The rest of us rely on mental shortcuts to arrive at our opinions on climate change - mostly to do with trust and perceived plausibility. In other words, how we feel/think about climate change depends in large part on whom we trust or don’t trust, as well as what information, explanations, and opinions fit with our understanding of how the world works. This is not an irrational way for non-scientists to approach a subject as complex as climate change.
But we could do better. We could live the words “science is real”…
Most Americans have accepted that the climate is changing as a result of human activity. If pressed for a reason, many will refer to the scientific consensus that such is the case. Some will refer to a 97% consensus.
Not that these survey results are implausible. Plenty of peer-reviewed studies have revealed today’s millionaires to be frugal, hard-working, and mostly from middle-class backgrounds. They buy boring cars. They’re diligent savers. This is not new information - twenty years ago academics Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that 80% of US millionaires were first-generation rich. That is, they did not inherit their wealth.
The capacity to imagine future danger and take constructive steps to avert it is called “adaptive anticipation”. Adaptive adaptation starts with sensitivity to threat. It ends with effective problem solving.
According to this trope, the Fearful Conservative is afraid of change and uncertainty, clinging to the safe harbor of habit and tradition, overly controlled, troubled by bad dreams and distressed by disorder. In so many words: fear makes conservatives stupid. The authors usually bolster their case with a few studies and quotes from “experts”, which can be hard to refute if you don’t know what they’re leaving out - namely, evidence to the contrary.
One thing the articles and opinion pieces don’t mention is the decades of research on personality and political attitudes, covering tens of thousands of participants. And that research is, well, unequivocal: conservatism is not associated with anxiety or fear - it’s most strongly associated with Conscientiousness.
Azarian wrote a Psychology Today piece titled, “Fear and Anxiety Drive Conservatives' Political Attitudes” …he supported his claims with evidence from four studies. Luckily I was able to locate most of the original studies to see if his conclusions were reasonable. Here’s what I found…
…in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky concludes a discussion of MFT with the claim that “…conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity.”
“…a four-year old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the US forging new relations with Iran and Cuba.” — Robert Sapolsky (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Locus of control is not just a belief in the head - it is a belief tendency that reflects reality and creates reality. Change the reality and the belief will shift - maybe not in lock-step but in time.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for desirable outcomes and blame factors outside one’s control for undesired outcome, e.g., attributing a job promotion to hard work but failure to get promoted to a bad boss. What accounts for this tendency? Here are four possibilities:
Another way of putting this: focus on the process and uncertainty spurs you on; focus on the outcome and uncertainty makes you stumble.
Then again, Americans love their specialists – nothing soothes the soul so much as expensive displays of conspicuous compassion.
Studies on the effectiveness of driver safety messages found that messages that focused on “fear arousal” were more likely to be rejected, while those that focused on concrete, doable behaviors were more likely to be accepted.
To quote: “…climate change beliefs have only a modest impact on the extent to which people are willing to act in climate friendly ways”…
What do chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and humans all have in common? We laugh.
The poor are also much more likely than the rich to go to church every single week and thus be asked for money in a public setting every single week. Talk about social pressure…
…The authors conclude that the rich are less generous than the poor because they are less compassionate, less trusting, and less egalitarian.
Ditto the results of a 2017 study: not a single a luxury sedan or sports car was among the top choices of high-income Americans. And then there's the complication that half the luxury cars in the US are bought by individuals with incomes of less than $100,000 a year (per the research firm Kantar Media TGI).
Regret is the recognition that one made a mistake and that an alternative action was possible. Regret requires consideration of what might have been, aka "counterfactual reasoning". In a phrase: coulda, shoulda, didn't.