Even though none of these programs agree with observations over the past two decades, it is postulated that we must change our financial, social and political values because if somehow we are right after all, the consequences for your grandchildren will be dire.
We often hear about the danger of unrepresented changes in our geophysical system. Where are the researchers warning us of unprecedented changes in our values?
But — but — Their really might be aliens influencing our thoughts so just as a precaution should we not all wear tin foil helmets? — Eugene WR Gallun
I am not sure how the authors missed what the study really shows; no matter how well crap is framed, it is still crap.
“its still crap” or something else…
http://lowres.cartoonstock.com/business-commerce-lemonade_stand-truth_in_advertising-sales-poor_marketing-poor_advertising-mban1504_low.jpg
It’s simple human psychology. You can only lie to people and get away with it for so long before the lies fail, and backfire. Turns out people don’t like being lied to. Go figure.
Putting John Holdren on TV at the WH with an explanation of extreme cold from global warming went much further down the road of backfire than its media handlers expected. So it’s a combination of media saturation mixed with extreme absurdities like Holdren that turn the tide against them. Some political campaigns are also lost that way by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (and over confidence in machine politics).
So they are looking for the “perfect” means of convincing people that CAGW is real. The one means by which CAGW advocates have successfully sold their political message of CAGW is through the giveaway of other peoples money. The author of this study should examine how his own financial security is predicated on accepting the CAGW agenda. He should study the diverse degrees of skepticism in government funded scientists, vs. independent and retired scientists.
He would arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the “perfect” way to convince people of CAGW is to pay them to believe!
It was difficult for me to get past the credentials…”will graduate with a Ph.D. in environmental politics next month from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.”. So the course work for “environmental politics” is a balanced view of the issues associated with this topic? Given the climate change advocacy tone of Mr. Zhou’s comments leads me to believe otherwise.
We in the UK have a parallel situation going on – to wit: a referendum on June 23rd asking us if we should leave the EU (European Union), – or remain in it.
Now, the UK government is firmly in the ‘Remain’ camp – and have been battering us with ‘facts’ (i.e. predictions) that, not only will we be worse off if we leave the EU – but our voice will be diminished on the world stage (so far they’ve stopped short of predicting plagues of locusts).
So – they bring in the Big Guns – in the shape of Barak Obama, who not only TOLD us to vote to stay in the EU, but THREATENED us that, in terms of any trade agreements if we leave, we would be ‘At the back of the queue’.
Now, ‘back of the queue’ is a British expression…. If he was speaking ‘Mercan’ – he would have said we would be ‘At the end of the line’…
Cue cynical reaction that he had been told what to say by the UK government…
Result – no change whatsoever in voter intentions…
Did he promise you that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor”?
Or that your people were too stupid to do the right thing so the government must lie to them?
That you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it?
That the video caused the “spontaneous demonstration” in Benghazi?
You might want to watch out for liars like President Obama and Company.
Is the polling in on that? My prediction when he announced his attention to interfere in UK politics was that he would drive a large portion of the undecided into the Brexit camp. When I lived there the attitude of most of my British neighbors would of been something along the lines of: “Who’s this bleeding wanker to tell me what to do!” or something even less polite. (That may be too vulgar for this forum and is so feel free to snip away.)
David wrote: “So – they bring in the Big Guns – in the shape of Barak Obama, who not only TOLD us to vote to stay in the EU, but THREATENED us that, in terms of any trade agreements if we leave, we would be ‘At the back of the queue’.
Now, ‘back of the queue’ is a British expression…. If he was speaking ‘Mercan’ – he would have said we would be ‘At the end of the line’…”
I gather you don’t like being lectured to by the President of the United States. We don’t either! 🙂
Here you have the smartest guy in the room, Obama, giving you his very best advice, and he is unappreciated. I love it! The British see through him, too!
Don’t worry, there will be a new U.S.president on Jan. 20, 2017.
