 My name is Michael Ranny, and I'm a professor here at the University of California at Berkeley. And I tend to do research on things that basically are the intersection of three different realms. One realm is science cognition, the other one is about mathematical cognition, particularly numeracy. And finally, I'm also interested in things that are really important to people and society. And if you look at the triple intersection point between those three realms, climate cognition, which is what I'm most interested in right now, is right at the center of them. Now, I think that science denialism in general is really quite rare, because most people will accept that cell phones work and won't deny it as a tool of the devil or something that just isn't functional. You can actually see scientific principles implemented in a lot of our technology that we use. So maybe the Amish might be as close as you get to science deniers in a practical way, why people deny certain pockets of science like evolution and global warming. And to my mind, I think it's because it violates some of our cultural sort of elements. So I think that part of the cultural cognition perspective is appropriate. So I have this model that's called Reinforced Theistic Manifest Destiny that purports to explain why it is that Americans are different or why you get a sort of clustering of acceptance in concepts that relate to religiosity and nationalism on one side and then sort of global warming and evolution on the other. So I think why people deny science in general is often very particular. In the United States we have this phrase, all politics is local. And I think that's relatively true, that is that the reasons that people deny evolution are correlated with the reasons that people deny global warming, but they're not perfectly congruent. And you might even see some religiosity involved in this. So for instance, if you really denied evolution, you could do that from the sense of accepting Genesis relatively verbatim, but also there are religious reasons why you might not accept global warming because if you really believed in a god of miracles, like how hard would it be for a heavenly entity to just take all the greenhouse gases and throw them into the sun? I mean, if an entity could generate the entire universe, how hard would it be for that entity to fix global warming? Or you might also think that benevolent deity wouldn't allow us to burn ourselves up. And so you get sort of a religious element there. In fact, there are even some very small fringe groups that are anticipating with gusto global warming because they're thinking this is one of the harbingers of the rapture or horsemen of the apocalypse. Like bring it on, global warming is great. That means that the Maasai is coming back. So I think that there are lots of reasons. Some of it is fear with respect to global warming. One of the things that I point out is it's a very scary thing. In fact, I prefer that global warming would not be true. In fact, it's sort of in contrast to a lot of the things that the deniers suggest. I would be so happy. I actually put this into my talks now. I have a pledge that if someone could actually convince me that global warming were not true, I would rent the largest SUV I could find. I would drive it to where that person was, kiss them on the mouth, or whatever body part they want, and I would stop doing work on global warming entirely and I would give back any dollar I ever got in funding related to climate change. Because I don't want it to be true. I would be so happy. The other thing that I should point out, and I realize this is a roundabout answer to your question, is that the people who suggest that, as I pointed out earlier, that scientists are just accepting global warming because they're on the dole, that they want this money that comes with global warming funding, whether it's from our National Science Foundation or from other nations. That is like so wrong. That is just not how science works. I mean, if I thought that I could disconfirm global warming, I would do it and I would anticipate being the most famous scientist who ever lived. I mean imagine if you could point out that global warming was a myth, not only would the fossil fuel companies love you and lavish you with prizes and you'd probably win a Nobel Prize for physics or whatever the relevant degree would be, but you could go into any bar in the world and they say, you're the guy that made it so that I didn't have to drive my SUV into the river. Come here, I'll give you a pint. I mean, you would be so famous and that is what real scientists look for. They want to overturn paradigms and gain great fame. I believe it was Australian researchers who found out that ulcers are primarily caused by bacteria and not by stress as it was previously thought. I mean, they're terribly famous and celebrated because they overturned the paradigm. They showed the truth and so it is completely incorrect to think that climate scientists would really rather global warming be true. Maybe in a little email or something like that, but in big picture, no one wants it. I mean any parent wouldn't want it to be true, right? So if you think about distaste for global warming, they can be something as simple as inconvenience that Al Gore sort of pointed out. I don't want to trade in my vehicle and have to get a plug-in. I don't want to change my voltage from AC to DC. I don't want to put solar panels on my house as sort of a pain. Or they can be more deeply fear-based with respect to what might happen to your children. So I have a friend, a dear friend of mine who accepts that global warming is happening, but he said, you know, my fear is that it's too late and we're screwed. And as a father of three, he said, you know, that's really disturbing for me. And so I mean, I see that as like energizing. It's like, well, that's why I'm in this game. I want to retard global warming because I don't want bad things to happen. But I think some people can, you know, there's a proverb that ostriches don't do this, but the notion of putting your head in the sand is part of it. So, and also, you know, like, well, what will happen in our economy if we don't have growth in the way we're used to it? What are we going to do with our dollars if we're afraid of, you know, rebound effects? I mean, how can we actually invest? What's going to happen to my pension if, you know, my pension plan is anticipating that it'll get like 6% per year and that's what's going to keep me alive in my old age. What happens if we can't do that? And so I think there are a lot of fears that deal with, you know, one's own health, you know, which I think Ed Maybach points out being oriented for that. Convenience and, you know, even sometimes existential things, like, you know, what would it mean for us to do this? You know, where is our creator if we could actually, you know, like be destroying our species or reducing our numbers or dramatically? So I think that there are a number of dimensions, maybe two or three. I mean, psychologists usually find that you can, that any field comes down to two and a half dimensions on average, like emotions and so forth. So I imagine there's something like two and a half different dimensions that counts for denial and some of them might probably correlate with fear and some of them might correlate with inconvenience. So I think part of it is that, especially in the digital age, people are able to sequester their information gathering to a relatively small number of channels. And I think there is evidence for this that people who like watch Fox News are less likely to even sample media outlets that are more liberal in character. And, you know, I mean, it used to be in the United States, you had like three