Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; A study from University of Bonn attempted to determine whether climate deniers are bending the facts to suit their narrative, or are simply misinformed.
01. February 2024
Why Are People Climate Change Deniers?
University of Bonn and IZA study reveals unexpected results
…
A surprisingly large number of people still downplay the impact of climate change or deny that it is primarily a product of human activity. …
Motivated reasoning helps us to justify our behavior. For instance, someone who flies off on holiday several times a year can give themselves the excuse that the plane would still be taking off without them, or that just one flight will not make any difference, …
…
At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. “Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves,” says Zimmermann, who is also a member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence, the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224 and the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Individuals & Societies” at the University of Bonn. “One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change.”
As it happened, nearly half of those in the second group decided to hold on to the money. The researchers now wanted to know whether these individuals would justify their decision retrospectively by repudiating climate change. The two groups had been put together at random. Without “motivated reasoning,” therefore, they should essentially share a similar attitude to human-made global heating. If those who kept the money for themselves justified their actions through self-deception, however, then their group should exhibit greater doubt over climate change. “Yet we didn’t see any sign of that effect,” Zimmermann reveals.
…
Zimmermann advises to be cautious, however: “Our data does reveal some indications of a variant of motivated reasoning, specifically that denying the existence of human-made global heating forms part of the political identity of certain groups of people.” …
Read more: https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/025-2024
I can’t help wondering if the study authors may be inferring meaning where no meaning exists, because of a cultural misunderstanding.
“… Anyone keeping the donation needs to justify it to themselves …” – but is that really true, outside of Germany?
Personally I would not experience an overwhelming need to justify my actions. I would pocket the $20, because someone just offered me $20 no strings attached and told me I could keep it. I mean, why should I hand a free $20 back to a bunch of researchers?
Maybe this is just me. What would you have done in this situation?
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The conceit here is that it is a case of being misinformed rather than better informed which leads to challenging/not accepting the anthropogenic cause of changes to climate.
This is an attempt at what traditionally would be considered a study of attitude structure, response to attitude-congruent and -discrepant communications, and behavior. It was conducted by economists, apparently, and not social psychologists, and it shows. Reading the original article, it appears, incredibly, that they never assessed their subjects’ own positions on the issue of climate change. They instead asked subjects to estimate how many scientists the subjects think are not part of the consensus, a rather pointless indirect measure; and never explained why this was used.
Using large samples (800 per “treatment” condition), and with no attempt to correlate response to the treatment with individual subject’s pre-existing position, not to mention how strongly that position was held, it is no surprise their results are essentially random garbage.
“.. how many scientists the subjects think are not part of the consensus”
As Einstein said, “you only need ONE to prove me wrong!“
Jo Nova covered this thanks to Dr Soon and included this gem:
This finding was also borne out in two further experiments. “In other words, our study didn’t give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception,” says Zimmermann, summing up his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information. If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter.
This looks like ‘if at first your lies don’t succeed, keep telling more lies’ as policymakers have a loose to no connection with the truth.
If Zimmermann wants evidence of self-deception maybe he should try looking closer to home.
Tell me that this isn’t the “Zimmerman” from the absurd “Doran and Zimmerman” 97% of Scientists study.
I know what I would have done in this situation, but how come nobody has criticized the “research”? It’s invalid research because it starts with an invalid assumption: That there is Human Caused Climate Change. Until they can provide proof of that, the rest of this “research” is just so much mental masturbation.
A better test would be to study how many would give their own money with the explicit limitation that no one would know and they could not brag about it. Remove the virtue-signal signal.
Of course I’d keep the $20…and charge the “researchers” (i.e. activists) another $200 for a complete waste of my and everyone’s time.
Why didn’t they study the reasoning of those who donated to entities that want to fight climate change. Surely it is more interesting to understand why so many people are willing to waste precious resources to invest in a campaign that destroys the underpinnings of modern society, devastates the environment, consumes massive amounts of critical resources and does nothing meaningful to change the climate while pretending otherwise. And they do this in spite of observational evidence that the mild warming we’ve had and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the industrial age have had nothing but beneficial effects in the biosphere.
I’d pocket the money and tell them I’ll be donating the cash to OneWater.org to help save the millions of people worldwide who die every year because they don’t have clean water and they should do the same
When, in fact, most dissidents of Crisis Anthropo Global Warming are sceptics without compensation for their position, the finding, which they are twisting and turning to reformulate as its opposite, supports the idea that sceptics don’t need an ulterior motive. But even then, it is simply bad study design.
This, in a nutshell, is precisely what is wrong with all research by wokey crisis climateers. They know the result they are looking for before the study begins (they know an equivocal finding will make the “Team” unhappy, too) and they will p-hack, selectively weight favorable proxy data, reject ‘unhelpful’ data, and, in the extreme, they will even cut off multi-decades of diverging data series and airbrush in the last hundred plus years thermometer readings, which is a no-no. You can’t mix yearly pixelated data with proxies having a 50 year ‘smoothing’.
The flawed psychological experimental design is a marker of wokey scholarship.
Hmm… keep $20 for myself or give it to delusional cultists intent on destroying civilization? Such a difficult choice…
I would keep the money and not think twice about it.
Ditto but I’d like to choose the representative population subset to random sample cos I’m well versed in statistical climastrology-
Territory plunged into power outage on Monday afternoon | Watch (msn.com)
This seems a ridiculous study! I would keep the money, not because I want the money, but because I wouldn’t want to give money to people who are pursuing a fool’s errand in attempting to control climate from a human standpoint. Giving money to people like that would defy my conscience and I could not do it.
There should have been a third option of a charity for the preservation of unicorns.