Next, we're going to talk about body of research on heuristic versus systematic processing. By heuristic what I mean here is cognitive shortcuts that people use to make decisions about content that don't require them to actually think about what's being said. That's in contrast to systematic processing which is thinking carefully about the content. There's a large body of research looking at this that goes back three decades at this point. When people aren't very interested in an issue, they're not going to pay very much attention to the content. They're instead going to use heuristics to make decisions about the content. Now, this is a weather castor who for many people who watch television regularly, she is a trusted source. What she says, they're going to trust it, not because necessarily of what the content is, but because of who she is, and she's known to them, she's trusted by them. It's also interesting. I chose this particular slide because you see the stripes here and also on her mug. A climatologist in the UK designed this graphic which shows cooler years and warmer years by the color of red and blue. This graphic then shows between 1850 and 2017 which years were hotter than average and which were cooler than average. It makes a very powerful statement that is processed much more easily than content that you have the whole figure with all of the data. Notice that she has that on her mug. You can also buy ties that have this, their weather casting community is taking advantage of this to help educate their audiences. When people are interested in an issue in contrast, they will spend more effort to attend closely and they can be motivated in two different ways. One is to reach a preferred conclusion, the one that they want to reach, and the other is to reach an accurate conclusion. That motivation will affect then the way in which they process the information. They'll both attend but how they attend and what they do with the information will be different. So I've made this little model here for us to contrast systematic versus heuristic processing about whether the audience cares about climate change nor they're likely to engage in heuristic processing also called the peripheral route, not through the content but around the content. For here, the audience does care about climate change, then do they accept the science? No. They're likely to engage in motivated reasoning and biased processing. Yes. They're likely to engage in systematic and central route processing. So let's look first at this bottom pathway, the systematic central route processing. This is the type of communication that probably most of you are most accustomed to doing, that uses the knowledge, attitude, behavior model, and is appropriate with highly involved audiences. So even though we know that people are willing to engage or to use more effort to understand this content, it's important to remember that you still want to say everything as simply as you can while still making the point that you wish to make. For you to develop this content, there are just dozens of great resources out there. Some of them were created for the information seeking members of the public and others were created as tools for you who work in public health departments to draw on and use within your own communities. Our second audience, the people who do not accept climate change and who are likely to engage in motivated reasoning and biased processing. This is a hard to influence audience. Climate skeptics are more motivated to arrive at their preferred conclusion that global climate change isn't happening and it isn't human caused. That's what they're aiming at rather than reaching an accurate conclusion. The way that motivated reasoning works is that anything a motivated reasoner hears that is consistent with their belief, they accept it uncritically, that's true. Anything that conflicts with what they want to believe, they will judge very critically, they may distort it, bias it, forget it, but they will not process that information in an unbiased way. The sad fact is and we have a number of studies that show this, that motivated reasoners can hear an argument that should show them climate change really is real and end up more convinced of their belief that it isn't happening after hearing the message than they were beforehand. We've used here as an illustration Senator Inhofe on the Senate floor demonstrating that climate change isn't happening because it snowed outside. One reason that skeptics reject climate science is that they don't want government intervention. We talked about this when we discussed values and they fear that solving climate change entails more government regulation. So I want to show you a lovely study on solution aversion. That is, I don't believe climate change is happening because I don't like the solutions to it that you have proposed. Democrats and Republicans were presented with an IPCC statement on climate change. It was paired with either a free-market solution to climate change or a government regulation solution to climate change. The type of solution that was presented made no difference to Democrats in terms of their agreement with climate change science. For the Republicans however, when they heard the free-market solution, they were much more likely to agree with climate science, significantly more so than they were if they heard a government regulation. Solution to climate change. So the free-market solution overcame their resistance to the science. Co-benefits are also extremely important in trying to reach the skeptical audiences. I bet that most of you have seen this wonderful cartoon, because what if we create a better world for nothing? There are so many co-benefits of acting on climate change that you don't even need to really believe that climate change is happening to understand that in order to recognize that these benefits are worth it for us to take those actions whether or not climate change is happening. So evidence of this, we have an experiment with the six Americas in which we present them with a message on climate change. You can see that the alarm, the concerned, all respond positively when we get to the dismissive, they respond quite negatively to it. However, within that message that they heard, there were four paragraphs. The opening, there was the threat of climate change, there was the benefits of acting on climate change, and then there was the close. All segments including the dismissive, responded positively to the paragraph that discussed benefits. There's our evidence that we want to talk about co-benefits because it reaches right across the spectrum. So there are no easy answers to overcoming motivated reasoning among climate skeptics. The studies that I've showed you have all been shown to be effective. But remember that it's a complex informational environment,s o people who have heard those messages and responded positively to them in the experimental context, then go back to their tribe where they are likely to be exposed to the opposite arguments, the arguments we are trying to extinguish. So the studies, if we can reach people repeatedly with those messages that appeal to them and that overcome their skepticism about climate change, we need to reach them more than once, they need to see repeated messages, they need to hear them from sources who they trust, and the messages if they're framed in terms of conservative values, emphasizing co-benefits, those things can change what skeptics think but one time in an experiment, isn't going to do it. We need other sources who are trusted by climate skeptics to repeat the messages often in order for us to see change.