Trump loves Great Britain. Trump wll put Great Britain at the head of the line.
Perhaps the study could be better framed as a study on preconditioning toward gullibility? We will need the other half of the sample to prove the theory however…..
Another way of looking at this is that Republicans have gotten used to recognizing left wing propaganda, and react negatively whenever they see it.
That also means more cognizant.
Here is a good example of “backfire” at UC Davis today. It makes you wonder how many multiples of this type budget for media manipulation consultants is used in the Climate Con. I’ll guess 1,000 times larger.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/04/28/uc-davis-chancellor-placed-on-leave-over-series-missteps.html
Isn’t there a fable about a boy crying “wolf.” Something about a town responding to a boy crying wolf a few times when there was no wolf with the result that when the boy cried wolf when there actually was one, no one believed him and no one came to his rescue. With two exceptions, the CAGW crowd is a lot like the boy. One: The boy cried wolf only a few times; whereas the CAGW crowd has cried wolf many times. Two, in the fable, the wolf eventually existed.
According to the Cardassians, the moral of that story is to never tell the same lie twice.
One young liberal tried to convince me that the moral of this story was that when someone tells you something, you must always believe them.
Since the towns people did not believe the boy, and he got eaten.
1) Starts off with assumption that CAGW is correct.
2) Does half a study by selecting only conservatives – in previous generations of researchers, it would have been natural to then poll 400 liberals to nail down the idea.
3) Should have filtered out any scientists – convincing people essentially means non scientists if you mean crafting a message for “conversion”. Surely a scientist would need to be convinced using science….er… in previous generations at least.
Crafting this stuff in politically partisan ways could eventually have a huge impact when the CAGW science falls apart – they are in stage II now with no one even talking about the science or debating it in the last decade. People might get the idea that conservatives are more objective and honest than liberals. People might get the idea that liberals only believe what they are told to believe. It’s time for liberals who think CAGW is a crock to speak up if they want to avoid being pigeon-holed as belonging to a dishonest, propagandized, new world order movement. Stage III, final breakdown and ruin of the movement and those in it could come quickly with the next presidential election.
“I would expect if I asked Democrats to read framed messages about how climate change is a hoax, I would also see strong backfire effects.”
He missed the obvious counter-conclusion to the study he did make: that when man-made climate change is framed as real, Democrats are strongly attracted to it. It is an astonishing blind spot — bias works both ways.
BallBounces wrote: “He missed the obvious counter-conclusion to the study he did make: that when man-made climate change is framed as real, Democrats are strongly attracted to it.”
Good point.
People are naturally attracted to being part of something greater than themselves, which they feel will be helpful, so they seek out those situations. Democrats do this to a fault by creating problems where they didn’t exist previously, if they can’t find anything else to be concerned about and emote over.
All of us, who are sane want to matter (at least a little), and we want to be a part of something good and bigger than ourselves. It’s only human.
That is all well and good, as long as we are dealing in reality. But CAGW is not reality. Supporting CAGW is doing harm, not good.
CAGW is, so far, a hoax, that is being used to move certain political agendas forward, which are detrimental to the vast majority of humans, and is thus seen as not good, but evil by the skeptics.
Particularly evil when the harmful hoax is based on blatant, deliberate lies meant to fool people into believing. The Liars have been unbelievably successful. So far. But the tide may be turning.
A PhD in environmental politics is the saddest thing I’ve seen lately, more so than Syrian stories and U.S. urban violence. The thought of an entire academic program and career based on settled science studies is disturbing. The only good aspect of it is the information to scratch Duke from the current college search process list. I know of others that scratched Yale in recent years.
I’m skeptical about man made climate change. If they want to convince me otherwise, they would have to show me absolute proof that man is the cause of the current climate change.
