Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

Are climate change deniers distorting the facts to avoid having to change their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) conducted an online experiment involving 4,000 American adults and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. It remains to be seen whether this is good or bad news for the fight against global warming. The study is published in the journal Climate change.

A surprisingly large number of people still downplay the impact of climate change or deny that it is primarily the product of human activity. But why? One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failures if they don’t believe things will actually get worse.

“We call this thinking process ‘motivated reasoning’,” explains Professor Florian Zimmermann, economist at the University of Bonn and research director at IZA.

Motivated reasoning helps us justify our behavior. For example, someone who goes on vacation several times a year may give himself the excuse that the plane would still take off without him, or that a single flight won’t make any difference, or, more precisely, that no one has in any case proven the existence of human-caused climate change. All of these argumentation patterns are examples of motivated reasoning. Distorting the facts until it allows us to maintain a positive image of ourselves while maintaining our harmful behavior.

Self-deception to maintain a positive self-image

But what role does this form of self-deception play in how people perceive climate change? Until now, little scientific evidence has been produced to answer this question. The latest study has now filled this knowledge gap and yielded some unexpected results. Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer conducted a series of online experiments, using a representative sample of 4,000 American adults.

At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to share the $20 between two organizations both committed to the fight against climate change. On the other hand, those in the second group might decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of donating it and would then receive the money at the end.

“Whoever keeps the donation must justify it,” explains Zimmermann, who is also a member of the ECONtribute cluster of excellence, the collaborative research center Transregio 224 and the transdisciplinary research area Individuals and Societies at the University of Bonn. “One way to do this is to deny the existence of climate change.”

It turns out that almost half of the people in the second group decided to keep their money. The researchers now wanted to know if these individuals would retrospectively justify their decision by denying climate change. The two groups were formed randomly. Without “motivated reasoning,” they should therefore essentially share a similar attitude toward human-caused global warming. If those who kept the money for themselves justified their actions through self-deception, then their group should show more doubt about climate change.

“Yet we saw no signs of this effect,” reveals Zimmermann.

Denial of climate change: a mark of identity?

This discovery was also confirmed by two other experiments.

“In other words, our study gave us no indication that widespread misconceptions about climate change are due to this kind of self-deception,” Zimmermann says in summarizing his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, as the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct misconceptions about climate change, simply by providing comprehensive information. On the other hand, if people distort reality, then this approach is entirely doomed to failure.

Zimmermann advises caution, however, saying: “Our data reveal some indications of a variant of motivated reasoning, particularly that denying the existence of human-caused global warming is part of the political identity of certain groups of people.” »

In other words, some people can, to some extent, define themselves by the very fact that they don’t believe in climate change. For them, this way of thinking is an important trait that sets them apart from other political groups, and so it’s likely that they simply don’t care what researchers have to say on the subject.