Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Edge Hill University Professors Geoff Beattie and Laura McGuire, the way to prevent people ignoring climate change and Covid-19 messages is to “avoid presenting both sides of the argument”.
Coronavirus shows how to get people to act on climate change – here’s the psychology
July 29, 2020 8.22pm AEST
Geoff Beattie Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University
Laura McGuire Research Fellow in Education, Edge Hill University…
With COVID-19, the early messaging attempted to circumscribe the nature of the threat. In March, the WHO announced that: “COVID-19 impacts the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions most severely.” Similar statements were made by the UK government.
A reasonable interpretation of this would be that the virus does not “affect” young people. But as new clinical data came in, this message was changed to emphasise that the virus could affect people of all ages and doesn’t discriminate.
…
The initial positive message for young people also created an “optimism bias”. This bias is very powerful – we know of various brain mechanisms that can ensure that a positive mood persists. One study found that people tend to have a reduced level of neural coding of more negative than anticipated information (in comparison with more positive than anticipated information) in a critical region of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making. This means that we tend to miss the incoming bad news and, even if we don’t, we hardly process it.
…
To make climate change messages more effective, we need to target these cognitive biases. To prevent temporal and spatial biases, for example, we need a clear message as to why climate change is bad for individuals in their own lives in the here and now (establishing an appropriate affect heuristic).
And to prevent optimism bias, we also need to avoid presenting “both sides of the argument” in the messaging – the science tells us that there’s only one side. There also needs to be a clear argument as to why recommended, sustainable behaviours will work (establishing a different sort of confirmation bias).
We also need everyone to get the message, not just some groups – that’s an important lesson from COVID-19. There can be no (apparent) exceptions when it comes to climate change.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-shows-how-to-get-people-to-act-on-climate-change-heres-the-psychology-143300
I guess big tech shutting down dissenting voices on Coronavirus was just a test run, for what these two professors from Edge Hill University want to inflict on us.
Things have sure changed since I went to school. I remember my professors arguing for logic, debate and reason, rather than an authoritarian shutdown of dissent.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
In the “Resistance is NOT futile” category I stumbled across this one:
https://www.citizensforfreespeech.org/how_to_use_the_cffs_no_mask_card
Print it off and hand it out to everyone who demands you wear a mask. Basically you are fighting fire with fire. You claim that you can’t wear a mask for health reasons. You do NOT have to disclose your health reasons. They are liable if they refuse you service.
Now I won’t be engaging in any lawsuits but they don’t know that.
“Things have sure changed since I went to school. ”
Not in the way you suggest.
Academics have always been distorting and hiding the evidence of views they don’t want heard and even just making it up.
A classic example is the British Celtic myth which was literally made up in about 1707 and for which there is not a single historical source that even suggests the Britons were celts and indeed there are numerous references that clearly distinguish the Britons from gauls (aka celts). Likewise the so called “genocide” of the highland clearance – was a time of growing population and prosperity in the Highlands. etc.
As far as I can tell, from the bogus histories that just don’t stand up to scrutiny (at least some) academics have ALWAYS been lying deceiving and distorting the evidence to push their own viewpoints.
What changed, is that the internet came along, and you didn’t need to be an academic to become an expert in many subjects, you didn’t need to be part of a conformist clique in a University to access libraries of books and material and in many cases even the data itself became easily available. The result is that non-conforming outsiders (like us) were suddenly able to check up on the bullshit being produced by academia and started calling it out for what it is and pushing back.
And that is why so many academics so intensely hate the internet and freedom of speech. Because the internet has empowered people like us to look behind the once closed doors of academia at the empty shelves of evidence for their views and the cupboard loads of evidence they hide. We formed our own views – views academics cannot argue against, but they intently want to stop anyone else hearing.
Excellent explanation. Internet versus academic fraud. This is an idea for the philosophy of science.
However, don’t forget that there are also different schools in science, different countries presenting contradictory expertizes on controversial events, there are professional scientists expelled from the universities and scientific institutions, etc. There are also conventional medicine and alternative medicine, the last one expelled from Wikipedia, but promoted in China, etc. And on the internet, there are countless meaningless “scientific” articles. Open Access Science journals seem to publish anything, if the author pays the fee. Picture is complicated.
From the article: “To make climate change messages more effective, we need to target these cognitive biases. To prevent temporal and spatial biases, for example, we need a clear message as to why climate change is bad for individuals in their own lives in the here and now”
Yes, that’s what we need.
When is someone going to put out that clear message? What would that clear message be? How about some evidence that Human-caused climate change is real? That would be a good start. Anything less isn’t going to get it done.
What sort of student wants to get tens of thousands in debt to be taught by these far quits?
Thanks to covid, I foresee students preferring to watch cheaper online ones with great presenters (Dr Soon?) on real subjects.
Hopefully that sort of nonsense will be redundant very soon.
There are no experts on covid and fewer experts on climate change.
Dr Shi is an expert on coronaviruses.
