Strong Climate Change Opinions Are Self-Reinforcing

An anonymous reader writes "A study recently published in Nature (abstract) looked at how personal beliefs altered a person's perception of climate change. Surveying a sample of people in 2008 and then the same people again in 2011, the study looked for 'motivated reasoning,' where 'high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience,' and 'experiential learning,' where 'perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty.' According to the article, 'When you categorize individuals by engagement — essentially how confident and knowledgeable they feel about the facts of the issue — differences are revealed. For the highly-engaged groups (on both sides), opinions about whether climate is warming appeared to drive reports of personal experience. That is, motivated reasoning was prevalent. On the other hand, experience really did change opinions for the less-engaged group, and motivated reasoning took a back seat.None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.'"

Comments

Technically this is known as Cognitive Bias

[Press2ToContinue]

Cognitive bias is nothing new; it is not specific to climate change.

"A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, which may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Re:How come...

[Black Parrot]

....when it's extremely cold in the winter, scientists say thats just normal weather, but when it's extremely hot in the summer, it's global warming?

Maybe you could make us a list of scientists who are saying that.

We know about global warming, not from observing warm days, but from longitudinal measurements from all over the world.

And of course, we understand the mechanism. The "greenhouse" property of certain gasses that we have been spewing into the atmosphere in ever-increasing amounts since the beginning of the industrial age has been known IIRC for about 200 years.

Also, global warming doesn't imply warm winters in any particular location. It means more thermal energy in our atmosphere and oceans, which can destabilize that very complex dynamical system that we call "weather".

For an example of a mechanism whereby global warming can make winter colder in specific locations, see "The Winters of Our Discontent" in the December 2012 Scientific American.

But then, I'm guessing that you're not particularly interested in learning how scientists figure out what's going on, or you wouldn't be posting such nonsense. A "first post!" would have made you look less foolish.