‘The Greta Effect’ and the marketplace of ideas
How climate activist Greta Thunberg gives hope that the public is listening on global warming
The “marketplace of ideas” is a term used to describe how certain philosophies gain prominence in the public sphere. This theory, which was popularized by the philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859, suggests that open conversations about policy issues should be similar to a grand bazaar where purveyors of differing positions present their ideas like items for purchase. The public can shop around for the most compelling viewpoints, and the best ideas will naturally stand out.
This view of public communication became so popular that Supreme Court justices from famed liberal Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to current conservative Samuel Alito have cited it as a basis for First Amendment free speech protection. As Holmes memorably dissented in the 1918 decision Abrams v. United States: “[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
However, in today’s world of extreme disinformation (think, salespeople at the bazaar touting brand names but selling cheap knock-offs), many wonder whether the truth can outsell lies that are yelled often and loudly. A recent New York Times op-ed paraphrased a Drake University law school professor, saying : “The marketplace … has become corrupted by ‘information technologies’ that ‘facilitate the transmission of false information while destroying the economic model that once sustained news reporting.’”
Despite this dispiriting belief, there may still be hope — at least when it comes to climate change — for this bedrock First Amendment concept.
In August 2020, a group of academics concluded that coordinated disinformation (aka “fake news”) “is unlikely to strongly influence climate skepticism.” Then, in December, a paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found similarly uplifting news relating to the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Although Thunberg has been the subject of so much disinformation over the past few years, the researchers concluded that Americans who listen to and are familiar with the Swedish native “have higher intentions of taking collective actions to reduce global warming.” Not only that, but this inspiration was “present across all age-groups, and across the political spectrum.” They dubbed this phenomenon the “Greta Thunberg Effect.”
The results are a promising win for proponents of the marketplace of ideas — and also a stark reminder that, while climate action can take many forms, one of the simplest may be among the most powerful.
Talking about global warming works.
For climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, this point is the reason why “The Greta Effect” came as little surprise to her.
“Why this effect?,” she asked on Twitter last month. “Not because @GretaThunberg ate less meat or encouraged her family not to fly: if that’s all she’d done, we’d never know her name. No, it’s because she did one simple but powerful thing we can all emulate: she raised her voice to advocate for change.”
Hayhoe continued in a thread: “Every year, I add 2 new low-carbon habits to my life. But every DAY, I do the most imp[ortant] thing anyone can to change the system we live in: I TALK about climate change. Not the science details, but why it matters and how, working together, we can fix it.”
That said, the next step in winning the marketplace may be figuring out ways to hone the message.
An additional study offers one path on this front. In the publication Environmental Research Letters, another team of academics recently argued that an effective “approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people’s agency for climate action [occurs] by providing a wide variety of stories of people taking positive action on climate change. Applied at scale, this will shift the conceptualization of climate change from ‘issue-based’ to ‘action-based.’”
For environmental advocates, this is a reminder that while we need to keep talking we also must continue to take positive action. The combination of concrete efforts to combat climate change and talking often and from the heart on that work is likely the best way to earn the broadest number of buyers in the marketplace of ideas.
