Duh. Humans are social critters that _very_ much do not want to flub the pronunciation of shiboleth. papers.ssrn/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2459057 page 14 The source of the public conflict over climate change is not too little rationality but in a sense too much. Ordinary members of the public are too good at extracting from information the significance it has in their everyday lives. What an ordinary person does—as consumer, voter, or participant in public dis- cussions—is too inconsequential to affect either the climate or climate-change policymaking. According- ly, if her actions in one of those capacities reflects a misunderstanding of the basic facts on global warm- ing, neither she nor anyone she cares about will face any greater risk. But because positions on climate change have become such a readily identifiable indicator of ones’ cultural commitments, adopting a stance toward climate change that deviates from the one that prevails among her closest associates could have devastating consequences, psychic and material. Thus, it is perfectly rational—perfectly in line with using information appropriately to achieve an important personal end—for that individual to attend to information on in a manner that more reliably connects her beliefs about climate change to the ones that predominate among her peers than to the best available scientific evidence (Kahan, 2012). If that person happens to enjoy greater proficiency in the skills and dispositions necessary to make sense of such evidence, then she can simply use those capacities to do an even better job at forming identity-protective beliefs. That people high in numeracy, cognitive reflection, and like dispositions use these abilities to find and credit evidence supportive of the position that predominates in their cultural group and to explain away the rest has been demonstrated experimentally (Kahan, Peters, Dawson & Slovic 2013; Kahan 2013b). Proficiency in the sort of reasoning that is indeed indispensable for genuine science comprehension does not bring the beliefs of individuals on climate change into greater conformity with those of scientists; it merely makes those individuals’ beliefs even more indicators or measures of the relationship between those beliefs and the identities of those who share their defining commitments.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 08:07:19 +0000
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