The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don't know their research topic at all, maybe?)
It must have been quite the shock when they were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn't enough.
Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected resultsThe only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can't define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it's not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it's just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well,... psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they'd know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for "motivated reasoning" in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants.
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results.
One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. "We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'...
Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer told people they could decide where a $20 donation went — they could choose which climate charity would get the cash, or they could keep it themselves. The "control" group weren't allowed to keep the cash themselves. Basically 41% to 44% of the crowd kept the money. But amazingly more than 50% still gave the cash to a climate charity. Humans are nice people, really. I mean, they could all have kept the cash, and most didn't. Presumably no one wants to look too scroogy in front of researchers, but some people know climate charities are pagan institutions designed to cheat money from the poor and give it to billionaires — so it's better to look like a scrooge than feed the machine.
At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. "Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, ... "One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."In another variation, participants could pick either a skeptical video or a believer one, and the researchers hoped somehow it would show people who kept the money would choose the skeptical video to reassure themselves that they were right. But as it happens, about 51% of the control group wanted to see "the skeptical side" of this 30 year long boring debate, which was slightly more than the test group. Foiled. Another null result.
It was good, bad, nothing-news really — another piece of useless academic study, and the experts don't know how to convince anyone:
This finding was also borne out in two further experiments. "In other words, our study didn't give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception," says Zimmermann, summing up his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information. If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter.All five treatments found nothing, even though there was money to be had. They even sliced and diced the data according to income to see if poorer people were more likely to keep the money and then "become" a skeptic, but they couldn't even find a link there.
We do not observe that more financially constrained participants choose the selfish action more frequently in reaction to our treatment variation.And lastly, just in case these 2,000 people (or 0.0001% of US voters) were influenced by watching one skeptical video the researchers had to "debrief" them.
Contrary to our hypotheses, we find no evidence that motivated cognition can help to explain widespread climate change denial and environmentally harmful behaviour.
To mitigate the ethical concern about showing some participants a video casting scepticism about climate change by presenting factually wrong information, we added a short debriefing for all participants at the end of the experiment (Supplementary Information).You know it's a cult...
h/t Willie
Reference:
Lasse S. Stoetzer, and Florian Zimmermann, (2024) "A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial" by 2 February 2024, Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01910-2
Reader Comments
Hmm...?
We haven't been always like that, have we ?
The good news is you can stop adding to the chain of people who do.
Hmm..
But to wager a hypothesis - if you yourself are encouraged to lie if convenient from early age on, you lose the ability to discern lies from truth in general. On conscious ans subconscious level, I suppose.
Could a society want this ... ?
However, there is a conflation with CO2 global warming or climate change propaganda that is being taught in schools throughout the West. This has led to a belief system that is false. The propaganda itself uses climate models that do not include the sun or other elements, and it has "biased" data collection as in monitors in "hot" urban areas.
It requires a solid indoctrination and hypnosis to not only ignore this facts, but label anybody even mentioning this facts as "conspicary kook" and "mentally ill climate denier".
The point here is the individual inner "system of values".
I would argue that a culture tolerating and even promoting lying is, deliberately or not, corrupting and destroying this value system, beginning at a very young age.
We are (as a whole) are that corrupt, ignorant and evil because we were made into it, and did not resist.
(This does not preclude that a small percentage of individuals did resist ... )
But essentially; no good deed goes unpunished, no bad deed goes unrewarded, and so God sorts the wheat from the chaff pretty effectively... and the harvest will be small... hmmm.
I like your general approach, but it is not necessary to invoke concepts that can't be tested.
What would I be doing if I said "It wasn't me. The dog ate my homework." or "Wasn't me. The devil made me do it."?
Just sayin'.
I was shocked when a new friend of mine, while looking at an appalling situation, said in a completely flat, un-emotional way " That's not nice ." He said it loud enough for everyone to hear but completely without affect. It was amazing how that cleared the emotion-laden air of the group and everyone understood he was simply saying the truth.
Try that and see what results you get. No need for monsters or spirits or wild emotion. Just the plain observable truth that every person can see in front of them.
I was shocked because of how well his approach worked to focus the minds of others around him. And, no, he didn't have a big deep voice and he was a skinny guy of average height.
The clear problem I have is not denying it is me; I have already told straight to the teacher, "I didn't do my homework, I forgot" and then got in trouble, of course. Hmmm... 'trouble' is the wrong word...
That situation with your friend is familiar to me; you did describe how people react when I do 'strange' things like that .... i don't like going to parties much, i get 'happy' and then a lot of strange stuff comes out, I like when they argue I get scared when they don't... well, like fear for them because you get attacked when trying to implement a truth into your life... Correct; except they are all around all of us, you, your friends, my family, etc, etc. You can 'feel' them... and you think your emotions are your own, I find that very funny indeed... [EDIT] They can be, if you are actively introspectively analysing yourself in real-time during these moments... It's an old 'trick': the quieter you speak, the more they strain to listen....
