But you haven’t told me how to persuade!
People in my field have been gaining clients (or students) for several millennia now based on explicit or implicit promises to help them persuade their audiences. For example: science communication scholars are sought out for advice about how to persuade audiences that climate change is real, bad, imminent and anthropogenic. “Just tell me what to say–effective messaging strategies!” is a common request. I’ve always wanted to reply: “Well, it’s complicated, and maybe persuasion isn’t what you want to seek.” Now Dan O’Keefe, who is much wiser than me, has confirmed this response in a just-out paper informatively titled “Message Design Choices Don’t Make Much Difference to Persuasiveness and Can’t Be Counted On.”
Read the rest of this entry »Stop looking for specks of climate skepticism
Since it’s Sunday, I feel called to preach. My text:
Why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? (New Living Translation)
Here are some specks and logs that showed up in this week’s #scicomm stream of thought.
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Why do people (scientists) think there is a “war on science”?–Bibliography
Point 4 in my project “unilateral disarmament” considers why the story about beleaguered science is so prevalent. I will collect here scholarship potentially relevant to the issue, focusing on studies of science/environmental communication.
Post & Ramirez (2018): Scientists’ (mis)perceptions of press bias induce advocacy in response
In my overarching project Unilateral Disarmament in the “War on Science” I claim that (4) cognitive biases lead scientists to faulty perceptions of attacks on science, and that (3) in response, scientists adopt communication strategies which, far from alleviating, tend to exacerbate the “war.”
This study by Post & Ramirez of German climate scientists provides some intriguing evidence for these two claims.
Responsibility for polar bear arguments
Harvey et al., “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy” (2017) identifies an argumentative strategy used by those who question the links between climate change, arctic sea ice, and declining polar bear populations (TWQ):
the main strategy of denier blogs is therefore to focus on topics that are showy and in which it is therefore easy to generate public interest. These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.”
Stripping this of its mixed metaphors, the claim is: TWQ claim that by refuting the arguments about polar bears put forward by those on the side of the authors (or angels, TOTSOTA), they are refuting the existence and significance of AGW.
I think this is an accurate statement of one TWQ argumentative strategy which (unlike Harvey et al.) I will document below. However, Harvey et al. are mistaken in taking this strategy to be illegitimate. Quite the contrary: the TWQ strategy is a well-justified and strategic response to the case made by TOTSOTA. To throw in another metaphor: TWQ polar bear arguments are TOTSOTA chickens coming home to roost.