Nah, even really smart people can be tricked by propaganda. Human brains love patterns and propaganda works best by shoving information into your face multiple times over multiple sources. And when you see things from multiple sources saying the same thing, you’re very likely to believe it.
When the science part of the brain sees information going against the beliefs held dearly, the science part just short circuits and starts twisting logic and facts into a pretzel until it fits the beliefs.
I highly recommend the book Influence by Cialdini. It covers in detail the science and psychology behind advertising and propaganda. Nobody is immune to it.
Very few of us are actually climate scientists. So ultimately we end up putting our trust in people who know more about it than we do.
Only some basic science knowledge is required to get the gist of what climate change is about. So it is easy enough for a non-scientist to understand what the causes are, roughly how it happens, and what the likely effects are. But it is also easy to ‘understand’ various alternative arguments about how the evidence is flawed or the effects won’t matter, or that it is actually caused by something else, or whatever.
Each person can be manipulated at the point where their own understand starts to get blurry. For many people, that’s means they are manipulated by some really basic crap - because they don’t know much in the first place. But people who know more about science can still be tricked and mislead by just some more advanced contrived science-like reasoning just on the boundaries of what the person already understands.
And that’s why the anti-action arguments seems to have an endless number of layers. Including ‘its not happening’, ‘it’s happening by it is due to natural cycles not humans’, ‘it is caused by humans, but it is not harmful’, ‘it’s harmful, but manageable’, ‘it’s harmful and totally unavoidable and therefore we should ignore it’; and so on. The arguments are often contradictory, but they are actually aimed at different groups of people.
But if they understood the science they wouldn’t get tricked by propaganda?
Nah, even really smart people can be tricked by propaganda. Human brains love patterns and propaganda works best by shoving information into your face multiple times over multiple sources. And when you see things from multiple sources saying the same thing, you’re very likely to believe it.
When the science part of the brain sees information going against the beliefs held dearly, the science part just short circuits and starts twisting logic and facts into a pretzel until it fits the beliefs.
I highly recommend the book Influence by Cialdini. It covers in detail the science and psychology behind advertising and propaganda. Nobody is immune to it.
Very few of us are actually climate scientists. So ultimately we end up putting our trust in people who know more about it than we do.
Only some basic science knowledge is required to get the gist of what climate change is about. So it is easy enough for a non-scientist to understand what the causes are, roughly how it happens, and what the likely effects are. But it is also easy to ‘understand’ various alternative arguments about how the evidence is flawed or the effects won’t matter, or that it is actually caused by something else, or whatever.
Each person can be manipulated at the point where their own understand starts to get blurry. For many people, that’s means they are manipulated by some really basic crap - because they don’t know much in the first place. But people who know more about science can still be tricked and mislead by just some more advanced contrived science-like reasoning just on the boundaries of what the person already understands.
And that’s why the anti-action arguments seems to have an endless number of layers. Including ‘its not happening’, ‘it’s happening by it is due to natural cycles not humans’, ‘it is caused by humans, but it is not harmful’, ‘it’s harmful, but manageable’, ‘it’s harmful and totally unavoidable and therefore we should ignore it’; and so on. The arguments are often contradictory, but they are actually aimed at different groups of people.