Message, shmessage. I identify with being from Missouri, the “Show Me” state. I don’t identify with output from computer models being treated as if it were gospel truth, especially since the models demonstrably have poor to no predictive power (even three days out predicting a hurricane path to only plus or minus 250 nm, with everything that can be measured being measured and processed by supercomputers – oh, that’s “weather” not “climate”). I identify with the idea that if reality and models conflict, I’m pretty sure it’s the models that are wrong, not reality.
Watch out, Missouri, the Liberal AG’s might be indicting your entire State for insisting on being “shown” before you believe something!
You will be charged with being “totally reasonable”.
Ask not what the Climate Con can do for you; ask what you can do for the Climate Con.
I think there is something in the real world like the Divergent movie metaphor that these psychology and marketing types will never overcome.
Some people have an inclination to believe the conclusions of experts. They want to believe. They deeply want to be part of the mainstream, to be an accepted member of the heard. They strongly wish to not question the heard which they need to be a part of. They want to trust. They convince themselves to believe what the heard tells them to believe. They will be looking for ways to discount anything that points away from their comfortable place in the heard. The idea of being opposed to the heard is unpleasant, so it is avoided as much as possible. These people can be managed.
Others do not care about acceptance in a heard. Some may even disdain the heard. They will not look for mental tricks to conform their thoughts to the heard. They are okay with, maybe even enjoy, being an outcast.Their thoughts cannot be influenced by appeals to authority or group. They will follow the evidence even if it leads away from the heard, maybe especially if it leads away from the heard. They are not troubled to entertain thoughts that are divergent. They even actively seek out such things. No marketing spin or psychological gimmick will ever take their eye off the data and their own independent analysis of it.
The only thing that will ever move the latter group into the alarmist camp is the demonstration of an objectively real cause for alarm. The fact that these psychology and marketing folks are looking for ways to trick them, rather than to prove the alarmist case, only serves as an admission that the alarmists themselves know there is no objectively real cause for alarm.
herd, not heard
you want an identity it conflicts with? how about ‘thinking human’ versus ‘mindless sheep’ … I cannot follow the non-science of global warming without fear that these idiots can turn back evolution using great minds like Michael “Nobel winner?!?” Mann and “Louie” “Science Guy” Nye …
“These backfire effects doubled or tripled in size among individuals who reported a high personal interest in politics, which functions as a measure of intensity of political identity.”
Not necessarily. Politics is a dirty, four-letter word with me. So, by extension, my respect for politicians is low and as is my interest in politics. Yet, my rejection of the CAGW alarmism narrative is about is strong as it can get. That rejection is based on the science I have read and studied (at least the science I can understand even though I am not a scientist) here at WUWT, not my political bent. I admit though that I probably have fewer problems with Republicans than Democrats.
“I want to be clear: This reaction is not a matter of intelligence or education….”
Wrong again. I consider myself fairly intelligent with a bachelor’s degree and have scored above average in I.Q. tests I took online. I believe my rejection of the CAGW alarmist meme has EVERYTHING to do with my intelligence level although I readily admit I am far from being an Einstein.
Alarmists regularly exhibit behavior that demonstrates an inability to accept that there are problems with the CAGW theory, and their behavior further shows how it has morphed into some type of a political and religious dogma or orthodoxy. In my mind, studying the behavior of the alarmists helps considerably when deciding who is right on the issue and who isn’t. Michael Mann is a good example. Politics has nothing to do with that, but I would suggest that intelligence might.
Sometimes I wish I had majored in psychology in college instead of computer science. Studying the behavior of the alarmists when I know and they know that their science is faulty would be a very interesting subject of study.
Gee Zhou ,should change his studies to Propaganda and why it fails.
Oh right, been there done that,no grants.no $$$$.
I thought Brad Keyes was a little over the top in his series mocking Climate Science Communicators(Climate Nuremberg),however once again..My bad.
I lack the imagination needed to parody the likes of Jack Zhou,he manages with this appalling piece of nonsense to become the very caricature Keyes presented.
Propaganda, that perfect message, only works on mushroom people.
