The cultural challenge to climate science writing

Credit: woodleywonderworks, via Flickr (CC-BY)

Credit: woodleywonderworks, via Flickr (CC-BY)

My previous posts on the inevitable politics of climate science, I was flattered to see, figured into a terrific article this week by David Roberts of Grist about the futility of “just the facts” approaches to explaining that science to the public. Read his whole post for the thoughtfully developed argument, but these paragraphs offer the gist of it:


Scientists, at their best, avoid this kind of blinkered, identity-reinforcing cognition, at least when they’re engaged in scientific work. They struggle to unearth their own assumptions and subject them to testing, to render them falsifiable. It’s a kind of mental self-discipline that requires considerable training. Scientists should not imagine that members of the general public do or could or should share that same self-discipline. If they want the information they convey to be understood and absorbed, they will have to speak as humans speak, from within a cultural identity and a set of values, not hovering above such mortal concerns.

Roberts notes my “morose conclusion” that scientists should advocate for whatever they want because nobody seems to care what they think, then makes the case that by building bridges to cultural groups with whom they can find real affinities, scientists can become more persuasive. (He cites climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe as a success at this.)

He and I are actually not far apart in our optimism. My remark was perhaps a little too flip: I was only trying to say that I think the potential harm from scientists discussing policy intelligently can get overstated. The kind of engagement that Hayhoe has managed seems like a wonderful example for at least some others to follow, and it should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to help build the democratic consensus that real progress on climate policy will need.

Cultural cognition—people’s universal tendency to screen their perception and acceptance of facts through cultural attitudes—gets a lot of attention from science writers these days, as it should. Walk into a meeting of science writers and talk about the need to better educate climate deniers and a fluttery squawk of scolding about “information deficit models” will erupt from every corner. I mostly agree with this, but will also confess to being frustrated for two reasons at how unproductive the recognition of cultural cognition typically becomes.

My first, lesser reason is that on the face of it, cultural cognition often seems to explain too much. It seems like such a potent force in shaping attitudes that I’m left wondering how anyone ever gets persuaded of ideas at odds with their social groups’ values, even though this clearly must happen all the time. Plenty of Americans haven’t been culturally comfortable with fighting wars, accepting tax hikes, abiding by environmental regulations, or accepting legalized abortions and gay marriages, and yet somehow those things happened through a political process anyway. No doubt the lesson is that in those cases, ways of making those propositions culturally tolerable were found, which makes sense—but it also suggests that instances of cultural cognition only get defined by failure in retrospect, which makes me suspicious.

My other, bigger reason is that in practice, people often treat cultural cognition as a showstopper, and a justification for haughtily criticizing certain communication efforts without offering meaningful alternatives. It’s easy to chide science writers for pointlessly throwing more scary climate facts at a public that doesn’t want to hear them, or for tut-tutting that some climate news will sound like the same old doom-saying hysterics unless it’s been watered down to pabulum. But what exactly are the bridges to those people’s realities we should be using instead? And what do we do if the value frameworks within which they define the world don’t allow meaningful policy responses and their intransigence carries consequences for everyone else?

(Here I should also acknowledge a third reason, which is more of a bias: I’m all for reaching out to others’ cultures with understanding and respect, but if somebody’s culture shows a deep, committed refusal to at least acknowledge empirical physical reality, then it’s hard for me personally to maintain that respect.)

Yet I could be very wrong on these points, which is why I’m glad that some people in science communications are trying to engage with the significance of cultural cognition more meaningfully. It’s why I’ve always been impressed by something that Dan Kahan, cultural cognition’s most prominent investigator, posted this past February, which I’ve called the most edifying and useful thing I’ve read about cultural cognition because it carries a clear message for communicators. Rather than deploring how some unscientific ideas come to be bound up within certain cultural sets, Kahan writes, science journalists need to be more attentive to how these mistaken notions become rallying cries in the first place.




Granted, that advice doesn’t do much to help unpollute the existing atmosphere for climate discussions, but it points to ways of preventing the situation from getting still worse. And that may be a second step toward improvement, falling right after the sympathetic outreach efforts of scientists like Hayhoe.

It’s also great that science communicators as a profession may be starting to take a more scientific approach to overcoming these cultural blocks to understanding, as John Timmer of Ars Technica reviewed splendidly back at the beginning of August. And although I’m not attending the ScienceOnline Climate conference now in progress, the feed of tweets emerging from it testifies to the value of the discussion. The program is also giving lots of attention to exactly these kinds of communications issues, such as the plenaries on “Testing Climate Communications Hypotheses” and “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion,” as well as sessions on “Lamenting Eden-Climate Change Discussions Across Ideologies,” on “Problem solving, democracy, and handling climate change,” and on “Engagement Strategies—The CCTI & Beyond.” Follow along on #scioClimate and let’s see what we can all learn.

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8 Responses to The cultural challenge to climate science writing

  1. Alas, I fear that David’s idea is also not likely to be effective. The reason why regressives and self-styled global warming skeptics refuse to pay any attention to information and facts is that in order to process that information, they would need to surmount cognitive dissonance. As George Lakoff explains in his book “Moral Politics”, when you present a person with facts that contradict any aspect of their fundamental worldview, they will usually try to discard the facts.
    Any idea that the problem is “presentation” or “messaging” fails to get to grips with that underlying reality, and is likely to fail. In my opinion, the best approach is to focus on building science popularizers who can expand the audience of people interested in and receptive to the message about human-caused warming. The hardcore skeotics and deniers will not budge, but they can be rendered inffective over time.

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  4. Thomas Carey says:

    Not to be forgotten are the very large investments worldwide in infrastructure related to fossil fuel. Those who profit hugely from these can and do influence public opinion thru media and particularly through financial support of politicians willing to vote in their interest.

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  5. Matt Shipman says:

    I’ll put forward one of the challenges I see, but have no idea how to address. Hopefully some brighter minds than mine can see a path forward.

    Some studies/polls show that a majority of people do trust scientists as reliable sources of information related to climate change. However, those same studies/polls show that people do *not* trust news media as reliable sources on climate change. So, here’s the challenge: how can we connect the public to the scientists they trust, given that the public doesn’t particularly trust the traditional conduit of news media?

    I wrote about this here (see below), but I’m not closer to figuring out a path forward than I was when I first posed the question.

    Here’s the link:

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    • John Rennie says:

      Thanks, Matt. Yes, finding a constructive way forward is a tough, tough problem. For example, even if we could do as you suggest and match up scientists as messengers with audiences that trusted them, my hunch is that many audiences would immediately start distrusting those scientists when they said something unwelcome. If the history of the climate debate shows anything, it’s that people will turn viciously on their sometime allies and heroes over disagreements.

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