networks. You were going to watch ABC, CBS or NBC. They were all basically saying the same thing. They were all basically normative with respect to science. Well, now you can go on the Internet and you can find people who like to believe the most bizarre thing, that certain ethnic groups are terrible or fantastic or certain genders are terrible or fantastic. You know, there are all manner of ways in which you can find really peculiar notions, including this idea that, you know, we want global warming to be true so that, you know, Rapture envelopes us and the most noble of us will arise into heaven. So I think part of the difference is that this fragmentation, oddly, you know, which came out of, you know, the internet age in which we had these grand dreams of wonderful information being passed around and everyone would be articulate, actually means that you can find your own bin of ignorance. And so I think that's part of the difficulty. And my hope is that that will, you know, not last too much longer for climate change. I mean, we don't see it so much in others in which there are many websites that suggest that smoking tobacco is benign or, you know, there hasn't been much inroad into the idea that the earth, you know, might be, you know, planar. So I'm hoping that eventually we'll find that fewer and fewer of these sites and outlets will be denying climate change. And I think the evidence will mount up so quickly that they won't be able to continue that. My fear is that by the time that evidence is so salient that we could have done a lot more than we have done. And so we'll have lost some opportunities for easy fixes for global warming and we'll have to take a little bit more of the draconian or more difficult fixes. So for instance, one of the ways one can protect yourself is by trying to disconfirm hypotheses. So what we often find is like in numerically driven inferencing that people often know things, but they don't know them coherently enough. So it actually rarely, even on Berkeley's campus with really bright undergraduates, if you ask people what they think the population of the United States is, there'll be one person who'll write down 100,000, which sounds bizarre. But if you get that person in a room and you say, okay, so there are 100,000 people on earth, and how many people you think are in LA? And he'll say, well, I'm from LA, they're about 10 million. And I say, okay, so they're 10 million in LA, but only 100,000 on earth. And then they're going, oh, oh yeah, that can't be true. And so if you get people to sort of try to disconfirm their hypotheses to, for instance, one of the techniques we use with our journalists is we had them, whenever they estimated a number, try to imagine a friend of theirs who might estimate the number much higher and why that might be the case, or another friend who might estimate the number much lower and why that might be the case. And so it turns out that in my work in science cognition in general, there are many times in which people have conflicting beliefs at the same time, these sort of like memes that don't coordinate, and it's only when you point out that there's a conflict that they realize that. So for instance, some people know things about playground swings that are actually in conflict with their understanding of pendulums. Well, they're really the same physical phenomenon. And so when you point out, say, oh, you said this about the playground swing, but how does that work in the pendulum? And they go, oh yeah, that can't be the case. And then they have to sort of reconcile it. The other thing I think is quite useful is reasoning to the extreme. Like, well, you know, were that the case? You know, what if this were 100% or a 0%? And often, reasoning to the extreme allows one to realize that you've made an incorrect assumption somewhere along the ways that you can kind of show that you've generated an absurd conclusion. So I think really the kind of critical reasoning skills that you'd find in a good textbook about judgment decision making or problem solving are ones that people can employ. The problem is we only have so much time in our lives. And so one thing I've written about is that we don't have the time or the processing power to be perfectly coherent. So if I told you my mother's maiden name, you could actually spend, you know, a long time trying to compare that bit of information with everything else you know, like whether or not you should move your car or whether or not you should buy IBM or something like that. But in fact, you know, it's probably a better use of your time and say, oh, that's nice to know and move on because otherwise you'd never get out of bed in the morning. So we have to sort of pick our battles about which are the things that are worth us spending our precious, you know, processing on, you know, our sort of type two cognition and our non-uristic sort of cognition to work on this problem. And I think global warming is so important that that's one that everyone should be spending their precious cognition on. You have to identify the particular places where there is a point of conflict. And this is often difficult. So for instance, I've interviewed a number of people who accept global warming perfectly fine and yet didn't know the mechanism. In fact, there's some studies indicate that people who teach global warming to undergraduates barely have a better model of global warming than the undergraduates they're teaching. So one of the concepts that I point out to people is that's problematic is there's this particular misconception that sunlight comes in and it goes through the greenhouse gases and then bounces off the earth and then gets trapped by the greenhouse gases. And I say, well, why does it have to go through? Why doesn't it just get trapped on the way in? How does a greenhouse gas molecule know which way is up or down? And at this point, even some people who've published on global warming go, huh, wow, that is a good question. And so what they're missing there is this notion that light is being transformed, as I said in the 35 words, from visible light to infrared light. In fact, one of the ways I try to reify this for people is I'll say of every 10 photons that get shot off the asphalt on a hot summer day toward outer space, only one of them actually reaches outer space. Nine out of 10 of them actually get captured by greenhouse gas and recycled in the atmosphere. We actually have little cards that we've now generated with the mechanism concentrated down to 35 words. Now we haven't actually assessed whether 35 words is enough to change people's minds, but certainly the 400 words. And we've replicated this several times with a number of different samples. And so we think it's pretty practical. For instance, it only takes a person maybe two or three minutes to read our 400 words with relatively good amounts of comprehension going on. So we think that it's pretty replicable. And on our website, howglobalwarmingworks.org, even though we really haven't had much chance to promote it, we've had about 140,000 page views looking at our website and our videos. And when you look at what other people have written about it, I mean some of the pieces that have been written about our stuff, and it's just solely about our work, gets 100,000 page views. So I calculate that maybe close to a million people have looked at our information involving the statistics or probably more particularly the mechanism. And we also have five different lengths of video. So people don't have the time to spend five minutes looking at our longest video, which you might send to say a middle school teacher. Let's say you have a crazy uncle that only has time to look at cat videos. You can send him the 52-second video and see if that floats his