My issue with this article is that it takes for granted the fact that individuals are to blame for climate change and not big oil/coal/etc.
No, the article isn’t blaming any group for climate change. It’s asking why people are climate change deniers. That’s a very different question than assigning blame.
But the article keeps mentioning “modify[ing] [individuals’] environmentally harmful behavior” and individuals “liv[ing] with their own climate failings” as well as implying that individuals should feel guilty for riding airplanes or (they don’t specifically mention this, but) owning a car.
Telling individuals it’s their fault a) clearly isn’t working and b) is how the big corporations get folks to stop paying attention to the climate crimes they’re committing. The problem is big oil pumping more oil out of the ground because the lawmakers let them, not that you didn’t carpool to work today.
If there’s hope for the earth, it’ll have to be saved either through science-based regulation or forcing big oil and other offenders out of business.
I don’t disagree with your main point, but in the context of this article:
- When we’re writing a research paper, they have to stay tightly focused on the subject at hand. That’s the nature of scientific research. In this case, they were setting out to investigate whether individual climate denial was caused by people not wanting to change their own actions. That is, whether it was motivated reasoning (or avoidance of cognitive dissonance as I might have put it), or something else. My work has always indicated it’s purely politically and socially motivated).
- You’re not going to get the corporations to do anything while you have half the country believing it doesn’t exist or isn’t important. You’re right about what needs to change, but that’s not going to change until the laws change. The laws aren’t going to change until there’s a mass mobilization to get that to happen. So we’re going to have to win them over, and on the basis of this kind of research we know that their resistance is not coming from motivated reasoning.
Rooted in propaganda
…does the article answer the question? It stops abruptly…
Oh. The study’s abstract does. Climate denial is not en example of motivated reasoning.
Quoted
Abstract
Climate change is arguably one of the greatest challenges today. Although the scientific consensus is that human activities caused climate change, a substantial part of the population downplays or denies human responsibility. In this registered report, we present causal evidence on a potential explanation for this discrepancy: motivated reasoning. We conducted a tailored survey experiment on a broadly representative sample of 4,000 US adults to provide causal evidence on how motivated cognition shapes beliefs about climate change and influences the demand for slanted information. We further explore the role of motives on environmentally harmful behaviour. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find no evidence that motivated cognition can help to explain widespread climate change denial and environmentally harmful behaviour.
My guess is that a big part of it is subconscious fear.
