 My name is Rithan Mitra. I work at North Carolina State University. My research focus is climate change communication. Cultural cognition has come out of Yale University and Dan Cahan is one of the big proponents. But the theory in its nascent form was there from the 1980s where Doug Wilson-Wildersky first suggested that we think according to our cultures and our understanding is largely clouded by what our cultural worldviews are. And so there is this two models like one is cultural cognition and one is a knowledge deficit. Knowledge deficit is like we don't understand there's this consensus gap because people don't understand the science. So yeah so there is a balance somewhere and then we don't know exactly what the balance is like between culture and knowledge. Again going back to the work of Doug Wilson-Wildersky where they say that we can group people according to foreign members that is hierarchist, egalitarian, communitarian and individualistic. So depending on our but very simply it's more like you can group them as Democrats and Republicans. So there is a correlation but it's not like one-to-one. So cultural cognition is like saying Democrats will believe in climate change because that is where what their cultural worldview or political worldview if you will that dictates them to believe in climate change and Republicans on the other hand will become more sceptic. But the interesting thing about cultural cognition is they say that if you give them more literacy if you educate the Republicans they will become even more skeptical. So that's the interesting bit and the reason for that is people use a motivated cognition bias so they're using their education to actually promote their cultural worldview rather than using it to be knowledgeable about the whole thing. Why would someone use their political worldview to understand science? That's because the entire debate on climate change has been politically charged for a long time so people there is a partisanship inbuilt into the whole debate. So people normally tend to think in terms of partisan kind of a basis. They attribute a partisanship to the whole problem of whole issue of climate change. So that is where it comes from and it has been observed with a few other topics like vaccines and which have been politically charged or by the media. Media has played a big role in this. So over the years it was not initially a very politically charged topic but over the years it became politically charged because there are two sides to two different views of the debate. It's probably about anti-business. It started from there. Also the religious part of it and religion is also tied to conservatism. So there's this whole connection and there are a few different feedbacks playing into the whole debate. Framing does play a very important role. An entire body of research exists as to when you are talking to a particular group like evangelicals. You would want to frame it in a particular context. Catherine Hayhoe has done a beautiful job of doing that in that recent documentary which came out. So yeah, there has been some work on that as well. How to frame it properly for two different tiles. Some of your research has shown actually yours and Lewandowski which shows that 97% if you tell people that 97% of climate scientists agree with this climate change is real then people start believing more. So that itself shows that there is some aspect of knowledge playing into the whole thing. There is probably it's not like we don't think according to our cultures. There is definitely a gap between Republican and Democrats and we all know that but the part which I'm not sure about is if you educate people do they really become more skeptical? Do they really use their use their culture? Use the science to promote their culture. That part is not well established. Knowledge depends on what you are measuring. What is knowledge to use? So if you're asking someone questions totally unrelated to understanding of climate change then it's not supposed to show any correlation with risk perception. Kahan used a 22 item set to measure literacy and he found out that well there is no correlation that knowledge actually is not helping but then there are a few other studies like one by Stevenson et al in 2014 which shows that if you are using climate change questions then the relationship is there that with more literacy skepticism goes down and there are the studies as well. So it is dependent on what you are measuring. Is it something related to climate or something totally numeracy or basic science which is not related to climate at all? It's not education which is polarizing. It's the type of education that's the very big take home point. So if you are looking at only educating someone with number skills then that's not going to help. I think that's the biggest take home point. I would say a lot of systems thinking. Thinking of climate as a big connected system where there are feedback loops, inefficiencies and the traditional way of doing science or math is like breaking down a big problem into smaller bits and then solving them independently and it's kind of like those bits add up to the big problem but systems thinking is looking at problems from a holistic point of view and it's like 2 plus 2 adding to 5. So there are some inefficiencies in the system and if you look at each discrete part you will not be able to get the answer correct. Communication and education should go hand in hand. It's not like the communicators are doing a really bad job of taking the science to the public. Well we can improve definitely but there is there also has to be a somewhat kind of a receptive frame of mind so that people understand what the scientists are talking about. I agree that the scientists can do a better job and the communicators can help them in doing that job but if you don't have the right set of skills, if the public doesn't have the right set of skills to understand that okay the climate is a big connected system and there are a lot of fuzziness and we don't understand. There are uncertainties but that doesn't mean we know nothing. So these are concepts which the public should know to really grasp what's going on. Harping about okay the uncertainties are there and trying to I think we have done a lot of progress with that and we still need to go do more but we also need to educate the public about what is uncertainty, how we look at the system and if that is not there then I don't think that only communication can help. Education has two different things so it's best to do it at the same time because if it's like I think of it like if you're not getting aware of something it's like a it's a two-body problem sort of like okay someone is someone has a message and someone has to understand the message and you can work on the message as much as you can but if this person doesn't have that capacity to both of them should work together. So I guess education will be working with this group and communication with the other group and then we can talk. Yeah I don't know if there are there's like this one thing we can do to address this problem. I think a lot of people agree with that's a good thing that's a good start and there will always be a few skeptics so one point of view which I somewhat subscribe to is let's work with what we have let's work with the people who are agreeing with we are who are getting that okay yeah climate change is real and there is a big number of people who actually think that you know climate change is real and so and there will be skeptics and we should keep working on them like okay giving them some education trying to address their questions as much as we can but let's not fixate on on that let's move with what we have. There has been improvement over the years not as much as we would expect so the consensus gap it's still there but there has been some progress and my worry is if we focus too much on the skeptics then we are not working with what we already have some of the consensus we have and I guess that's a balance to strike so some of our effort should also be focused on you know how to move forward how to move forward from this okay whether it's happening or not happening there is a big group of people who agree with the climate change the big debate that yeah it's happening it's real and scientists agree and we are with you so yeah I agree that we need to work with them more and focus our energy more on how to move forward and not get too bogged down with this smaller group of people and we should keep working on them but not focus our entire energy on that smaller group of people so my area of research is a climate change understanding communication that's the big area of research and this particular problem there was this actually this paper by Dan Cahan got me interested into this whole topic and I was like well that's a very interesting result that if you if you are educating people they're using their culture that education to promote their culture and that was very interesting to me so I started looking more into it and that's how I got involved also it's a very challenging problem and it's a very relevant problem instead of working on something which is which is scientifically relevant and but this is a very present and real danger we are facing so that kind of motivated me into into getting more into this this question everything we have to we have a big role to play the choices we make every day that is definitely affecting future generations so we might not be able to see it in our lifetime the choices we make how it's or we might be we are pretty close to that stage but and that is where again you know geoscience come into play because the concept of deep time how the choices we make today can have an effect like down like decades from today and how little bit of accumulation can lead to bigger accumulation in the future so that again is making people aware that this kind of the system works in a slightly different way than you cannot point the remote to a TV and switch it on it's not like as the feedback is not as quick so there is a delay there is a time gap we have a big role to play and it's the best that we try and understand how the system behaves