Part of the solution may be as simple as talking to each other more. Conservatives tend to underestimate the popularity of positions they disagree with whereas many liberals assume far fewer people share their opinions than actually do, the authors note.
“When you go to a dinner party, you don’t bring that up, especially if you don’t know people very well,” Weber says. “At work you don’t want to bring that up because people might stereotype you in a certain way. So you never hear what others are actually talking about.”
People often rely on rules-of-thumb, called “heuristics,” to make complicated estimates simpler, said Sparkman, who is the paper's lead author. Media perpetuate unproductive heuristics by assuming there is a popular partisan divide on climate policy. “Here, they might rely on a rule of thumb like ‘some liberals and no conservatives in the US care about climate change,’” he said. “So we might have to provide people with a better rule of thumb, in this case that ‘all liberals, about half of conservatives, and most independents care about climate change.’”
Psychologists in recent years have found some evidence that just providing factual information about public behavioral norms or beliefs can lead to change. Studies have looked at how much people think their peers drink alcohol, use seat belts and practice safe sex. A 2016 review of this phenomenon found that the willingness of bystanders to “intervene, whether in risky dating situations, ones involving homophobic taunts, or ones involving sexist actions, depends on their perceptions of their peers’ support for such actions, support that they systematically underestimate.”
The Nature Communications analysis is particularly relevant coming so soon after the narrow passage of the most ambitious climate law in US history. A strictly Democratic affair, the Inflation Reduction Act nonetheless might have more fans on the metaphorical other side of the aisle than congressional vote counts represent.
That’s one thing for the climate-aware to consider, as is the observation that set Elke Weber’s research on a new course more than three decades ago. Populations are susceptible to the “single-action bias” just as individuals are, and that could lead to the assumption that US climate policy is complete now that the IRA is law.
The hard math of climate change suggests otherwise.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.