Motivated reasoning about climate change: How worldview impacts the interpretation of scientific data

Lecture by Bjørn Hallsson, Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at Department of Political Science (Aarhus University).

Public disagreement about the reality and severity of climate change remains widespread despite the presence of a broad scientific consensus in its favour. One reason for the persistence of climate change doubt in the public is that scientific questions about climate change have become embedded in larger disagreements between competing worldviews. Under such conditions, the reasoning is often motivated by worldview-protective goals in addition to accuracy goals, hampering its ability to accurately assess information. In this talk, I discuss a series of studies in which we demonstrated how motivated reasoning can magnify the gap in perceptions of climate change between people with different worldviews, and how it can lead people to draw opposite conclusions about the implications of identical scientific information. While most existing research in this field is from Anglophone countries, our data shows that worldview is an important predictor of attitudes and reasoning about climate change, even in a country like Denmark with a relatively low degree of polarization and a high degree of belief in climate change.

About

Bjørn Hallsson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at the Department of Political Science (Aarhus University). His work focuses on how people’s values impact their reasoning about science and social issues.