Does this work?:
[Via CEJournal]
Ben Hale posted a link to this video at his blog, Cruel Mistress, under the headline “Gaia’s Fever.” It appears to be from the Alliance of Small Island States, and when I went to their Web site to have a look, I couldn’t help but feel for their plight. is the video above really an effective way to move people?
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The idea of framing is a persistent one, particularly when dealing with complex subjects, such as evolution or climate change. You have scientists who feel that framing the discussion hampers examination of the true data, forcing the researcher to alter what they know to be true.
What is comes down to, for really complex problems, is that most people do not live lives that provide them with the tools to understand something like climate change. A significant amount of the training scientists receive provide them these tools. Things such as understanding confirmation bias, how to overcome our personal tendencies to see patterns when none may exist, etc.
Humans deal with a complex world by using a series of heuristics or rules of thumb. In a deadly world, there was not often a=enough time to examine every situation. It was easier to adopt a rapidly accessed heuristic than to think deeply.
Many people live in a world filled with old wive’s tales of a sort. In the normal course of their lives, There is little conflict between reality and their rules of thumb. But, and here we can have a problem, very often when their is such a conflict, they are very, very resistant to changing the rule. They would rather negate reality if at all possible. Change might only happen when reality hits them over the head and gets their attention. Thin Saul on the way to Damascus.
This denialists can hold onto views that are simply wrong, even when presented the correct facts again and again. Particularly when the subject is something like climate change that does not seem to directly affect them. That is, refusing to accept reality does not actually appear to present them with any harm.
So, how to get detractors to accept the facts? Well, framing can help. That is, try to understand the heuristics that drive them to deny factual reality. Then try to use that view to move them towards the real world.
I wish I could remember where I read a comment so I could link to it. It involved a passenger on a plane that was delayed so they were all waiting in the lobby. She was reading a book on climate and happened to strike up a conversation with the pilot. He was quite vociferous in his denunciation of climate change, seeing it as a bunch of elitists telling us what to do.
The woman, instead of arguing back, simply asked him if he had flown any polar routes recently. This was the way in. he had and proceeded to discuss how much the landscape had changed in the last few years. Here was a set of personal data, filed under a different rule of thumb, that the commenter was able to connect to climate change.
Now the pilot had to do what we do all the time – resolve two rules of thumb that have conflicting results. Now he was able to listen to more of the story as he dealt with this conflict and could now be moved to examine climate change in a way that could overturn some of his heuristics.
To me, that is what framing is. And a very successful approach is to understand the worldview and rules of thumb (a so-called mental map) and try to get some of these to conflict. Then you have an opportunity to accomplish real education as you can help them resolve this conflict.
As an example I have used with respect to health care. I have had success by first discussing the huge impact health care has on American businesses who have to pay for insurance out of profits where companies in other countries do not. Fixing health care would put our companies in a stronger competitive stance. Then I usually add “And I refuse to believe that France can do a better job with health care than America.” This permits me to actually show them data that indicates this very thing.
So, in the CEJournal video, the heuristic used is fear. However, I expect that this will have little effect on the current denialists. Anyone who would change rules of thumb due to fear made that change a long time ago. I would expect that most denialists today would just look down on any appeal to fear.
In fact, while denialists are often motivated by fear of some sort, (i.e. fear of change making their own personal rules of thumb obsolete and wrong), attacking that fear with more fear will simply not work. Attacking the fear with hope is more successful.
What I have seen are approaches that deal with more straightforward rules. Margaret Thatcher is often a hero to many ‘skeptics’ and she has been on the side of climate change for a long time. And she makes the point that the things we should do for climate change make excellent economic sense. They involve innovations and increasing efficiencies that have much wider application than just lowering carbon dioxide.
Show all the work by people who are very optimistic we can do this. Show them wedges. Make it a game. Assuage their fears with hope. Help them learn new rules of thumb that they can use.
It is probably not possible to completely change these views with one example. Some denialists, such as young Earth creationists, have such strongly held heuristics that facts will never alter. Luckily for them, their daily lives are not generally affected by the principles of evolutions.
But figuring out the rules they use, how they frame their lives, makes it easier to figure out a way to reach people. Well, some of them.
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