Don’t ask me what I think. Ask me what I think others think.
The most interesting question isn’t what people think about global warming. It’s what they think other people think.
The latest public opinion research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reveals a sadly unsurprising truth: global warming ranks very low on the list of overall concerns voiced by the American public.
For the population as a whole it ranked #19 — far below top concerns such as ‘free and fair elections,’ ‘the economy,’ and ‘government corruption.’ For conservatives it was further down the list — policy issue #26 out of 28 for “moderate Republicans” and second-to-last ahead of COVID-19 for “conservative Republicans.” For liberal Democrats, it’s a whole other story: climate change is a real and pressing concern.
But for the odd burst of attention — James Hansen’s June 1988 testimony to the U.S. Senate, the release of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, and the occasional time a United Nations climate conference makes regular headlines (e.g., Copenhagen, 2009), how often and when the average person thinks about (much less talks about) climate change is indeed quite rare.
But there is a way of squaring the public opinion circle on the climate emergency.
It builds on the notion that most people refrain from talking about global warming — in ways that they might otherwise engage in small talk about the weather — not because they don’t understand climate change, are put off by it, or even may not think it affects them personally.
Instead, people refrain from talking about climate change because of what social psychologists sometimes call ‘pluralistic ignorance.’
In a 2011 book called “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life,” researcher Kari Marie Norgaard wrote about a town in Norway where residents were clearly seeing, with their own eyes, the impacts of a warming planet — warmer winters, thinner glaciers, weirder weather. Everyone knew it was happening. But nobody was talking about the underlying cause (beyond ‘wow, what about that weird weather?!’) — not because they did not know there was an underlying cause (i.e., global warming) but because nobody else in the village was talking about it either.
Pluralistic ignorance can also be described as ‘social denialism’ or ‘false social reality.’ You could also call it ‘polite avoidance’.
For instance, you might not ask how your neighbor voted simply because you know that that is not the stuff of polite conversation (though, more likely, it’s because you know exactly how they voted). Therefore, the question does not come up.
It is the same with climate: We don’t talk about it because nobody else around us talks about it. It’s not cool.
What other people think
To burst that bubble, public opinion researchers, environmentalists — and even politicians — should consider a question beyond “what do people (my constituents) think about global warming?” They might want to consider not what people think, but what people think other people think.
To do so reveals some very surprising results.
The pluralistic ignorance surrounding climate change was described by Oxford researcher Hannah Ritchie in a literature review published by ourworldindata.org, where she describes the “perception gap”, whereby governments will only change policy, and businesses their products, if they think they have strong public backing. Us talking about it matters.
Ritchie writes:
If governments, companies, innovators, and our neighbors know that most people are worried about the climate and want to see change, they’ll be more willing to drive it.
On the flip side, if we systematically underestimate widespread support, we’ll keep quiet for fear of “rocking the boat”.
Several sociological studies and surveys conclude that with respect to climate (and other politically-charged subjects), people vastly underestimate the degree to which other people (both people like them, and people unlike them) know about the topic and/or support action to address the problem.
In one study published in the journal Nature Communication, researcher Gregg Sparkman and his colleagues found that 80 to 90 per cent of Americans underestimate the degree to which other Americans supported policies to deal with climate change. The researchers reported that 66 to 80 per cent of Americans, in fact, supported such policies. But when asked to what extent respondents thought other Americans supported the same policies, they only said between 37 and 43 per cent on average.
This matters because if people underestimate what other people think, then social denialism — or pluralistic ignorance — of an issue or subject area is bound to set in. That makes it very difficult for people to talk about it — especially if the topic becomes politically loaded, as climate change has in the United States.
Underestimating widespread support for fear of ‘rocking the boat’, as Ritchie puts it, is what’s happening in Norgaard’s Norwegian town. It’s what happens every time you get in an elevator and your fellow resident talks about how hot it’s been, but completely overlooks the connection to climate (even though they know there is one).
Partisan divides…or not
Often with these studies, the surprising results are to be found where you might least expect them.
Survey after survey shows that conservative Republicans are the least likely to identify global warming (and related corollaries such support for renewable energy policies, etc.) as important when asked to rank priority issues. This is hardly surprising given how Donald Trump talks about climate change versus how Joe Biden or even Kamala Harris talk about it.
It is not surprising, then, that the most conservative Republicans are also the most apt to report that other Republicans are also opposed to climate action. Nobody wants to be the outlier in a group of polarized individuals.
But that’s where things get interesting. Because, as it turns out, the gap between what Republicans believe about climate policies (they don’t think it’s a big priority), and what they think others like them believe (those people also don’t think it’s a big priority) is the greatest.
In a study published in Nature, researchers Graham Dixon and his colleagues found that Republican voters opposed to climate policies were the most likely to misreport the extent to which other Republicans feel about those policies.
For example, Republicans opposed to more solar farms estimated that just 30 per cent of other Republicans supported the policy. The actual level of support was over 60 per cent. The same effect was observed in a range of other climate policies.
In other words, the conservatives opposed to climate action consistently (and significantly) underestimate the extent to which others like them support such action.
“While Republican supporters recognize that most Republicans support climate change policy, they may be discouraged from expressing their support due to an information environment disproportionately portraying Republicans as opposed to climate action,” the Nature study authors report.
Put another way, if you’re a conservative Republican, then it’s a big no-no to say you support climate action. The effects of false consensus are too difficult to overcome.
Tough to say yes
Politics and polarization often make it tough to go against the grain. The effects of social denialism among political subgroups, and the implications of shattering this in-group thinking, are hugely important for climate policy.
Other studies have found that just telling a group of people that the vast majority of the world’s scientists (it’s over 98 per cent now) think that climate change is real and caused by humans has a strong effect in terms of nudging the voters who are skeptical of the scientific consensus, or simply ignorant of it, to accept the correct view. This acceptance then leads to support for policy action to address the problem.
Where was the greatest effect observed?
Surprisingly, in the most conservative voters — the ones least likely to believe the ‘scientific consensus’ message in the first place — but whose change in mindset would stand out the most in the survey data.
This evidence points to another little-reported fact about persuasion and climate change.
Immediate family members, especially the children of individuals who strongly de-prioritize climate action, have the greatest impact in terms of nudging those individuals to develop scientifically accurate attitudes and beliefs, and, by extension, supporting policy action.
Because children are so trusted, they have the greatest effect in terms of prompting people to step outside of their pluralistic ignorance and go against the grain.
That’s what happened when former Miami Mayor Thomas Regalado had conversations with his son about the climate emergency. He came around. So it’s not a cliché: your kid coming home to talk to you about what they learned at school plays a huge role (assuming that what they are learning at school is also scientifically-accurate).
Which brings us back full circle to the conversation about public opinion, and the need for breaking the ‘climate silence’ bubble.
To inspire climate action, it’s less interesting to ask people what they think. It’s far more revealing to tap into the gaps that get exposed when you ask them what other people — especially people just like them — think. We might all just learn something.
