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Environmentalists Hire Psychologists to Convince Conservatives about Climate Change
New York magazine has figured out why conservatives don’t believe climate change is an imminent threat: we have a serious psychological problem.
As a result, environmental activists are working with shrinks to retool their message for the red states:
[S]ocial scientists have shown in laboratory settings that there are ways to discuss climate change that nudge conservatives toward recognizing the issue. Research is proceeding along a few different tracks. One of them involves moral foundations theory, a hot idea in political psychology that basically argues that people holding different political beliefs arrive at those beliefs because they have different moral values (even if there’s plenty of overlap). Liberals tend to be more moved by the idea of innocent people being harmed than conservatives, for example, while conservatives are more likely to react to notions of disgust (some of the conservative rhetoric over immigration reflects this difference).
I assume the “innocent people” in this study don’t include the unborn, though I agree that most conservatives are disgusted by abortion. The article provides zero examples of conservative disgust on the immigration debate. Most of the arguments I’ve seen focus on economics, security, and national sovereignty. But no worries — greenies have discovered other mental defects to exploit:
Another promising route that researchers are exploring involves the concept of “system justification.” Put simply, system justification arises from the deep-seated psychological need for humans to feel like the broad systems they are a part of are working correctly. It doesn’t feel good to know you attend a broken school or inhabit a deeply corrupt country — or that your planet’s entire ecology may be on the brink of collapse.
People tend to deal with major threats to their systems in one of two ways: taking a threat so seriously that they seek out ways to neutralize it, or “finding ways to justify away problems in order to maintain the sense of legitimacy and well-being of the system,” explained Irina Feygina, a social psychologist at New York University. This latter route is system justification.
Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on system justification, but there’s strong evidence they do it more than liberals. “There’s a lot of research that just goes out and asks people what their opinions and preferences are, and pretty consistently — I don’t actually know of any examples to the contrary — people who tend to report being further on the conservative end of the spectrum also report having greater confidence in the system and greater motivation to justify it,” said Feygina.
Researchers found positive responses to phrases such as “being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life,” and “it is patriotic to conserve the country’s natural resources.” That’s nice as far as it goes, but doesn’t touch the heart of the left/right disconnect.
I know many, many people on the right, but don’t believe that I’ve met any who aren’t conservationists. We have always wanted to “conserve the country’s natural resources” and “protect and preserve the American way of life.” That these psychologists were unaware of this truth reveals they know little about conservative beliefs. Perhaps they’ve bought into the tired liberal caricature of greedy oil tycoons strip-mining national parks as rows of smokestacks belch soot hither and yon.
Unlike many leftists, we pick up after ourselves, try to save fuel, and enjoy the great outdoors. We vote for clean drinking water and don’t want smog-choked cities or garbage-filled lakes. That is a far cry from believing that man-made climate change has doomed our fragile planet to a nightmarish hellscape that will kill us all.
Partisan psychologists have a lot of work to do if they want to move conservatives from “it’s nice to save energy” to “we need a one-world government with 90 percent tax rates or the planet will melt.”
P.S. Today marks 18 years without global warming.
Published in General
Actually, that’s coming a lot sooner than we’d like to believe.
So now we’re liking psychology, when it says things we agree with ;)
Your points are mostly correct, but:
1) Science requires that you create a hypotheses before hand, and test that hypotheses. Hence, they have to come up with a theory before hand, and test that. It’s not data mining.
2) Of course, if one doesn’t agree, one can design another study to contradict their findings or show why their theory is missing something or is wrong.
3) That’s why its important that the variables they design, are tested multiple times in multiple studies to see how they hold up. Psychology does this on a very large scale.
4) That’s why there’s nothing better than a “spurt” of studies to get to the bottom of whether these variables are useful, on whether the theories are correct. There’s no other way.
There’s a non sequitur if I’ve ever seen one.
Speaking of which, the author apparently chose the least flattering aspect of moral foundations theory to describe conservatives. Jonathan Haidt, the founder of the theory, has identified six moral foundations, listed below.
The theory states that conservatives tend to weight all six roughly the same, while liberals emphasize 1, 2, and 6 while disregarding 3, 4, and 5. Here’s a Venn diagram.
So why is it that liberalism often develops into an anti-individualistic system and is more concerned with “community” than conservatives (in the US sense of the word)?
Is there a difference between liberalism (in the US sense of the word) and Leftism (in the international sense of the word)?
