Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the abstract this propaganda technique, indoctrinating children with educational material deliberately designed to help them influence parents, is particularly effective on Conservative men when the influencer is their daughter.
Children can foster climate change concern among their parents
Published: 06 May 2019
Danielle F. Lawson, Kathryn T. Stevenson, M. Nils Peterson, Sarah J. Carrier, Renee L. Strnad & Erin SeekampThe collective action that is required to mitigate and adapt to climate change is extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to socio-ideological biases that perpetuate polarization over climate change. Because climate change perceptions in children seem less susceptible to the influence of worldview or political context, it may be possible for them to inspire adults towards higher levels of climate concern, and in turn, collective action. Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents — may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern. Here we present an experimental evaluation of an educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA. Parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents. Our results suggest that intergenerational learning may overcome barriers to building climate concern.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0463-3
Sadly the study is paywalled, so we don’t know who in North Carolina authorised this experiment, and whether parents gave full informed consent before their children were used by greens as social engineering guinea pigs.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Daughter: Daddy, we have to save the earth by fighting climate change!
Father: The earth and the climate will be just fine.
Daughter: I hate you!
Father: Good. That means I’m doing my job…
+50
This only works if the mental development of the kids is held constant and neither age group adapts with new information and only uses approved propaganda materials.
…..little things like that
Indoctrination requires ignorance. Labour-voting members of my greater family accept Labour propaganda uncritically without educating themselves and try to tell me they know better than I do. It takes about ten minutes to ascertain they know Foxtrot Alpha about the subject and even when presented with contradictory evidence, they overtly reject it to retain their mantras.
If the Conservative men can be influenced by daughters, it says they are not sure of their intellectual ground…..or they think their daughter will not love them unless she is their perfect little princess who has daddy wrapped around her little finger….
If I had a child coming home spouting warming propaganda, I would see it as an opportunity to build a relationship by examining the subject in greater detail…..and also exposing my child to conflicting evidence bases, thus requiring them to learn to sift, evaluate, judge, explore further snd identify key questions needing to be answered….
Here’s a bit more detail about the … “study”:
https://news.ncsu.edu/2019/05/climate-education-for-kids-increases-climate-concerns-for-parents/
Oh no, it was done at NC State — I went there for a few semesters, long ago.
The outcome of the study is that “Propaganda can be an effective tool for third party indoctrination”.
Nothing new here.
“Socio-idiological biases that perpetuate polarization” ?
TRANSLATION: scientifically determined facts that prevent irrational exaggeration.
TRANSLATION: Because climate change perceptions in children are more easily molded by irrational adult worldviews arising in a political context, it is possible for them to guilt adults into adopting equally irrational concerns, leading to equally irrational collective action.
TRANSLATION: Parasitizing child-to-parent connections — that is, convincing parents that children (with child-like knowledge) are the correct teachers — may be a promising pathway to sidestepping proper intellectual treatment of climate concern.
Here’s more info: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190506111428.htm
It also works the other way around…
We (conservatıve men) are pretty powerful influences in our daughter’s maturation-of-adult-values. I have a 32 year old daughter, and tho’ she went to preppy HS and University institutions, and has a PhD to boot… she has completely resisted the indoctrination that comes with such long academic brainwashing. She definitely is not a card-carrying conservatıve by any means. But neither is she a fountain-of-banality like essentially all her life friends and academic colleagues.
I was successful, it seems.
It is NOT necessary for our kith and kin to be card-carrying Conservatives. It is vitally important that they’re NOT zombie Libtårds. Vital. I’m proud to have achieved that.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
I wonder how many husbands are out there toiling away so his wife and kids can destroy the livelihood they depend on?
Unfortunately, these guys are usually the least interested in the politics their own families are enabling.
I remember MY early teens- we weren’t exactly whole hog on agreeing with what our elders told us. I suspect that there is no more respect for authority NOW among teenagers.
My daughter is going to get an an education from a lot of WUWT articles. I really hate how they are depressing the kids by saying we have less than 12 years to solve this “crisis”.
The Methods section of the study starts with this ethics statement:
Ethics statement. Data collection procedures were approved by North Carolina
State University’s Institutional Review Board (Protocol #7793). Informed consent
was received directly from each adult participant before their participation in
the research. Parental consent was received from each child’s parent before child
participation in the research.
ARS Tehnica has a bit more information about the manuscript.
Limbaugh just mentioned this article on his radio show today.
Gratz.
Yes he did but he characterized ‘What’s Up With That’ (sic) as a web-site that answers people’s questions. I am assuming he is unaware of the correct spelling and purpose of WUWT.