From the UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT and the “that’s going to leave a mark” department comes this bit of news that’s sure to cause some heads to explode.
Regardless of political affiliation, people are more likely to believe facts about climate change when they come from Republicans speaking against what has become a partisan interest in this country, says a new University of Connecticut study.
In fact, Republicans are even more persuasive than scientists when it comes to correcting misinformation about climate change, researchers found.
“Unfortunately, correcting misinformation is much harder than simply providing ‘facts’,” says Lyle Scruggs, professor of political science at UConn, who co-authored the paper with Salil Benegal, a recent UConn Ph.D. graduate, now at DePauw University. The study is published in Climatic Change.
“For science issues such as climate change, we might expect scientists to be a credible and neutral authority,” says Benegal. “However, partisanship increasingly influences perceptions of scientific credibility.”
The study included 1,341 people, data collected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and focused on a specific partisan issue on which scientific consensus has been widely adopted by Democrats but challenged by Republicans. Participants included those who self-identified as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents.
As expected, study authors found a partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans in their stated opinions on climate change, with Democrats expressing the highest level of concern and scientific agreement. The partisan gap diminished, however, with corrective information.
In the study, misinformation was corrected by factual information from different sources stating the presence of broad scientific consensus that climate change is happening and attributable to human activity.
All participants, regardless of partisanship, received factual corrections after reading a statement denying climate change. The corrections were randomly attributed to Republicans, Democrats, or non-partisan climate scientists.
Overall, participants found the most effective corrections came from Republicans rather than non-partisan scientists or Democrats. This transcended partisan leanings, researchers found.
“This may be because Republicans who make such statements are engaging in more potentially costly behavior that lend them additional persuasive value,” the authors say.
Republican political identity is now perhaps associated with climate change denial. As such, Republicans engaging in pro-climate change discourse is more “surprising” to all citizens, the authors say.
The researchers examined the issue in an attempt to determine which sources of information are the most effective in persuading individuals to reject misinformation on the topic of climate change.
The findings have implications for environmental communication strategies that seek to improve awareness about climate change.
“Citing Republican elites who endorse the scientific consensus on climate change may be the most effective way to persuade citizens that climate change is a real and important problem,” says Scruggs. “That may be a step forward in reducing the partisan gap in public opinion on the subject.”
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The study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-018-2192-4
Correcting misinformation about climate change: the impact of partisanship in an experimental setting
Abstract
Misperceptions of the scientific consensus on climate change are an important problem in environmental policy. These misperceptions stem from a combination of ideological polarization and statements from prominent politicians who endorse information contradicting or misrepresenting the scientific consensus on climate change. Our study tests a source credibility theory of correction using different partisan sources of information in a survey experiment. We find that corrections from Republicans speaking against their partisan interest are most likely to persuade respondents to acknowledge and agree with the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. The extent of these effects vary by the partisanship of the recipient. Our results suggest that the partisan gap on climate change can be reduced by highlighting the views of elite Republicans who acknowledge the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.
Replication materials for this study are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KV6S5V
Democrats destroy everything they touch:
Sports (Football and other sports they’ve infiltrated are a mess!)
Immigration (it’s designed to leave a permanent poor class that votes Democrat!)
Education (Venezeula’s socialism is touted as a success!)
Government (Comey and Brennan, Leaders of the Coup)
Health Care (The Affordable Care Act that was anything but affordable and caring!)
News (Democrats invented Fake News and are awash in it!)
Entertainment (Hollywood destroys our social fabric even as such movies lose money!)
And the list goes on…
Show me just one thing where Democrats have made an improvement. The reason is that they don’t deal in the truth; they deal in lies, distortions, and subterfuge. They are the largest criminal organization in the United States.
Democracy, in the hands of Democrats, has become soft communism. Communism, hard or soft, must have institutionalized slavery if it is to exist and persist. (Do an Internet search on “Death of Democracy” if you have time for some interesting reading in the form of essays from some bright people.)
Democracy in anyone’s hands is going to be a handful of manure, communist or otherwise. At least in the United States, people don’t elect (democratically) politicians to a democratic government to steward democracy. They elect politicians to a republican form of government to reign in the people’s proclivity to vote away their rights. The proper carrot and too many people would vote away autonomy. The republic was created to restrain that urge.