Liberals are all about liberating individuals from oppressive groups that would seek to inhibit their actions on any impulse they may have to expressions of their individual desires. This puts them in opposition to the church and everything conservative that might slow down the mad rush to self-destructive behaviors (so, as example, the bank that inhibits your desire to rack up even more debt that you have no hope of repaying). They are truly clueless that they are now imposing very similar inhibitions to ordinary behaviors that they deem harmful to the planet. For many liberals, throwing off the religion of their parents/grandparents meant adopting Mother-Earth worshipping Environmentalist Religion in its place.
I think a lot of low-information voters are actually conservative people who have substituted the authority of the lamestream media for the authority of the church, and have adopted ideas taught them by the lamestream media about what is sacred and what is patriotic. Those ideas come from very liberal sources, of course. The result is a lot of LIVs who have generally conservative attitudes about such things as family life, but who vote like sheep for the Dems.
Jonathan Heidt said that as he has learned how conservatives think, he has moderated his political outlook in a number of ways. This may have moved him to the center-left, but he is still very damaging to the right. He has busied himself in teaching the left how to undercut the right, how to understand where to press their advantages, and how to dodge our counterattacks.
When he speaks to gatherings of psychologists, or at universities, or gives TED Talks, it is the left that is gaining information from his work.
Does Ricochet have any member who is a tenured professor of psychology at a research university?
Does any Ricochet member have a friend who is a tenured professor of psychology at a research university?
I will pay his Ricochet membership if you can find one who will participate here.
Psychology normally doesn’t hold to a priori truths. It relies on empirically measured beliefs. Let us look at the concepts that tend to attract them. Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression. If you were to assume that the concepts in the Declaration and the Constitution were just cultural and bound in an epoch then you would not be interested in Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation. Grasping directly at the first set of concepts would appear to be the simple solution. The second set of concepts might even appear to be some sort of deception.
If on the other hand you were to accept the existence of a priori concepts and recognize the power and meaning of the Declaration and the Constitution then you would realize that Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation in respect to a priori concepts and the government founded upon them was of paramount importance.
Regards,
Jim
To answer you in part, it has to do with a skewed sense of harm, fairness, and liberty due to the lack of recognition of the other three foundations. Here is what Haidt said about the different meanings of liberty for liberals and conservatives. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here is the core of it:
Jim, this is a good explication. The text I have bolded is key; in fact, many liberals will answer that the other three foundations are not just amoral, but positively immoral.
Mark,
When you don’t believe in anything to be Loyal to, Loyalty is a frightening proposition.
Regards,
Jim
Liberals have a desire to flatten hierarchies because they don’t recognize Authority/subversion as a moral foundation. This means “we are all equal and in this together, man” which kind of sounds like “community” but it’s not. Their emphasis on individual autonomy and rejection of both Loyalty/betrayal and Sanctity/degradation as moral concepts severs the kind of blood/soil/religion bonds that form human communities organically and replaces them with anodyne worldpeace ™ foundations and faceless state bureaucracies that are ostensibly to serve Harm/care, but as we know, usually do the opposite.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at.
Yes. I know some. I’ve never discussed politics with them, just statistics ;)
Anyway, they’re not as bad as sociologists. They’re probably 99% communists, nevermind liberal. Psychologists at least tend to change their mind in line with whatever the data shows, for the most part. Sociologists don’t care about the data. Unless they’re demographers, who unfortunately are grouped together with sociologists.
Thank you for linking to my Venn diagram.
I’m a huge Haidt fan, advocate, and critic. He has started an important conversation that should continue.
Moral Foundations are psychological mechanisms that evolved in humans as we became The Social Animal; the only species on the planet that forms into large groups of non-kin individuals for their mutual benefit. They are “the tools in the tool kit” (from Haidt’s first TED talk) that make cooperative society possible. They are elemental components of fundamental human nature.
Moral foundations are also tools of both kinds of thinking; “Fast” intuition and “Slow” reason. They define the limits and the extent – the performance envelope – of one’s abilities to perceive, intuitively grasp, and consciously reason about the social world. That performance envelope becomes a closed epistemic system that answers all of its own questions. Haidt’s term for this system is a “moral matrix.”
When half the foundations are external to one’s cognitive universe of moral and social perception and cognition, as is the case for liberals (according to Haidt), one is left with no conceivable alternative but to conclude that people who see the world differently must be, can only be, afflicted with some sort of cognitive, psychological, or social disorder like racism, sexism, homophobia, greed, lack of empathy, etc., etc., etc. Thus books like “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and “The Republican Brain,” and those are the polite opinions.