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1. Bridging the divide: The effect of individuating information on attitudes toward political outgroup members

   https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.8217  

   Koetke, Jonah; Conrique, Beverly G.; Schumann, Karina (November 2023, Journal of Social and Political Psychology)

   Mari, Silvia (Ed.)

   Liberals and conservatives in the United States exhibit intergroup bias toward those on the other side. In three preregistered experiments (N = 1,389), we examined the bias-reducing benefits of individuating members of the political outgroup by providing people with individuating information—information that provides knowledge about them beyond their group membership, such as their social roles, emotions, and personality. Studies 1 and 2 extended work on individuating information into this domain by testing its impact on a novel political outgroup member. Study 3 broke new ground by testing whether the benefits of learning individuating information can extend to additional members of the outgroup. Each methodology revealed that, compared to those who read non-individuating controls, participants who learned individuating information about a political outgroup member were less hostile and more empathic toward that outgroup member. The current studies thus identify a promising avenue for reducing interparty hostility. 

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2. Broadcast Meteorologists’ Views on Climate Change: A State-of-the-Community Review

   https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-19-0003.1  

   Perkins, David R.; Timm, Kristin; Myers, Teresa; Maibach, Edward (April 2020, Weather, Climate, and Society)

   Abstract Broadcast meteorologists—highly skilled professionals who work at the intersection between climate scientists and the public—have considerable opportunity to educate their viewers about the local impacts of global climate change. Prior research has shown that, within the broadcast meteorology community, views of climate change have evolved rapidly over the past decade. Here, using data from three census surveys of U.S. broadcast meteorologists conducted annually between 2015 and 2017, is a comprehensive analysis of broadcast meteorologists’ views about climate change. Specifically, this research describes weathercasters’ beliefs about climate change and certainty in those beliefs, perceived causes of climate change, perceived scientific consensus and interest in learning more about climate change, belief that climate change is occurring (and the certainty of that belief), belief that climate change is human caused, perceptions of any local impacts of climate change, and perceptions of the solvability of climate change. Today’s weathercaster community appears to be sharing the same viewpoints and outlooks as most climate scientists—in particular, that climate change is already affecting the United States and that present-day trends are largely a result of human activity. 

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3. The causal impact of local weather anomalies on beliefs about the occurrence of climate change

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/acffae  

   Carlson, Deven; Ripberger, Joseph; Jenkins-Smith, Hank; Silva, Carol; Carlson, Nina; Bell, Elizabeth; Gupta, Kuhika (November 2023, Environmental Research Communications)

   Abstract Research has demonstrated that members of the public recognize anomalous weather patterns, and that subjective perceptions of the weather are related to beliefs about the occurrence of climate change. Yet despite two decades of scholarship and dozens of studies, inconsistent and insufficient data have made it difficult to credibly identify the causal impact of objective experiences on perceptions, and the impact of perceptions on beliefs regarding climate change occurrence. Here, we overcome these limitations by collecting and analyzing data from a 5-y panel survey of 2,500 individuals in Oklahoma, a US state that is highly divided on questions about climate change. Our findings indicate that the relationship between local weather anomalies and climate change beliefs is heavily dependent on baseline beliefs about whether climate change was occurring. For people who did not believe in climate change in the initial survey in our series, perceptions of anomalously hot and dry seasons shifted their beliefs towards the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change, whereas their perceptions of anomalously cool and wet seasons shifted their beliefs away from anthropogenic climate change. This relationship was not present among people who believed that climate change was occurring at the beginning of the study; their perceptions of seasonal temperature and precipitation anomalies had no effect on their beliefs about climate change. These patterns have substantial implications for the evolution of public beliefs about climate change. 

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4. Crowdsourcing to analyze belief systems underlying social issues

   Priniski, J. A.; Holyoak, K. J. (January 2020, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   People’s beliefs and attitudes about social and scientific issues, such as capital punishment and climate change, appear to form complex but generally coherent networks. Understanding the nature of these networks is a prerequisite for designing interventions for changing beliefs on the basis of rational arguments and evidence. It is therefore important to develop methods to represent and analyze the form and nature of belief networks, which may not be explicitly verbalizable. Adopting an emerging approach that utilizes crowdsourcing to develop educational interventions, we mined discussions from the Reddit forum Change My View to determine which beliefs and types of information underlie people’s attitudes about capital punishment. By combining computational analyses based on a topic model with more qualitative assessments of the extracted topics, we found that moral arguments are more prevalent than statistical or data-based arguments. The present study serves as a test case for the open sourced software crowdpy, a Python toolkit for running naturalistic studies on the web, which will enable other researchers to use crowdsourcing in their research. This approach sets the stage for research exploring potential interventions to change people’s beliefs. 

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5. The belief that politics drive scientific research & its impact on COVID-19 risk assessment

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249937  

   McLaughlin, Danielle M.; Mewhirter, Jack; Sanders, Rebecca (April 2021, PLOS ONE)

   Gesser-Edelsburg, Anat (Ed.)

   We use survey data collected from 12,037 US respondents to examine the extent to which the American public believes that political motives drive the manner in which scientific research is conducted and assess the impact that such beliefs have on COVID-19 risk assessments. We find that this is a commonly held belief and that it is negatively associated with risk assessments. Public distrust in scientists could complicate efforts to combat COVID-19, given that risk assessments are strongly associated with one’s propensity to adopt preventative health measures. 

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