Perhaps according to Nash and his psychopathic game theory ...
The recent large decline in cognitive skills is due to many factors, not least of which is the "side" effects of the clot shot. Longer term (way before covid or the vaxx) I have been watching a general decline in simple cognitive functions of the population. In 2001, I wired $55,000 dollars from the U.S. to the UK. What arrived was $5,000! :jawdrop:. Never got an explanation why but I am pretty sure that "way back" then, cognitive skills were already being seriously fucked with. Reduced cognitive function is a great thing if you want to slip in outrageous propaganda or otherwise prefer to hide your lack of ability with a lie.
"Society" is not any more real than the employment figures governments routinely publish. "Society" is just a misdirection to keep you from looking for real (granular) explanations of what is happening around you. i.e. "Society" is simply a mental construct with no basis in reality. There is no "We". It is always the case that if you don't have food, that doesn't make me feel hungry.
So, could a society want this? No, but some people benefit from it. The rest of us individuals pay for those benefits and get nothing in return.
Hmm...
Sometimes I think I can save myself a few keystrokes ...
That said, State and Government are also just constructs. None of us has ever met a government, or a state. "How do you do Mr. Government. Are you here to help me today?" That's why the swat team breaking down your front door never says "We're from the government."
Under U.S. law, it is rarely (but sometimes ) acknowledged by the courts that if you shoot and kill a policeman when he is violently entering your home, under just the right conditions you have not committed any crime. For the most part, the people in power pick and choose the terms and phrases they want to hide behind, which they constantly switch around to suit their own needs.
In doing so, you are given the chance to see that it is top to bottom lies, constructs for serving their purposes. When we say "a group of people", that is not a construct. It is simply a use of language to make a particular point. This group, not that group. The implication is that it is not terribly difficult to expand the "group" label to something with complete granularity. Every person's name, address and so forth. But, when it comes to Society, Government or State, that granularity is not even theoretically possible.
The issue of constructs is quite large and invariably involves a whole lot of thinking, which most people angrily reject doing. That in turn is why the people using constructs to get their own way are able to get away with it.
Hmm...
In fact, it boils down to the executive branch (local officials and police) and faithful zealots that firmly believe in the state as their god. They make it real for the rest of us.
California had very strong navigable waterway rules about maintaining public access actually written directly in the California Constitution. Not just a law or some state agency edict, but part of the constitution itself, from Day 1! However, unlike other parts of this constitution, this part clearly stated that it would take a 75% vote by the legislature to change it. Anything else in the Constitution could be changed by a 2/3 vote.
Long story short, Santa Fe had made an illegal exchange of land it owned (Where UC Berkeley now sits) for land at the edge of (and apparently under) San Francisco bay. That wasn't just illegal, it was unconstitutional. I went to the police station and informed them of that (and also complained about the timing of their visit). I was told "You're right, but what are you gonna do about it?"
When researching my options, I found that there were laws about making exceptions. While unsaid, those laws also meant that with a simple majority vote, the legislature could 'make' an exception to the constitution itself, in spite of the laws prohibiting that very thing.
Thereafter, whenever I needed to understand things, like why rich people never got charged for crimes, I found the 'exceptions' they used to get out of jail free. And these exceptions always exist. Just look at Hunter Biden.
The point is, a very few people, a small group , gets any advantages they want. It's not the state, it's not the government, it's not the faithful zealots. It's just a small group with a LOT of power, and of course money. They are not a construct. The rest of those other things are a construct. In many cases, you can find the exception they have codified and use it to make the "authorities" back down. When you can't, but you also can't give up, you know who you have to go after. It really is a small group. You are right that you can't force their agents to go away. But there are other things that can be done.
The difference between the civilized West and other countries (like the Ukraine) is, the lawlessness is more out in the open, and everybody knows.
In contrast, the West (at least in Europe) has legalized and formalized bribery and quasi-feudal prerogatives for "thee".
And if push comes to shove, these individuals will be stripped of their privileges - and much more.
Straight,
Recurve,
Compound, or
Cross?
And while crossbow is the slowest to load, the projectiles shot from mine have about 3 times the KE / momentum I can manage with a traditional, "vertical" bow. Sometimes that counts ...
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So this guy's parrot starts insulting him, " Your an asshole!" says the bird. "Pete, stop that! " Says the owner. The bird keeps on, "You're an idiot!". "Pete, shut up!" the man demands. Undaunted the bird shouts out, "You're brain dead!". Fed up the man says " If you dont stop this nonsense I will put you in the freezer! "You're ugly!" "Ok that's it" the man says and puts the parrot in the freezer. After awhile the man takes the parrot out of the freezer and the parrots says, "Burrrrr, what did the chicken do?"
You make me think that having artificial intelligence around full time will be a lot like having an intelligent but annoying pet.
Problem is, it's the AI that controls the freezer.
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But such large masses of wet snow hit you like a freight train.
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Thanks for the morning laugh!