GROUPTHINK HIVE MIND informs climate change believers (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 06:20

Both sides of the climate change debate tend towards group conciousness and define their positions based, in part, on hating the other side of the argument, according to a letter published in Nature: Climate Change.

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities(PDF), penned by folks from Monash University, the University of Western Sydney, Murdoch University and Flinders University is based on an online survey conducted among a random sample of US residents, 120 of whom identified as climate change sceptics and 328 as believers .

The paper posits that debate about climate change might be “an intergroup conflict between two groups with conflicting views … (rather than between scientists and sections of the public). The authors therefore tried to assess respondents' “social identification” with others who share their view and level of anger with their ideological opponents. The survey also tried to examine “group efficacy beliefs”, a measure of faith in one's chosen cause.

FULL STORY