boat. One reason that the mechanism is compelling is because there's no alternative theory. I mean, when you think about creation, there was an alternative theory to evolution. I mean, we have this book, it says how in six days, this is the mechanism of our planet rising and the universe and so forth. There's not really a stasis theory. That is that there are not really many people who are saying, this is why our planet has to stay in the same tiny temperature band forever or to effectively negate the idea that greenhouse gases are absorbing infrared light that is being radiated off the earth. And we have this sort of asymmetry of light that causes this basically leaky one-way valve. And so there really isn't an alternative mechanism. But once you know the mechanism, it's not like deniers can come up with this other one that effectively combats it. So let's say you're a denier and you're trying to minimize the danger of greenhouse gases. You'll focus on what a small proportion of our atmosphere is actually comprised of greenhouse gases. But that's sort of missing the point because when you're looking at a tall column of air that goes miles and miles into space, you don't need that many of them to capture an individual photon. And that's why 9 out of 10 of them don't get shot off into space. I call that one-tenth, the Goldilocks tithing, the sort of really biblical notion that we need to give back 10% of our photons to space because if that 10% window narrows more toward 9%, then we're going to get too hot. And so I think what you can do is you can negate the people who are saying that the amount of greenhouse gases is so small that we shouldn't worry about that because you could say, oh, do you feel that way about arsenic also? Would you drink something that has that number of arsenic molecules mixed in water? And I'm not sure if that would be a danger with arsenic, but I'll bet it would be. And even if not, you could find something like plutonium that wouldn't definitely be the case. So for each particular element that a denier comes up with, there can be a targeted response to that. And that's one of the things we're sort of moving toward in our website, haveglobalwarmingworks.org. We're trying to develop some FAQs slowly so people can click on it and say, well, if you think it's the solar cycles that account for global warming, click here. And I think that's one of the difficulties that you don't want to introduce misconceptions to people. But if they already hold them, then you can address them. Because what we know from memory research is that you don't want to tell people things that are wrong because five years later, who knows if they're going to remember one thing or the other. So the more often people say that Obama is not a Muslim, the more often they're associating Muslim and Obama. And so in 10 years, who knows if they'll think, yeah, Obama, he was our first Muslim president, right? You know, what we want is to have a set of representatives in our governments that cannot deny global warming. That is that even in the United States, as wild and woolly as it is, you can't find a single representative or senator who says that the earth is flat. They would be laughed off the stage in any debate and they'd lose the election. But we do, in fact, have representatives and senators that will claim that global warming is a hoax. So what we need is the population in perhaps even a grassroots way to understand so much about global warming that they realize that someone who would assert that in a debate is a crackpot and they won't be elected. And then, you know, we can move more toward the questions of, well, how dangerous it is it, how fast is it happening, and what can we do about it and how much are we willing to spend to change that. So one of the subtle things that we found in one of our studies was that we were trying very hard, and this was in an 11th grade chemistry classroom, you know, a little way through high school kind of, we were giving them a little bit of a curriculum that mostly worked, but there was one way in which we weren't as effective as we might have been. That is that it was almost statistically significant that some of the students thought that global warming was natural. And the reason is that they were employing kind of a broken syllogism because we told them that the greenhouse effect is natural, and indeed it's been around for many, many millions of years, and perhaps a billion or more, but that the global warming is an unnatural addition to that greenhouse effect. There was this amount of greenhouse effect that was predating human evolution, but we've been adding this much, and therefore it's too much. But in the end some of them remembered that the greenhouse effect is natural, and they knew that global warming was an extra greenhouse effect, so they inferred that it also is natural. So you have to be very careful with the way you discuss it, and I think that's one of the nice things about researchers. You can find out things that are just close enough to being cognitively similar that people can make incorrect inferences about them. So I guess one of the reasons we termed it wisdom deficit is because I think knowledge deficit is... it's got some negative connotations. For one thing in the realm of education it's often got even more negative connotations than probably in climate science. But I think the difference is that wisdom I think should actually be about practical knowledge and the utility of that knowledge, not just information. And so I think the knowledge deficit sort of suggests that people just don't know enough, which is certainly part of the lack of wisdom, but it's the sense of, like, how that knowledge is actionable. So for instance, in real life we might know a lot of things, but they don't make sense, they're not coherently pieced together, and we wouldn't necessarily know how to act on them. Whereas I think if you understand enough about climate change then you can actually move legislators and rulers into action and you can think about what particularly would be useful for you to do rather than more sort of inert knowledge or information that one might regurgitate. So for instance, in misinformation, often what people are given are, say, statistics that might be misleading or information that's cherry-picked in such a way that sort of suggests that the truth of the matter is somewhat different than it really is in terms of the science. And I think part of the wisdom one needs is to be able to analyze those sorts of bits of agnotology or misinformation and say, oh, so they chose April of this particular year because it's the only month that there was more sea ice in 1999 than there was in 1940 or something like that. So I think the wisdom is also part of critical reasoning in that it allows you to disconfirm things that may not be accurate by knowing how to poke them sometimes by reasoning to extremes and say, well, by that measure, we could all be covered in ice right now or by that measure, you know, we'd all be, you know, there'd be a beach on the Arctic. So it's sort of that kind of BS detection in some respects. We have found a particular niche in our group with respect to closing the wisdom deficit. So we've come up with two different ways we think is probably useful, perhaps most useful in terms of bang per buck. So for instance, it turns out in our research that basically 0% of people know the mechanism of global warming. If you ask them, what's the physical chemical mechanism by which the earth is purportedly heating up, people draw a blank. They may be able to recognize parts of it, but they're really not good at generating it. So one of the things we thought we'd do is just explain what the mechanism is and so we've done that and now we