Tailoring the message

One of the most important things that I have learned over the past two years is that everyone comes from somewhere different. People come with their own languages, their own ways of thinking, their own wants, their own penchants and proclivities and dislikes. People are culturally molded to espouse particular beliefs and not others. This is wonderful and beautiful. A world full people that thought and acted in the same manner, with the same ethics and morals would be no fun at all and barely resilient; it would indeed be a world exactly like the one that is taking shape in this age of what Charles Mann calls the homogenocene.

I think that one of the fundamental challenges that I think needs to be overcome in homogenocene is the division we've created between "right" and "wrong". You are either pro-life or pro-choice, a capitalist or America-hater, someone that believes in the "free market" or the "welfare state"...you are an "tree hugger" or "job creator". In trying to advocate for changed relationships to people and the environment, I have realised that it is important to navigate these dichotomies by meeting people where they are. There are ways in which we can talk to people that don't agree with what we say. All it takes is the capacity to change languages, to make arguments that make sense to those that think differently than you.

We see these dichotomous camps most starkly in the public responses to climate change. It is abundantly clear that climate change is occurring, and that it is anthropogenic. But there are people that still vehemently deny these realities, that believe it is a hoax or conspiracy, that believe responses to it will take away "freedom". One is either a believer or a skeptic. That's it. But how come given all of this knowledge of the causes of climate change and the empirical evidence of our daily lives do people not believe in climate change? It seems as though it comes down to cultural differences--the politics of knowledge and opinion.

According to Dan Kahan and others at Yale University, it is who you are around, the culture you are in, and the culture you are from, that affects most your beliefs in climate change. It is actually not about scientific comprehension. Here are excerpts from Kahan et al.'s paper from the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled¹. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk². We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

[Therefore, a] communication strategy that focuses only on transmission of sound scientific information, our results suggest, is unlikely to do that. As worthwhile as it would be, simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing world-views.

It does not follow, however, that nothing can be done to promote constructive and informed public deliberations. As citizens understandably tend to conform their beliefs about societal risk to beliefs that predominate among their peers, communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values. Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups²². Perfecting such techniques through a new science of science communication is a public good of singular importance²⁵.

There are two important conclusions that I have come to, for now, through experience and Kahan's work. It is that the message we deliver to advocate for ecologically responsible living must be tailored for the audiences receiving it. In drawing lines in the sand, in saying that there is a "right" and a "wrong", that one way of communicating is the best and the other is not, that "free market capitalism" is "free" and "socialism is un-American", we perpetuate the differences that fundamentally divide us.

Education and expertise

It is no secret that education, or what is commonly thought of as it, changes us. Education has the capacity of changing our perspectives on human relationships, our interactions with the man-made parts of our world, as well as with the biophysical parts of our world. It changes, fundamentally, the way we think. In the hyper-specialised culture that has developed out of "competition" and industrialism, our education has become hyper-specialised, too. But there is one thing that I haven't really thought much about, and that's one reason why I love being around people that know so much about so many other things!

As Avik told me yesterday, there is a whole body of literature that has studied expertise. What has been particularly defining of the recent environmental movement, is that scientists have tried continually to raise awareness about the dire situations and scenarios we face with climate change and yet, we see very little mass acceptance of their findings in this country. There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is that people's lives, and what defines them, are fundamentally challenged because of what issues of the climate dictate we ought to do. Secondly, different people comprehend issues differently because of their cultural identities. Thirdly, and quite interestingly, those people that are aware of the issues actually view the world differently because of their "education." When I say education in the post, I mean the education that most of us think of--become a scientist, or a doctor, or engineer, or lawyer, or accountant, or whatever.

As we become more and more educated, while we are exposed to more and more things, we also bin ourselves more and more in our worldview. As I said previously, when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, the more educated we become, the more we forget about what it was like to be uneducated, or what it is like to be educated differently. What this can result in then is a loss of capacity to communicate with those that are different than you. As a scientist, it may be entirely obvious to you that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to global warming, increasing hormones in water leads to hermaphroditic frogs, increasing the efficiency of something doesn't lead to decreased overall consumption of it. How do we explain to those that aren't experts? How much danger is there in being experts? Many have talked about the guardianship model of policy-making, in which 'experts' in a 'field' are given full responsibility to decide the course of actions that need to be taken about something--those that 'know' about health insurance decide national health insurance policy. This, of course, comes at the expense of so-called 'democracy'.

In the environmental movement, it would do us well if we are able to relate to those that do not accept what we say, to those that are not 'experts' in pollution or deforestation or fracking. We must be able to have the capacity to think like those that don't agree with us, so that maybe we can communicate with them in ways that are more approachable to them. More thoughts on the expertise literature to come.

Further thoughts on activism in science

The philosophy of science, and of the technologies stemming from that science, assume that science is dispassionate, that there are irreducible laws of nature, and that science in itself has no morality. What this has come to mean is that in order to practice science and have any credibility in the community of science, the scientist should generally not speak out about the application of science to society (unless, of course, the science or technology has positive implications for the economy, which technology at least always seems to have).

Unfortunately, this view is flawed - science and technology are deeply moral. They both have massive implications for human thought and behaviour. Technologies are applied within the context of communities and the environment those communities exist in. Therefore, it is fallacious to think that the job of the scientist is done with the discovery of a theory, or the provision of data. In fact, that is where the job of the scientist begins. As I have mentioned in previous post, data do not speak for themselves, but are interpreted and internalised by different people differently. It is up to the scientists to maintain the integrity of the data, and to make sure that only the well-intentioned outcomes resulting from those data are pursued.

And so I wonder why I hear of only a few prominent scientists speaking up about what should be done socially given the data we have (1, 2).

Through irreducibility, science has come to distance itself from the context within which is it pursued. Distractions such as human emotion must be left far away from science. But once we know what the data can say, there must be an emotional response to the data. If this were a different time, I could maybe respect the role of the scientist as a dispassionate provider of data and theory. But things need to change here and now. So why not it begin with those that know the outcomes of human behaviour?