Journalists examine the “solution aversion” response to climate science

A 10 November New York Magazine article publicized a new name for an old climate-politics phenomenon. The headline said “‘Solution aversion’ can help explain why some people don’t believe in climate change.” The term comes from the academic paper “Solution aversion: On the relation between ideology and motivated disbelief” in the November issue of the paywalled Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (The abstract is freely available. The coauthors’ institution, Duke University, published a press release deemed worthy by New York Times science columnist Andrew Revkin. It appears also at Phys.org.)

In examining the new term and the academic study, magazine author Jesse Singal joined writers at several other publications, including Wired , the Huffington Post , the Daily Kos , the New York Times , the Washington Post and Newsmax .

Six weeks earlier, Singal had linked social science to climate technopolitics in a piece headlined “Psychologists are learning how to convince conservatives to take climate change seriously.” His conclusion echoed the surmise that figures, for example, in the commonly heard argument that climate solutions can build new industries and create new jobs. Singal wrote:

In his November article, Singal wrote:

Singal calls solution aversion “an intriguing new idea” and believes the study opens up “a promising new avenue for explaining why people come to such different conclusions” on climate. Newsmax emphasized that perceived newness via the verb in its headline: “Research reveals root of GOP aversion to climate science.” And indeed the academic study itself—a full copy of which coauthor Campbell kindly e-mailed to me—uses the word novel a few times. It qualifies the newness claim, however, at the end, where it stipulates that “although the solution aversion model proposed and tested here offers a novel perspective, it does so in a way that also complements much previous theory and research.”

Campbell explained to me that solution aversion “puts a label and framework around a concept that has been suggested generally by motivated reasoning theory and more directly by some recent work in motivated skepticism of environmental science.” He added that the “contribution of this project comes in the way it synthesizes past work, provides controlled empirical tests in multiple domains, and shows how these biases may manifest in some of the most debated issues of modern times.”

In a blog posting headlined “Conservatives don’t hate climate science. They hate the left’s climate solutions,” the Washington Post‘s Chris Mooney treated the newness claim in much the same way. He wrote that the study “teases out a key factor that, while not inconsistent with [other] explanations, definitely helps us better understand what is going on.” But he also declared that “the new paper definitely adds to the mountain of evidence suggesting that conservatives reject modern climate science because they think that it implies a series of policies that they find unacceptable.”

At the New York Times, Dot Earth science columnist Revkin has recognized that mountain of evidence for a long time. He monitors, assesses, and reports on the evolving states of climate science and climate politics. In 2011, he lamented what he called “the mixing of basic science with policy prescriptions.” For years, he wrote, “climate campaigners, and some climate scientists,” had been falling into the “trap” of “mashing up climate science and pre-selected energy solutions in one conversation, sometimes a single sentence.” He recalled reporting in a 2009 column that climate scientist Ken Caldeira worried about “describing policy prescriptions as if they’re a scientific conclusion.” In the 2011 column Revkin summed up: “There are ways to discuss both climate science and energy and pollution policy cogently and constructively. But this requires parsing if the goal is engagement and not deeper divisions.”

Revkin came back to the mountain of evidence in his 10 November 2014 column “How ‘solution aversion’ and global warming prescriptions polarize the climate debate.” It urged anyone “eager to understand, and move past, the deep political polarization around global warming” to explore Campbell’s and Kay’s findings. He linked back to a 2013 column that opened by describing a study showing “how polarization over the merits of cutting greenhouse gas emissions appears to torque the behavior of conservatives away from common-sense energy choices.” His 14 November 2014 column brought it all up again. He wrote, “On the environmental left, a tendency to mash up messaging on science and preferred liberal policy prescriptions has unnecessarily deepened the public divide over addressing human-driven climate change.” He even made his mash-up point in an online comment beneath Mooney’s Washington Post piece.

At the end of that piece, Mooney observes that “we probably shouldn’t assume based on [the Campbell and Kay study] that running out and singing the praises of clean energy and green tech, framed as a free-market solution, would actually work to depolarize the climate issue.” His final line emphasizes: “Still, it is very useful to bear in mind that often, when we appear to be debating science and facts, what we’re really disagreeing about is something very different.”

---

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.