have some videos on our website, which is howglobalwarmingworks.org. And so people can very quickly sort of get a sense of how it is that climate scientists would explain why the earth is warming up. So that's one way that I think you can help people's wisdom, you know, reduce that deficit is by using a proper understanding of the mechanism, sort of a tiebreaker. The other thing that we've done is we've used some statistics. In this case we call them our seven representative statistics. Sometimes informally we've called them the saintly statistics, but generally there are statistics that are meant to indicate relatively quickly to people some of the effects of global warming that really seem quite apt and salient. And the third thing we've been working on lately are just sort of graphs that show that the temperature of the earth has been increasing. So what I've got here are two graphs and one of them is the Dow Jones and gestural average adjusted for inflation. And the other one is the earth's surface temperature according to data that we got from NASA. And what we've done is we've averaged them to take out sort of the, you know, saw-truth kind of nature of them. So you're looking at 16-year averages, each datum aggregates for 16 years. And so I've asked the three people in the room who were interviewing me which one they think is the Dow Jones industrial average and which one is the temperature. Right, well it turns out that the top one actually is temperature. But one thing I should point out is that I asked this of 35 participants who are really quite financially sophisticated and only 16 out of the 35 chose the correct one. So it was non-significantly less than zero. So the notion is like if you look at these and they're clearly going up like we ask people do you think these graphs are going up or going down or they flat, they look at me like, duh, of course they're going up. And then I'd say well one of these is the temperature graph and one of them is Dow Jones. I mean at that point how many people could deny that the temperature is going up, right? So that's why we think this is a good chance for being a third leg of our tripod in addition to the mechanism and the seven statistics. And we're hoping that this is compelling to folks. It does show a little bit of a plateau. But actually if you look at the graphs more closely and do a moving average it's a little easier to tell because there's actually like this little almost sine wave looking thing that indicates when the stock market took quite a tumble which is really around 1965 to 1981 or so. So you don't always win in the stock market as it turns out when you adjust to inflation. But it actually turns out that if you do a 60-year moving average of the temperature then it is completely monotonic. It goes up every successive average year. It goes higher and higher and higher. It just looks like a jet plane taking off basically. Whereas in a 16-year moving average as we have there then I think every year from 1974 on is monotonic so that every successive average year is higher than the one before it which I think is pretty compelling. So I think all three of those, I sort of describe it as our tripod of interventions that help people understand what's going on with global warming and I think that those three legs of the tripod are pretty good at helping folks gain enough wisdom to overcome that sort of misinformation or agonitology that they may be getting from other sources. We found zero polarization and by that I should sort of describe what we mean by polarization. So it turns out that many people use it sort of informally in the way that like in the United States, Democrats and Republicans kind of a sort where Democrats find global warming both more plausible and more scary. They have greater concern than Republicans so that at minimal level of asymmetry among liberals and conservatives that's pretty clear. Then there's another sort of level of polarization by which you might generate an intervention for someone and you find slightly differential effects between liberals and conservatives but they're both changed in the direction that one would expect. So with our mechanisms you would expect both liberals and conservatives to increase their acceptance of global warming, which they do. The third level of polarization which is sometimes purported to occur in social psychological situations is when some information sort of differentially affects liberals and conservatives where you find perhaps liberals being more compelled by some of our information but conservatives less compelled, in fact so much less compelled that they actually have this sort of propaganda sort of sensation that they're being gained somehow and somehow they're being worked over and so purportedly if they were polarized at that level then they'd accept global warming even less than they did before you even gave them information and we don't find that. We find that our information both in terms of mechanism and with our seven representative statistics increases the acceptance of both liberals and conservatives so we don't find polarization in that more classical sense that was sort of spawned by work by Lord Ross and Lepper. Although frankly they didn't find polarization quite the way it's been recast over the years. One of the things they did for instance in that paper was they excluded all the middle people and they just looked at folks at the extremes and so they found that indeed I believe it was a death penalty case they did find that when you gave people information that the folks kind of had a sense that there was a bit of propaganda in it which was true I mean they basically jury-rigged their interventions to some degree was relatively light on evidence and it was also clearly written in a well kind of a rhetorical way as a newspaper article but with a bent you know and people can tell when they're reading something you know this from Fox News versus CBS or CNN or something like that but they never actually tested to see if the people in the middle were polarized and in fact a past graduate student did his dissertation with me and he basically ran a similar experiment even with death penalty and we didn't find polarization either when we gave them for instance statistics or other information about the death penalty and so I think polarization is actually rather rare even for people in that tradition of Lord Ross and Lepper and we also make it very clear to our participants that we're really giving them honest information that there are no deceptions involved that we say look you know you can share these statistics with your family tonight you can go home and tell your kids about this mechanism you know and there are no deceptions involved and so I think that's part of it whereas you know in a classical social psychological experiment you know if you've got a 19 year old psych major they have a sense that you know what you're getting might not be the God's honest truth as they say we're finding the conservatives are compelled by it as well now I imagine that there's some limit to that like if we just looked at the very tail of the distribution like people that are employed by a fossil fuel company and are married to a Republican senator or something like that it's going to be harder and harder and I forget the particular source in the 30s said something like it's very hard to get someone to believe something or get very hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it but generally we find a great deal of receptivity and relatively few people that you know we get comments from that are denying it and in fact we get more criticism actually from people who accept global warming but wants to tweak just a particular way we deal with the physics involved to