• DOI:10.1177/0002716214559002
• Corpus ID: 149147565

Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization

@article{Kahan2015GeoengineeringAC,
  title={Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization},
  author={Dan Kahan and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith and Tor Tarantola and Carol L. Silva and Donald Braman},
  journal={The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science},
  year={2015},
  volume={658},
  pages={192 - 222}
}

• D. Kahan, H. Jenkins-Smith, +2 authors Donald Braman
• Published 8 February 2015
• Environmental Science
• The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

The cultural cognition thesis posits that individuals rely extensively on cultural meanings in forming perceptions of risk. The logic of the cultural cognition thesis suggests that a two-channel science communication strategy, combining information content (“Channel 1”) with cultural meanings (“Channel 2”), could promote open-minded assessment of information across diverse communities. We test this kind of communication strategy in a two-nation (United States, n = 1,500; England, n = 1,500) study, in which scientific information content on climate change was held constant while the cultural meaning of that information was experimentally manipulated. We found that cultural polarization over the validity of climate change science is offset by making citizens aware of the potential contribution of geoengineering as a supplement to restriction of CO2 emissions. We also tested the hypothesis, derived from a competing model of science communication, that exposure to information on geoengineering would lead citizens to discount climate change risks generally. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that subjects exposed to information about geoengineering were slightly more concerned about climate change risks than those assigned to a control condition.