The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks

By Dan Kahan, Ellen Peters, M. Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, Gregory N. Mandel. 2012

2,025 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/218b6d23317bd0fc8b735b9cc4fa27545a103139

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Climate change awareness: Empirical evidence for the European Union (2020, background): “This finding is fully consistent with previous evidence in the literature (Kahan et al., 2011; Kahan et al., 2012), pointing to various explanations, ranging from cognitive bias and self-denial to elitist cultural worldviews and conflict of interest.”
The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science (2013, background): “Second, a striking feature of the opposition to climate science is that worldview-driven polarization often increases with greater levels of education [3] and greater science literacy [17], suggesting that the opposition reflects a cognitive style rather than a deficit of knowledge or ability.”
Determinants and Measurement of Climate Change Risk Perception, Worry, and Concern (2017, background): “The more recently developed cultural cognition scales have also shown to influence climate change risk perception (e.g., Kahan et al., 2012).”
Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government (2017, methodology): “The former tend to be more ‘conservative’ and ‘Republican’, the latter more ‘liberal’ and ‘Democratic’, although individuals with strong worldviews or orientations of this sort are not in fact highly partisan (Kahan et al., 2012).”
Everyday Consequences of Analytic Thinking (2015, positive): “In contrast, analytic thinking polarizes preexisting opinions about anthropogenic global warming (Kahan et al., 2012), perhaps because it is a very politically charged issue that is highly susceptible to motivated reasoning (i.”
Perceptions and responses to climate policy risks among California farmers (2013, background): “However, it is important to consider that broader individual values such as political ideology may influence both the formation of beliefs about climate change and perceptions of past environmental policies (Kahan et al., 2012).”
Attitudes Towards Science (2018, background): “Moreover, in doing so, we controlled for moral concerns, scientific literacy (see Hayes & Tariq, 2000; Kahan et al., 2012), and demographic variables, and we included measures of general faith in science (Farias, Newheiser, Kahane, & de Toledo, 2013) and a behavioral measure of willingness to…”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “Most notably, partisans differ in what they believe about the world, even when it comes to so-called 'factual beliefs' – beliefs that relate to facts or empirical evidence [28], such as in the case of global warming [126].”
What Dilemma? Moral Evaluation Shapes Factual Belief (2013, result): “That individuals who feel informed about an issue also show greater moral–factual coordination is reminiscent of an effect found in a number of recent studies suggesting that, contrary to most people’s initial intuitions, ideological biases are more rather than less pronounced with increasing politi”
Conflicting values: ecosystem services and invasive tree management (2013, background): “Sceptics of environmental issues are frequently highly educated and scientifically literate, with conflict driven by fundamental values, not lack of knowledge (Kahan et al. 2012).”
Framing Climate Change: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Generating Advocacy Behavior (2018, background): “However, subsequent evidence clearly indicated that individuals’ ideology, not their knowledge, best predicts climate change attitudes and behavior (Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; Nisbet, Cooper, & Ellithorpe, 2014), and the individuals highest in science knowledge are the most polarized abou”
Climate change skepticism among adolescents (2015, background): “However, this view is too simplistic, because, for example, worldviews and values seem to be more important than scientific knowledge when it comes to climate change perception (Kahan et al. 2012).”
Statements about climate researchers’ carbon footprints affect their credibility and the impact of their advice (2016, background): “Previous scholarship addresses ad hominem arguments (Walton 1998) and has looked specifically at communication of climate science related to conflicts of interests between the individual and the collective (Kahan et al. 2012; Nordhagen et al. 2014).”
Can science literacy help individuals identify misinformation in everyday life? (2020, background): “Kahan et al. (2012) found that science knowledge and numeracy (the ability to comprehend and use quantitative information) affected the perceived risk of climate change in ways that depended on participants' cultural world views.”
Psychological Barriers to Energy Conservation Behavior: The Role of Worldviews and Climate Change Risk Perception (2018, background): “, hierarchical individualist, hierarchical communitarian, egalitarian individualist, and egalitarian communitarian) according to each person’s location on a grid-group map (see Kahan, 2012; Kahan, Braman, Gastil, Slovic, & Mertz, 2007; Kahan et al., 2012).”