you know into a way that might be more palatable for their background and such so we've been pretty fortunate in terms of the response and the other thing I might say regarding you know convincing people is that it doesn't even matter that much to us if people go to our site and don't remember that specific set of constraints regarding the nature of the mechanism global warming and what I liken it to is when people are talking about or thinking about the Pythagorean theorem you know if I ask you right now to prove the Pythagorean theorem if you're like me it'll take you a little while but there was this one crystal moment undoubtedly in your background when you were in geometry or a course like that and you saw this proof maybe multiple proofs and they were elegant and you understood them and in that beautiful moment you became a believer in the Pythagorean theorem in a way that even though you can't regenerate it at a moment's notice it's part of you and we hope that that's what the effect will be about our mechanisms and our statistics is that even you know a month later or year later when people ask them you know in a bar so what is that mechanism they'll say well you know I can't remember exactly but it involved infrared light and you know if you look at a video you'll know and that's what we're hoping and so part of our desire is just to get 7 billion people to come to our website and they don't even have to come back as long as they leave and they accept global warming presuming that that belief is warranted and we're not so concerned that you know on a post test a year later they'd get 100% correct on the subtleties about whether or not greenhouse gases are the asymmetrical ones or the symmetrical molecules so I guess the what we've done is we've sort of projected on to one particular person who's written in the literature suggesting that people aren't likely to change based upon information whether it's scientific information or what not and I think that that just can't be true I mean historically it seems quite unlikely given that people used to think that the earth was flat or that the sun revolves around the earth or that the smoking tobacco was benign for you so it does indeed seem that over time you know societies eventually approximate toward information that is scientifically more normative but I also think that it's an unfortunate political move in some respects to suggest that well there's not much we can do on the front of changing people's minds via information because sometimes a suggestion is well you just have to change their culture or wait for the culture to change which would be terribly long and certainly wasn't necessary for some of these other changes at least not in a dramatic way and so I think that in some respects the idea that people can't change which is sort of the kernel of stasis contrast with a whole bunch of data we have now that indicates that people do change when you give them the mechanism or the seven statistics and I'll warrant that they'll change even if they see two functions that are going up and they're told the one is the temperature of the earth and the other one is the Dow Jones and they can't tell which is which and they believe that the Dow Jones is going up and they accept it so I think that the problem that the stasis theorists and I think that by that I include a whole host of just plain folks who say oh people won't change they just believe what they want to believe which is generally not true I think humans generally are really quite good at being empiricists and one sort of Riebal example I have is that if you were to come home and find your partner in bed and find someone else you could go fully rationalistic and not believe the data you could say well for all I know I'm sleeping and this is a dream or I'm hallucinating or maybe I'm just a brain in a vat maybe the mail carrier came here to change a light bulb and through some odd chance they just ended up in this situation no most likely you're going to accept it as a datum that really changes your understanding about the fidelity of empiricists when you come down to it and the other thing that I think is unfortunate is the sort of suggestion that there's an either or relationship that is that either people are compelled by science information or they're compelled by their culture when clearly it's both of those I mean it's sort of like the quote unquote nature nurture debate and the nature nurture debate I think is clearly you know it's kind of obviated as well when you think about the extreme conditions of like a baby Einstein sort of raised in a closet that child wouldn't be the Einstein that the world came to know or similarly if you have a really severely brain damaged child no matter what sort of tutoring you could give that child with today's technology and pedagogy they're never going to master the upper echelons of quantum mechanics or things like that really we're all if you really press people I think most of them will agree that science information and culture are important and I wouldn't denigrate the important role of culture in fact I even have a little theory that takes culture very much at the heart of it about why Americans in particular but some other cultures don't accept global warming so it's not like I think that information is going to be the only thing but I think in the end it will be the thing that changes people's minds this actually grew out of a line of research that we've called numerically driven inferencing and what we found is that often a single number can change one's perception of an entire configuration of other beliefs regarding a particular realm so some of the most striking numbers we've used in the United States are the legal immigration rate and people are often an order of magnitude sometimes multiple orders of magnitude in their estimation of how often it is that women will engage in a surgical abortion or the legal immigration rate when you put it in terms of the current population of the United States and so people are off by so much sometimes 300,000 off and we're not talking about bumpkins some of my colleagues in mathematics cognition or mathematical education have the most bizarre bizarrely distant answers from the truth from the fact of the matter so when people see the contrast between what they anticipate and what they see is evidentially true when we give them the actual number it causes them to have this cascade of inferences and they very quickly change their understanding about the realm whether it's abortion or immigration to give you an example from the abortion debate one of the things that we ask is for every 1 million babies that are born how many legal abortions take place in that period of time so basically in the time it takes for a million babies to pop out of mothers how many legal abortions take place and so it turns out that some people just say one there's like one abortion for every 1 million live births but the median estimate usually comes in around 5 or 10,000 but the actual number is roughly almost 300,000 so you're surprised right there so what happens is people have to accommodate in their mental structure how they could think it was one or 5,000 or 10,000 and on average it's about 60 times higher than people anticipate and so for any given realm generally I think that within like 5 numbers you can kind of get a sense of what's going on in that particular issue parametrically so for instance the abortion number often causes people to think wow Americans just aren't responsible enough with their birth control but indeed it turns out that birth control isn't perfect so I think 5% of women on the pill still get pregnant in a given year in the end it turns out that almost one out of every two pregnancies is not