Correct Me if I'm Wrong: Groups Outperform Individuals in the Climate Stabilization Task.

Belinda Xie,Mark J Hurlstone,Iain Walker

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02274

Belinda Xie, Mark J Hurlstone + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02274

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Abstract

Avoiding dangerous climate change requires ambitious emissions reduction. Scientists agree on this, but policy-makers and citizens do not. This discrepancy can be partly attributed to faulty mental models, which cause individuals to misunderstand the carbon dioxide (CO2) system. For example, in the Climate Stabilization Task (hereafter, “CST”) (Sterman and Booth-Sweeney, 2007), individuals systematically underestimate the emissions reduction required to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels, which may lead them to endorse ineffective “wait-and-see” climate policies. Thus far, interventions to correct faulty mental models in the CST have failed to produce robust improvements in decision-making. Here, in the first study to test a group-based intervention, we found that success rates on the CST markedly increased after participants deliberated with peers in a group discussion. The group discussion served to invalidate the faulty reasoning strategies used by some individual group members, thus increasing the proportion of group members who possessed the correct mental model of the CO2 system. Our findings suggest that policy-making and public education would benefit from group-based practices.

Highlights

To avoid dangerous climate change, average global temperature must not exceed a critical threshold, defined in the Paris Agreement as 1.5–2◦C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015)
Ethical approval to conduct the experiment was granted by the Human Ethics Office at the University of Western Australia (UWA) (RA/4/1/6298)
We sought to examine whether group reasoning could increase success rates on this task

Summary

Introduction

To avoid dangerous climate change, average global temperature must not exceed a critical threshold, defined in the Paris Agreement as 1.5–2◦C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015). In a democracy, implementing effective mitigation policy is a two-step challenge: policy-makers must craft appropriate policies and those policies must receive political and electoral support (Dreyer et al, 2015) Both steps require policy-makers, politicians, and citizens to understand the CO2 system. Someone who accepts the scientific consensus would: (1) recognize that global temperature is increasing, (2) attribute that increase to human CO2 emissions, and (3) predict that emitting more CO2 will further increase temperature. This knowledge structure is called a “mental model” (Sterman, 1994; Doyle and Ford, 1998). Crucial for decision-making, mental models are constrained by cognitive limits (Doyle and Ford, 1998; Sterman and Booth-Sweeney, 2002)

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