“Democrats destroy everything they touch:”
Did you forget the Republican wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the Democrat / Republican
war in Vietnam?
Let’s not pretend the Republicans are so wonderful.
Richard,
Roughly 600 votes in Florida made the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “Republican Wars” and not “Democrat Wars”. Al Gore, the Clintons and a majority of Democrats in Washington supported both wars, until they didn’t. It’s just that media lets Democrats forget their bad past decisions, where Republicans are “hypocrites” until they start parroting bad Democrat ideas that have never worked in the real world. Then they are “enlightened”.
It’s more of a Washington swamp critter thing than a “Republican” or “Democrat” thing
Rather than non-partisan scientists , well rules out climate ‘scientists’ whose livelihood and profession makes them very partisan. For although AGW has not delivered on the climate front its certainly has delivered on the ‘easy life and money for old rope ‘ front .
File this one under mind games and nowhere near the files on fact checking, science model evaluation, and awareness.
That’s what happens when you have the facts and the science behind you.
Sorry, misread the title.
Perhaps it is because the dribble published by the AGW group their minions and the MSM sound like the preachers of the various cults that end up committing a mass cult suicide. How many/ deadlines have we passed and – nothing? How many calamities have been predicted and not happened? How many mistakes have been discovered and then dismissed as not important. Why are they increasingly recognizing the influence of the Sun and the various phases after vociferously claiming that the “Sun is constant” and has no effect on the changes? The effect of the Sun Spots are like a gnat flying in front of a spotlight.
Connecticut residents are more interested in UCONN sports programs than its educational efforts 10 to 1. A sad but true fact. Conn and national education is tied 100% to political correctness. It has become the core of their educational efforts. Indoctrination 1st and foremost, education takes a back seat if at all.
Hey, I know what they should do: persuade some True Believers to pose as Republicans! No way would Republicans see through that ruse, as they tend to be rather dense, and easy to fool. Then, since it would be a “Republican” doing the climate-‘splaining, why, they would see the light and switch sides. Problem solved, easy-peasy, piece of cake! Why didn’t they think of this before? It’s a no-brainer.
Put Tony Podesta in charge. He needs the work.
I’d like to see examples of misinformation used in the study, subsequently corrected by factual information from whatever source. Could you provide some?
Look up the link and read the paper, or at least teh abstract.
One of the questions is ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ – with an IPCC quote saying that 97% of scientists agree that it’s happening (whatever this means), and then a Republican politician saying that he believes that the weather is changing ….
We have seen several studies about how to message, aka propagandize CAGW. Remember the Obama Administration use to say that they “just hadn’t message appropriately or enough” when Americans rejected their policies. This was in spite of the fact that Obama and other members of his administration, as well as the mainstream media, had blasted the country for days, weeks and months about the policies. Studies like this one are another attempt to find the “secret key” to selling the CAGW orthodoxy. They believe the the whole issue is not that AGW hypothesis is wrong but that they just are not using the right words from the right persons, etc. When anyone starts talking to me about AGW I listen until they get to “overwhelming scientific consensus” at which point if I am in a good mood I just walk away. If I am not in a good mood they get a lecture about the history of Scientific Method and how it has held us in good stead for a couple of centuries and “scientific consensus” is basically an oxymoron.
I’m underwhelmed that pseudo-Republicans arguing for CAGW are more “persuasive” than climate “scientists”. The chances of my wife or I being polled is exactly zero. We screen our calls, and never answer calls from those we cannot identify- therefore we’ll never be polled. I suspect that the intelligence of those polled is, on the average, lower than the average intelligence of those never polled.
Oh nose….a white LAB COAT and a hockey stick. I’m convinced. Come and take my money and make it colder fascist losers!
It costs $40 bucks to read the paper, which is wasteful. No mention of number of subjects, degrees of difference, possible error ranges etc. Typical psycho-social research. Unless they used an ungodly number of subjects any results are meaningless- part of the 90% of research that cannot be duplicated. Psycho-social stuff calls a correlation of .5 good, and anything over .6 virtually certain. In engineering it’s over 99% and particle physics they use .999999999 for significance.
IAT- It’s All Trash.
Props don’t impress me much, but I guess they do for others in the easily-influenced class.
This reminds me of the truism, “This study is so stupid, only an academic could believe it.”
This opens a whole new area of research. Are vegetarians more persuasive than Italians?