planned for and then almost one out of two pregnancies that's not planned for gets aborted so that kind of gives you a sense of what I believe is going on with our statistics for global warming as well so one of our statistics is the increase in methane which is a pretty dangerous greenhouse gas since the dawn of the industrial age to today well let's say that you're dealing with someone who denies global warming and they'll say well gee you know I think that if anything methane has probably gone up like 2% I'll bet it's actually gone down 5% so what would they do if you told them well actually it turns out it's increased over 150% we're getting their tripling amount of methane that we had in the year 1750 well it's hard for them to accommodate that if they truly do believe that methane is a greenhouse gas and that gases are somehow involved it sort of kicks out that potential leg that suggests that well maybe global warming is occurring but it's negligible it's what I call a parameterization problem that you know yeah it's happening but earth is so vast our Gaia can absorb any amount of greenhouse gases it needs you know it'll be sunk into the ocean or somehow you know the earth will self write itself at an appropriate level if you think that methane is only going up by 2% and you find out it's getting near tripling then you have to sort of reconfigure your understanding of the situation similarly if you think that you know the earth's ice has been relatively stable and you find out that it's dramatically dropping then it can be you know it can violate your homeostasis and cause you to go through sort of a Piagetian accommodation rather than a simulation you have to go through like a conceptual change so we're not talking about all incremental cognitive changes but rather a re-centering a restructuring in sort of like Gestalt psychological terms we found empirically in study after study that the greater the distance between what you would predict a number to be and the feedback number the more you are likely to change in terms of your concepts about that and also your preferences so usually what we do is we look at policies like what you would prefer a number to be divided by what you understand the number to be and so like you might think that if things are okay that ratio is one because your sort of status quo but if what you find out to be true is vastly different than what you think it ought to be then people will actually change their policy they'll think that something that was just fine should be increased or decreased or vice versa something they thought really need to be changed is just fine so we find that in the abortion debate people end up caring a lot more about abortion after we give them our surprising statistic whereas in immigration people care a lot less because that number is is the opposite of alarming not necessarily that it should be but that's the way it's interpreted so definitely we find that the greater the distance between what one expects a number to be and what it turns out to be and then you might imagine because like one of the most benign numbers we ask is how much sleep does someone get during a day and it turns out it's like 6.9 hours in the United States and the most common guess is 7 hours so those .1 hours isn't going to dramatically change what you think about in terms of when we should turn the TV off or stop looking at screens and get better sleep so the magnitude of how far you're off really does matter unless it's something that you think you have no clue about anyway like how far we are from Pluto at this very moment you know if it's 100 million or 20 billion for a lot of people that's basically I know that's I couldn't tell one thing that actually a number of Americans find compelling is we we say in 1850 there were approximately 150 glaciers in our Glacier National Park and now there are this many and it turns out there are only 25 so people have that sense like wow 5, 6 of all the glaciers in the park that's named after glaciers that they can tell pretty soon it's going to be Glacierless National Park and there's a sense of regret and sadness that we're hoping will at least cause people to think about changing things so that that doesn't happen or is retarded misleading statistics are ones that you would have found in fossil fuel websites in fact some of them were actually inspired by mobile's website when it was denying climate change when one of my first doctoral students was working on environmental cognition he found this mobile website that was basically trying to feel the viewer's minds with misleading information so for instance one of the elements were did you know that they would have you believe that water is a greenhouse gas how could water be bad for you and of course the truth of the matter is that even water although it's fine in some numbers too much water is bad for you so you can actually die by drinking too much water let alone if a thousand pound block of ice fell on your head so it kind of depends you know it's like aspirin you know one aspirin is fine but a bottle of it is not and so again the parameterization is important one of the classic cherry-picked numbers was pointing out that there was a relatively plateauish period from 1940 to 1975 in terms of the earth's mean surface temperature and I'm still not 100% sure why that appears to be the case whether it's that we weren't getting great data from parts of the planet where we don't have probes like the Arctic, Antarctic and parts of Africa or if it's because we're not putting probes down in the marion's trench you know like deep ocean and so forth but for one reason or another there is this apparent plateau from 1940 to 1975 to the next extent data and so one of the things we do is we cherry-pick numbers there and we actually find two points where the temperature of the earth seems like it's dropped minus 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit and of course that's an extremely tiny amount especially when you think of temperature in the Kelvin scale you know you're talking about a 0.2 out of 600-ish and so those sorts of things I think can be compelling and indeed when we collated eight statistics of this sort of evil or misleading non-representative set we found that it was indeed enough to cause people to doubt global warming is occurring and in fact it really decreased people's their confidence about their knowledge about global warming so by using these cherry-picked statistics I think that those folks that are trying to cause some confusion about global warming they can be successful because in a relatively small number of statistics we found that we could diminish our participants confidence by about 50 percent which is really quite striking and I think that's sort of like the oh there's my partner in bed with the mail carrier kind of thing it's like well I thought this was all true and now I'm seeing these things that suggest otherwise we didn't find as much of a confidence change in the representative statistics but partly because even people who accept their climate change is happening are still surprised at how much evident it is in terms of the effects so I think there's kind of a potential asymmetry there where even if you're surprised by statistics that suggest global warming is occurring that's going to change your confidence a little bit so any surprise is going to drop your confidence in what you understand so if I told you that actually the average American gets 1.6 hours of sleep that should probably really change your confidence in your understanding about sleep right well how could that be true I'm sleeping way too much what are they doing you know what are they putting in their red bull over there so I think and you know you'd probably have