Moderators: I don’t understand how on a blog post about silencing talk on COVID-19 and climate change, in a week where the President goes after tech companies for censorship my two comments posted to R. Binns about COVID and climate were not posted. I spent a month developing a UV index application just to could produce this important public policy-related message that should help diffuse this complex social situation. Thank you.
What a pity that Stalin did not have the help of Mr Beattie and Ms McGuire. Then he could have made sure that only the officially approved view of everything was made available for the masses. Or maybe the Gulags were a pretty effective way of removing optimism bias.
Whenever anybody says “Science tells us …”, you can be sure they don’t know what “Science” is. And if they something like “Science tells us that there is only one side [to an issue]”, they are either shockingly ignorant of the Scientific Method and general logical thinking, or are spreading pure propaganda. Take your choice, but in the end it doesn’t matter because you want to stay as far away from those people as possible.
How weak their science and agendas must be for them to demand that any contrary and obviously defective debate take place.
I had never heard of Edge Hill University. Now I understand why. I also understand why I never want to be troubled by its mention ever again.
Brainwashing 101!
From their article:
“Other campaigns have used the perennial polar bear in the associated images, which strengthens spatial bias – polar bears are in a different geographical location (to most of us). These messages therefore allow for a high degree of optimism bias – with people thinking that climate change won’t affect them and their own lives.”
NO! That’s not why that failed. It failed because the polar bear population increased 30% since 2005, obliterating the “Polar bears are threatened” narrative. If the polar bears actually did start suffering from climate change, we would never have heard the end of it.
“Latest global polar bear abundance ‘best guess’ estimate is 39,000 (26,000-58,000)”
https://polarbearscience.com/2019/03/26/latest-global-polar-bear-abundance-best-guess-estimate-is-39000-26000-58000/
“This new estimate for 2018 is a modest 4-6 fold increase over the 10,000 or so bears that existed in the 1960s and after 25 years, a credible increase over the estimate of 25,000 that the PBSG offered in 1993 (Wiig et al. 1995).
However, my new estimate is much larger than the improbable figure of about 26,000 (range 22,000-31,000) offered by PGSG biologists in 2015 (Regehr et al. 2016; Wiig et al. 2015). The scary question is this: what do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?”
We are having a climate optimum for life on this greening planet…………the opposite of a climate crisis.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/27864/
I wonder how these academics feel about the UK met offices new paper that finds all models are rubbish!
Should this new paper be hushed up for not being on message?
I guess they need to ban people from applying for jobs unless they went to brainwashing school then, because if they want to be that totalitarian then no-one should go to college at all.
So the only way for them to get paid is to force people or else…..
If you can be banned from Twitter for questioning transgenderism, why are accounts openly advocating pedophilia still on the site?
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/496690-maps-paedophillia-twitter-children/
the way to prevent people ignoring climate change and Covid-19 messages is to “avoid presenting both sides of the argument”
I addressed COVID and climate change in my comment here to R. Binns that wasn’t posted.
Censoring my comment, my study, is doing exactly what the UK academics want! You need to be better and tougher than that here people otherwise they will end up ending your website.
I have a modest proposal: let’s encourage dissent on everything. If your child dissents with you on who should tell who what to do, encourage your child. If your doctor tells you that something will kill you, dissent. If your boss tells you how to do your work, dissent. Don’t respect anything or anyone. Dissent and chaos is good.
Unless, of course, you want to consider the radical idea that some people are more intelligent and know better, and maybe you should listen to them. Discussion is only good among peers, that is, people with the same level of intelligence and knowledge. The truth is, when an uneducated idiot disagrees with an intelligent expert, that isn’t true discussion. That’s an insolent idiot not knowing his or her place. But we have somehow forgotten that insolent idiots should not assume they have a right to discuss with intelligent experts, and if the expert allows them to, it’s just to teach them.
Otherwise, be coherent and tell your children and other younger, much more unexperienced relatives that they have a right to be as stupid and insolent as they like.
That’s the wrong idea Doly. We aren’t children to be talked down to, nor do the supposed experts have satisfactory non-contradictory answers. If you wish to be a sheeple and do as you’re told without thinking without assessing the risks of the experts being wrong, then you’re an immature human, a child.
You are willing to obey their edicts unquestionably, the rest of us, not. Isn’t that what you mean?
I’ve done research that indicates high UV index and heat stress are driving symptoms that are now misclassified during the southern US states second wave, and the CDC is responsible for it by widening probable case definitions in April.
Are you suggesting I shouldn’t have sent an abstract to the AGU with this information and more, and that the AGU should not have had a session over possible links to climate? That is what this cancel culture thing is all about is people like you who can’t handle others’ freedom of thought and expression. Isn’t that right Doly?
…you want to consider the radical idea that some people are more intelligent and know better, and maybe you should listen to them.
…and how would you know who is more intelligent?
When you suppress one point of view then violence becomes the only available response. Surely if the case is sound it is far easier to convince people of it.
These psychology professors from the UK assume that they already know the truth and to avoid cognitive bias, they suggest censoring of counter-arguments.
Unfortunately, banning one side of the dispute will itself create cognitive bias.