Anybody else notice Steve Mosher and Nick Stokes seem to have disappeared?
Anybody know how to find out who funded this study?
Would like to know how to find out who finds all of these studies.
Democrats & media are condescending. Using phrases like, “the debate is over, the facts are in, the evidence is clear”, is another way of saying, “shut up, we know better than you”. Furthermore, even to speak up quickly turns into “you support the racist, Nazi, Putin-loving, pussy-grabber”…who may soon deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
The Hockey Stick chart in this picture is one of the bigger lies told in the Alarmist’s efforts to promote CAGW. 1934 was the hottest year in recent memory. Hotter than 1998 and hotter than 2016, but you wouldn’t know that looking at the lying Hockey Stick chart (which is the purpose of the lie). A truthful chart would show 1934 as being hotter than any subsequent year. It would not show a trendline going straight up like this lying Hockey Stick chart does.
Here’s the Hansen 1999 chart. Note how its temperature profile looks nothing like the Hockey Stick chart with 1934 being the hottest point. The Hockey Stick chart is scary, and it is meant to be. The Hansen chart is not scary, so they had to change it into a Hockey Stick.
If CO2 were really the driver of our climate then it should be an H of a lot hotter then it is now. Scientists have never registered and voted on the AGW conjecture so “97% of Scientists Agree” is false. From examination of the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has not control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational the the climate sensitivity of CO2 is really zero. The AGW conjecture is based on only partial science and cannot be defended. The AGW conjecture is based on the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, on Earth, or anywhere else in the solar system. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction. It is all a matter of science.
The white coats must be some sort of Halloween costume.
When they say: “correcting misinformation“, they mean promoting climate alarmism.
After years of demonizing, even moderate, Republicans as Nazis, lefty climate activists now need to recruit some Republicans as fellow alarmists. So they can convert the other Republicans over to the climate catastrophe cause. Not going to happen.
It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that people are more persuaded by a Republican armed with real facts (backed up by data) than by Democrats, who “massage” their data to present their opinion as fact.
How long have we skeptics been pointing to factual data to debunk all the hype and worry about “global warming” while the alarmists fudge the data and “hide the decline” in order to feed their propaganda machine?
Weren’t we told 30 years ago that the next generation of children would never see snow? What’s all that cold white stuff people have been shoveling this winter and a month into spring? Maybe THAT is more persuasive than somebody’s computer model about a future disaster that never seems to happen…
Sadly, no. Read the article more carefully, or maybe don’t bother. Let me summarize.
The study presented true facts to various survey subjects, then they told politically-correct lies disputing the true facts and randomly attributed the lies to one of three groups. They asked if the subject found the lie believable and then measured whether lies attributed to Republicans, Democrats or Scientists were believed more frequently.
For example:
Fact; “CO2 concentration does not cause warming, in the geologic record, warming causes CO2 concentration to rise. Today, due to fossil fuel burning, it is possible for CO2 concentration to rise above an equilibrium level, but this is not appreciably impacting temperature, despite a slight greenhouse gas effect”,
Lie: “97% of scientists agree that high CO2 concentration is causing temperatures to rise catastrophically”.
Then the researchers randomly attributed the lie to a Republican, a Democrat, or a non-partisan scientist.
Then the researchers asked the subject if they believe the “correction” (lie).
Then the researchers found that when the lies were attributed to Republicans they were believed more often than if the lies were attributed to either of the other groups.
Their explanation of the study was that if a Republican supports the CAGW religion, going against the evil-evil-evil Republican meme, then they are believable because for a vile Republican to abandon their fossil fuel oligarch sponsors, is dangerous to their political careers.
Hope that helps
If a Democrat ever comes out and says that CAGW is a hoax, now that would be a credible source!
You can be sure that the MSM Inquisition would burn them at the stake for that apostasy from the one true Faith.
Environmental alarmists have apparently never heard of the fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Their messaging needs some work (as well as their facts.)
Sigh. Republicans backed by energy companies – i.e. ‘Big Energy’ – heavily invested in renewables.
They are perceived as ‘more trustworthy’ simply BASED on perceived partisanship – the idea being that their side of the aisle is an opponent of the issue.
Perhaps in lip service (to constituents who are promptly ignored once elections are over) but certainly not if you pay attention to what almost anyone in congress is doing.