to get a reasonably random sample of saintly or evil statistics to really tell if they're kind of comparable in their effect but you might imagine that the people who are going to be most changed are those that have completely drunk the Kool-Aid as we say that either they totally accept global warming and you give them these misleading statistics or the people that think that there's zero chance that the earth is even warming or has ever warmed and you show them these statistics so there's much more room for people to move of course if you're not dealing with a ceiling effect or a floor effect it's not hard to find misleading statistics of that sort in fact it was much easier easier for us to find misleading statistics than saintly statistics partly because I don't think that the that climatologists have done a good enough job at generating a message that is short and concise that would include like these statistics or the mechanism or our graphs that's why I think the mechanism is so important because when people are like yelling at each other whether it's through appeals to authority like in the United States you might have Rush Limbaugh claiming that this is a joke or Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma is a hoax and then you might have like Rachel Maddow or other people from the media who are saying well obviously you know the planet is heating up you know if you really don't have much of a sense of the science then you're sort of caught between these two different authorities and I think that's where mechanism is most critical as a tiebreaker because once you can see how we must be heating up by putting more more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere I think that allows people to navigate between them one of the contrasts that I engage in with respect to this is that I'll say let's say that you went to this isn't a terribly politically correct example but let's say that you went to a group of people say in the far reaches of the Amazon in like 1960 or something like that and this is a group of people who had never seen western technology and you try to explain to them look we have these things called toilets you know and they're really cool and they'll take your waste away and so maybe it sounds plausible to some of them but the spiritual leader of the group says don't believe him he's lying to you he's going to get better trade you know sort of terms for our pelts so what would you do in that case you know here let's say you're a member of the tribe here's this foreigner who has these interesting things and but here's your spiritual leader they're saying it's true it doesn't true it's not true so one thing that one might do as an explorer is to go to a river bank you know and take a stick and draw into the mud well this is what a toilet looks like so we have this tank water up here we have the bowl of water down here we've got pipes water comes in here water leaves there with the naughty bits the lesson pleasant stuff and so then you know if you're a tribes person you might think well you know that actually sounds plausible I can see how that would work and if you still don't believe it you know maybe the explorer can call down to receive a and have someone you know hike up this little model of the toilet and say look this is kind of how it works so eventually that mechanism will cause people to change their minds and I think that generally in most of the controversies that people discuss you know most of the potential controversies in science mechanism really doesn't matter right so if I told you about superconductivity or superfluidity you know you might think well that sounds okay because there's no one you know on TV you're saying don't believe those people would have you believe that superconductivity can occur or superfluidity or quantum tunneling or something like that they're lying to you so it's the only one there's a dispute that really the mechanism comes in the tiebreaker and then if there were a dispute you know then you'd have to say well this is exactly how superfluidity works and you'd have to explain it and but it turns out that most people don't know how to explain a whole bunch of things like I've asked a number of people lately they could explain why the earth is spherical and many people just like draw a blank you know and you'd think that's like one of the main tenets we know right we know that the earth is round you know it's spherical and yet well why is that the case why aren't we a cube why aren't we a tetrahedron what is it that makes us a sphere and virtually no one I've asked has ever really been asked that question or asked to account for that knowledge that we take as so central well it's probably a really important question back in the 1600s or 1450s or something like that right but now it's just something we take for granted and since there's no other side we don't have to know the mechanism of that and so it's really only things like evolution and global warming where the mechanism can really come in as a tiebreaker and that's why I think that our explanation of the mechanism makes it very salient and makes it what I call round world evident I would indicate that the basic mechanism of global warming is well understood in fact I'll read 35 words earth transforms sunlight's visible light energy into infrared light energy which leaves earth slowly because it is absorbed by greenhouse gases when people produce greenhouse gases energy leaves earth even more slowly raising earth's temperature so those 35 words are enough to get at least a gist you know of the mechanism and so I would suggest that there's virtually no dispute about that there is some dispute about again the parameterization that is how fast are we heating up how dangerous will it be for us to heat up and then the question of what we should do about it is still a little bit unclear I mean we have many options we know what we could do it's just a question of how much of that is palatable and economically the most feasible but one of the things I try to get across to people is that I actually think that we already have the solution to climate change that is I've seen some analyses that suggest that we spend about a trillion dollars a year as a species subsidizing fossil fuel in terms of you know hidden subsidies and so forth and that if we took only about half of that per year we could convert the entire planet to solar panels let alone wind power which is even cheaper so what we're really lacking is the political will so that people who are making money now are not the ones making money or they'll have to convert how they make money if they're going to make money in a newer economy with a more sustainable economic system much of it depends on what you're calling a subsidy but actually scholars on this campus have suggested that somewhere between 800 billion and 1.2 trillion dollars a year so I think it's reasonably good and when I was speaking to a Norwegian oil executive energy executive he was saying that we can convert now if we want to that it's really just the problem of people who are used to making money don't want to stop that I mean if you're Exxon or you're Chevron and you think you have a certain number of trillions of dollars of fossil fuels underground you are not going to be happy by saying oh let's just forget about all that stuff those assets actually are meaningless so we're going to just start doing wind power and solar now so you can imagine the motivation for people to not change especially if they think they have these assets that they want to reap and they're being told that perhaps that's not such a good idea so I think that the main thing is that we can fix this and I think that's really important because some studies have shown even on