Polling Beliefs and Action

Posted on October 23, 2009
Filed Under Politics, Science | 7 Comments

Interesting post up by Megan McArdle on polls on global warming. As many have noted this week there was a 14 point drop in the number of people accepting global warming. While some of that might be explainable by persuasion by warming skeptics, I think McArdle is correct that something else is going on. She says,

I can only come up with two explanations for this phenomenon: one, that many Americans are happy to embrace a symbolic belief in global warming as long as there is no danger that anyone will do anything about it. The other is that Americans don’t know what they want, and also, enjoy messing with pollster’s minds.

I raise this less because of the issue of global warming. (And given how poorly the press reports on this, I’m not sure polling the ignorant tells us much) Rather I find it fascinating how much our beliefs depend not on evidence but rather on the value we place on actions. That is we’re more apt to say we believe something if the consequences don’t matter.

This is rather at odds with how we say people ought believe which is based upon the reasons for a belief.

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Comments

7 Responses to “Polling Beliefs and Action”

In this case the belief is politically correct, socially respectable, and idealist. I don’t see anything surprising about diminished belief in a social cause in proportion to the actual costs it will incur.

That is a classic example of belief adjusting to considered judgment and rationality. If a social objective is respectable, comes at no cost, has no deleterious consequences, there is very little reason to oppose it, and considerable amount of social pressure to support it, some support which may indeed be of the self-calculating opportunistic variety.

I guess that’s what I’m getting at – that one ought note a distinction between supporting a view in a quasi-political sense and actually believing it.

On the other hand those who support it may be entirely sincere, just unaware of the real costs.

I’m hesitant to think the costs have much to do with it. While pundits like McCardle, particularly libertarians of her sort, might be very aware of the costs (to business, to government, etc.), since the issue hasn’t gained much traction legislatively, I doubt most people are. Instead, I suspect the biggest factor in whether people believe or disbelieve in global warming is the weather. This past summer was exceptionally cool in much of the country, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talking about how the cool summer related to global warming (usually along the lines of, “If global warming is true, why is it so damn cold in July?”). If we have a huge nationwide heatwave next summer, you might find that by October of 2010, the percentage of people who believe global warming is occurring will shoot up.

Good point Chris – the confusion between weather and climate is probably a simpler explanation.

I’ll buy the weather vs. climate argument. It is well-established that weathermen are skeptical while climatologists are not. Short-term vision often trumps long-term.

Interestingly there was a segment on this on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today. The poller also brought up the weather thing, noting that when you break down the stats those in places where it was unusually cold believed in warming less. However because they didn’t have the data for previous years broken down by region he couldn’t draw too many conclusions (since what counts is change from last year).

The more interesting bit from the show was noting that this is most likely due to the economic crisis. Partially for the point I noted – your beliefs about content are related to desire for action on the content. So if you are economically stressed you don’t want people to focus on global warming but the economy.

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