The Newyork Times
February 11, 2010,
By THE EDITORS

Cultural Cognition

One side uses the weather when it helps their view. Then the other side does the same. The climate change disagreement is not about such details. Those are just the weapons employed by armies engaged in a deeper war. This is the theory of Cultural Cognition, a powerful subconscious influence on the positions we take on most of the issues of the day.

There are four basic tribes in this war. One group prefers a society that is more hierarchical, a rigid world of order, of structure, of class and authority and elites, where things don’t change much.

Another group prefers a society without those constraints, where everybody has a chance at everything. A third tribe is more individualist, people who want a society that will protect them when the lion attacks, but otherwise pretty much leaves them alone. The fourth group are community-minded people who think we’re all in it together, 24/7. We are all some combination of these underlying worldviews.

As social animals, it’s important to us, literally to our survival, that our tribe is winning. So we adopt positions on issues of the day that support our underlying tribe’s beliefs on how society should operate. That strengthens the dominance of our tribe’s view, and wins us support from the tribe as a member in good standing.

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A Mental Model

Perceptions of the implications of lots of snow for the existence of climate change are like the results from a Rorschach test.

These perceptions can tell you what a person believes about weather and climate change. Some will believe that unusually heavy snowfall is evidence of a cold spell because if had been warmer there would have been rain.

Others will believe unusually heavy snowfall is evidence that temperatures are warmer than normal because colder temperatures would result in less water in the air and less snow. Thus, interpretations about the causes of heavy snow fall reveal mental models (i.e., explanations for how things work) about weather.

The extent to which these mental models are used as evidence for or against climate change can also be revealing. It can reveal mental models of climate change. People may have difficulty reconciling the accumulation of snow in their neighborhood with the existence of climate change if their mental model of climate change is melting ice, including ice bergs, rather than, for instance, extreme weather.

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When Experience Trumps Data

Statistics and our experience often conflict. Our immediate vivid experience often overwhelms more abstract distant statistics.

We fear terrorism much more than death from skin cancer, but skin cancer kills many more annually. Most cancer patients learn that how they feel day to day is not related to the long-term progression of the disease.

One might feel good because of a good night’s sleep, but the progress of one’s disease has much more to do with blood counts and other measures outside of direct experience. Yet it is hard not to pay attention to how one feels in looking at one’s prospects.

It’s very hard not to look outside, see a foot of snow on the ground, and think that global warming is real.

Both the cancer patient and the snowbound share a tendency to overweigh the immediate concrete evidence in front of them, even when it has little relevance.

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Ways Around the Impasse

The Earth is warming, which is changing weather patterns and often causing localized weather volatility as opposed to localized warming. Extreme storms, droughts, intense rains, unusual amounts of snow or lack of snow are all signs of global warming. People know the weather is getting less predictable. They call it “weird weather.”

Washington has just broken snowfall records, but even so, economic risks feel much more immediate than climate volatility, complicating climate legislation.

Progressives criticize cap and trade for giving too much to coal, nuclear, corn and other special interests and not enough to ordinary people facing higher energy costs. Conservatives criticize it for creating another burdensome government program when the economy has enough problems. The Senate has to somehow balance these concerns. The proposed Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act might help move us forward, but it might be a long road in the current political environment.

Meanwhile, there is something significant we can do now to fight global warming, whatever the weather and while we resolve the debate over the economic costs and even before regulatory and market solutions kick in: change our behavior.

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