Expect these fools to demand control of the internet.
Only “approved” messages,memes and myths shall pass into the public domain.
“Stoat” was just ahead of his own team in his desperate and relentless manipulation of that online dictionary.
The hypothesis going in was that a message coming from a party the respondents identified with would receive a more favorable response. That hypothesis was disproven. Despite that surprising lack of partisanship, he concludes this: “When asked to read information that clashed with their partisan identities, respondents reacted with motivated skepticism,”
Hello. It clashes with my common logic, not my partisan identity. You should only call it “motivated skepticism” when your hypothesis has been proven, which it wasn’t.
Promises that turning off reliable power will create economic growth, national security and alleviate poverty are being met with “cognitive” skepticism. So stop trying to “find the right framing” when you don’t even have the picture.
“It’s not totally irrational”? Don’t insult us; it’s not even partially irrational. We’re not trying to “justify and defend their identities.” We’re not following a party line. We have done our own research and thinking.
The advice from the author is to “take care to target their audience’s values.” Contrarily, this is a study premised on rejecting their values from the get-go. How ironic that it is funded under the auspices of a Center for Ethics.
Yes, absolutely correct. Lies must be spread as rumors; if you try to spread them as facts people will fact check and prove you wrong.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/27/polarization-may-cause-climate-communication-to-backfire-so-might-tweets-from-michael-mann/
This researcher has utterly failed to do his basic due diligence on the underlying scientific issues. Skepticism of the claim that late 2Oth century warming was human caused (when both sides agree that the previous 300 yrs of warming was natural) is based on the utterly unscientific nature of that crazy assertion. There is no evidence for it at all, just a negative argument that we don’t know what else could have caused it, when we don’t know what caused the previous 300 yrs of warming either, or the Little Ice Age that preceded it, or the MWP before that, and the models that predict possibly bangerous levels of human caused warming going forward have already been falsified by decades of dramatically wrong predictions.
On the skeptic side none of this has anything to do with ideology, but ideology does explain the unscientific behavior of the “consensus” side. These are religious environmentalists, driven by the economically backwards belief that human ecomomic growth is gobbling up the natural world. Thus they seek any opportunity to curtail economic growth and have long recognized that their best chance is to demonize the fossil fuel burning that powers economic growth. When the planet was cooling in the early 70’s fossil fuels were blamed, then as soon as temperatures started to rise the alarm went from cooling to warming.
Since capitalism produces economic growth and communism doesn’t environmentalists have long been drawn to communism and communists have in turn been drawn to environmentalism as an available path for infiltration. The IPCC itself only came into being through the machinations of mega-rich Canadian communist Maurice Strong.
So there is an ideological component to the warming debate but the resulting bias is overwhelmingly on the left. This phony researcher is completely unaware of this basic lay of the land because he never did his scientific due diligence. How can someone presume to cast light on a scientific debate without examining the scientific debate? It’s ridiculous.
Sent from my iPhone
Yes, but it’s only the ridiculous of the day. Next up….
Alec, I have a bit of sympathy for the poor guy. He thinks he’s done his “due diligence”, because he’s read the PeerReviewedLiterature. In his reference list there’s Cook, Lewandowsky, Maibach, Mann, McCright & Dunlap…. all the usual suspects who have politicised and poisoned the climate debate. In his university environment he is drenched and brainwashed with left-wing activism and environmentalism.
Although he is, as you say, unaware and clueless, it’s to his credit that he’s reported results that didn’t match what he’d been told by climate activists.
For an egregious example of their impenetrable rationalization inspect this thread, especially the contributions of “bb0tin”: — Who pays for the effects of Global Warming? [ https://forums.teslamotors.com/node/55374 ]
Feel free to weigh in!
The wolf turned out to be a chihuahua. It came into town, ate a little dog food and left. The end.
Environmental Politics? That there’s a degree for that shows how disingenuous they are.