Current issue (Part II of lecture course)!

 

 

What are their background assumptions, and what is the evidence for them?

 

What is their theoretical framework?

 

attitudes do not matter, moral values do.

 

This is repeated just to stress that we have data for the assertion.

 

There are effects, but they are small-to-medium only. And the smaller effects are for specific policies vs general things. (Remember this is people who *do* vs people who *do not* believe in anthropogenic climate change.)

 

Figure caption: ‘Correlations between climate change belief and outcome variables. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.’

 

I did look but I do not fully understand the methods. I think the key point here is that we are asking whether, when there is a difference in climate scepticism, there is a corresponding difference in support for various policies.

 

 

Study in US on who picks up a coupon for a free tire-pressure check from a billboard saying it will save money vs it will save the environment vs it will make you safe vs just ‘have one’ ( = control)

 

(Severson \& Coleman, 2015) also found that money doesn’t help, whereas ethical appeals do.

 

This is a study in which. Participants were just visitors to a local garage in North America and they were shown a display which offered a leaflet to get a free tire pressure check on your car and the poster advertising the Leaflet either said get a free tire pressure check on your car to save the environment. So kind of environmental motivation. It could say nothing. It could say get a free tire check to improve your safety or it could say get a free tire check to save you money. Right now this is very counterintuitive, so for me I would be like, Yeah, save money. That's it. I should go and get my tires checked, but actually the number of leaflets taken from the save money thing was almost non and the most leaflets were taken from the post. As you can see there was advertising the environmental benefits of getting your tires checked. Good news you try to motivate humans on climate issues by money and they don't respond. You try to motivate them with the climate issue itself, the ethical issues, save the planet and they do tend to respond very strongly. Many studies like this, also indicating that when you try to tell people look, you know something bad will happen to you or you can gain some money. They're very unresponsive in those cases. What tends to have an effect on behavior, as in this study, is the appeal to the ethical issues around climate change. That's what appeals to motivate people.

 

So it's moral convictions and the emotions they evoke that shape political attitudes. These are not the only factors, but by that they are by far the most. Important factors of those that we can manipulate.

 

Next quote to analyse

 

 

 

Subjects are Dutch students

 

 

Implicit measure: IAT test of conservative and liberal concepts; which are implicitly associated with good things?

 

Also works with a web sample collected in USA (Graham, Haidt, \& Nosek, 2009, p. figure~1)

 

 

There is a similar figure for each foundation. This one is for purity (which shows the largest effects).

 

effect sizes are small to medium (purity is the strongest)

 

BACKGROUND ‘Cohen suggests that r values of 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5 represent small, medium, and large effect sizes respectively.’ https://www.statmethods.net/stats/power.html#:~:text=We%20use%20the%20population%20correlation,and%20large%20effect%20sizes%20respectively. (Other sources say .25 is medium)

 

Some studies do not find a non-zero estimate of effect size (cross 0.0), but very few confidently find an effect in the opposite direction ...

 

 

We will consider this when we come to the objections