this campus by Feinberg and Willer I think that if you just tell people about the problems of global warming without suggesting solutions and people will turn off because they sort of have a learned helplessness response so I guess in my elevator pitch I'd say people should really learn the mechanism and the data whether it's the statistics or the graphs and that we can fix this and we should fix it and if we really care about our kids and our grandkids or even if you don't have kids if you care about mountains or fish or trees or even sort of a sense of aesthetics we should change this and that every person should look into their future and think about you know when they're near the end of their life when they're 90 are they going to look back and feel badly that they didn't do more when they could have and so that's what motivates me I want to do stuff now so that I'm not you know near my death bed and saying well if I just done a little bit more of that or something anyway well I've always been interested in sort of cognition about science even when I was an undergraduate I was interviewing physicists about various physical phenomena and I have an undergraduate major in microbiology my first publications were actually in applied physics and cryogenics and such and so I took a lot of chemistry and physics and biology and so I'm very much a scientist even more than I am a cognitive scientist or a psychologist I love the methodology and the justifications and epistemology of science so I've sort of been looking at scientific reasoning in a number of ways especially explain to our coherence how people come to grips with a large configuration of evidence hypotheses and competitions between bits of theory and such and that's what you have even in the abortion debate or in the immigration debate basically you've got this large complex of competing hypotheses with evidence and also I've been interested in how people deal with numbers and I've actually taught here on campus to journalists trying to get them to use numbers in a better way and doing better analytics so the particular hook into global warming was actually from evolution when I started to ponder why it is that Americans among most peer nations were least likely to accept evolution and I realized that a lot of that had to do with sort of religious religiousness and nationalism and then I found empirically that there's a positive correlation between people who accept evolution and global warming and that made me think well maybe some of the same analysis should be applied to global warming and that's one of the reasons why I started looking at it and it's more interesting to me in terms of science cognition than evolution because for say the average farmer maybe in Kansas or something like that it really doesn't matter so much if you accept evolution it could be that you deny it but you can still raise hogs and cattle and corn and even be using genetically modified corn that's based on evolutionary theory that you're denying but it's not going to change too much I mean there really isn't a huge downside for people ignoring evolution but if people ignore and deny global warming then that's going to have really bad effects for future generations of humans and other species and so it seems to me that that's why it's perhaps the world's biggest problem and since I study problem solving I might as well be working on one of the bigger ones than rather trivial ones My final question is how often have your ears bled to do you listening and reading so much on this topic? That was a phrase I used that's right well I think in particular when our ears were most close to bleeding was when we were developing the 400 words that explained the mechanism and I use that phrase often with respect to that because what we would do is well first whenever I engage in a new analysis of controversy whether it's abortion or immigration or evolution I like to write down and write like two relatively short essays about whether it's happening or it's not happening or it's good or it's not acceptable and in this case I found out that I really couldn't explain the mechanism of global warming to my satisfaction and I realized I'd probably only get like a B plus I would be in the zero of 270 San Diegans that we interviewed because I wouldn't have gotten even a good basic 35 word explanation so one of the things that I found out when I was trying to lay out for myself the mechanism of global warming that I would have been one of those 270 San Diegans that didn't really know it at a sufficient level at the 35 word level that I would have caused called even basic and so I did a little bit of research and then I wrote the rest of the explanation including the asymmetry between visible and infrared light and I thought wow I wonder how many people would know this and so I asked around and I thought well I should write this up for others and so we actually went to a physical chemist here on campus named Ron Cohen he's an excellent atmospheric chemist and we were involved in the grant proposal a while so I knew him and so I said Ron how does this read and you know like you might expect from a lot of climate scientists oh oh oh this is I gotta change you know okay so I'm taking notes and then I go back and I change it and so I try to put it into just plain people's talk and I brought it back to him and he said oh well you got to change it and I said okay okay so I went back and I did this in collaboration with a couple other people Lloyd Goldwasser and Daniel Reinholz and so finally I went back to Ron and I said what about now and he said yeah that's basically it and I think what's interesting is that most climate scientists can't find the sort of simple elements in explaining global warming and it's sort of like the paradox of the expert that we often find in cognition that is you know like I was a much better of skiing when I was a relative novice because I could remember what it was like for me not to know which way is downhill you know and so it's harder and harder sometimes to explain simple mechanisms when you've got more fancy ways of talking about it so like if you look at our 400 words you won't find a phrase like radiative forcing you won't even find albedo because studies of cognition like cycle linguistics indicate that as much as 50% of the processing time of a sentence can the variance of that can be swallowed up by using novel words so I figured better to use relative simple words that people can get through and understand and really come on to and try to show how fancy one is by using these as we used to say 50 cent words so I think that was really one of the ways in which we were working so hard our ears bled because we were trying to find a way that would be succinct and interpretable and in fact in our 400 words we have a summary and a shorter summary so the actual main content that is not summarized is probably closer to like 200 words and 300 words and so you can really get a sense of it in that and I think that's a difficulty that is many people if you were to ask a geneticist or a molecular biologist or someone else to explain evolution you know you'd hear a lot of fancy words and so I think one of the things that you want to get across to the public is a way in which they can understand it because you know you're really trying to inform not so much try to dazzle them and often you know the most eloquent, elegant things that you can portray can be gotten across with relatively simple language unless you know the concepts really warrant more I hope you've got a robust server then well it's robust enough so far anyway at least 7 billion but you never know if we get too political you know there might be a problem with people who've been hacking Sony and what not