Documenting the Mechanisms of Belief and Attitude Change on Controversial Issues: The Case of Global Warming and Trust in Scientists

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Decades of research have suggested that Americans' opinions on political issues change very slowly over years. Sudden large shifts in the percent of people who hold a particular view occur only very rarely and only in response to dramatic events that capture the attention of the entire nation, such as the September 11 attacks. Recently, a challenge to this view has been posited in the domain of climate change. During a period of just two years, some observers have viewed national surveys as indicating that large proportions of Americans have changed their personal opinions about the existence of global warming. If true, this would represent a significant challenge to existing theories of public opinion change and would merit a revision of those theories so that they more accurately capture the processes that produce such change.This project is designed to investigate whether such theoretical amendments are required. To do so, two new surveys monitor short-term change in public opinion explore the causes of whatever opinion change has occurred in recent months. Furthermore, experiments test hypotheses about the impact of question wording changes on the appearance of over-time shifts in beliefs and preferences on this issue. Statistical analyses explore the possibility that local weather conditions at the time of the survey interviews and preceding those interviews have influenced the expressed beliefs of some respondents. To document the impact of recent events, some respondents (chosen randomly) in an Internet survey are exposed to news stories about the East Anglia emails and the questionable aspects of the IPCC reports, and other respondents do not see such stories. All respondents then report their personal opinions on a wide range of related issues. This approach documents the causal impact of such messages in the current information environment.This project will have value not just because it will help document and explain changes in politically relevant perceptions and preferences in a charged policy environment, but also because it will help to illuminate psychological processes of great policy relevance at the moment. Many policy-makers are said to be reacting strongly to the recent opinion polls on climate change, often by pulling back on their willingness to support legislation aimed at ameliorating climate change, because these legislators perceive the American public to be increasingly unwilling to support such efforts. A collateral benefit of the research proposed here is that it will help these legislators to interpret the widely-publicized poll results, to become increasingly sensitive to the impact of scientific methodology of survey findings, and to plan their legislative efforts based upon veridical rather than misleading claims about what the American public believes and what it wants its government to implement in this arena.