Echo Chamber: Facts don’t matter to climate skeptics, empathy does

[topaznebula]

Climate change skeptics are most likely to change their mind when an argument uses values they care about, not facts. The reason? People feel secure in their echo chamber.

As a science communicator, media creator, and journalist, I’m trying to share new important information with people who may have never been exposed to it. But people tend to

Comments

[topaznebula]

Agreed. Writing this I was thinking about some of the conversations I’ve had with my own conservative family members who denied climate change. Years ago, those conversations would consist of me saying facts and figures, them arguing and getting mad, and me getting upset that they didn’t care about my future or the future of children in our family.

Then more recently, a couple years ago, I started explaining how I was questioning if I could even have children because I didn’t want to leave them a world that was full of more pain. And in my emotion around that, several of my family members tried to comfort me. My reaction was explaining that the only comfort would be knowing more people were working to solve the problem.

It took a year or so of this sort of emotional exchange, but I’ve had several family members change to not only believing in it, but actively telling me they plan to vote for someone with a policy to change it, and they try to conserve more and waste less.

It didn’t change the world, but, it was things like that, which made me realize empathy worked with people I was close with. So I guess in this case it was the shared value of caring for children and wanting to have a family.

I didn’t do it on purpose, I just noticed it starting to work after the first time, and so I kept that up, and it’s worked. It still took like a year or two for some of my conservative family, but that’s better than never, which was what I expected after like 10 years of denial of facts.

I know that’s not exactly a conversation written out, but, that was the type of conversation I was thinking of when writing this and reading studies and sources about it. For me, it tends to be more “how can I empathize” rather than a calculated “how can I attach this to their values” thing. But I’m sure it’s different for every conversation.

[estelle]

That is a very relatable (ha!) example.