Добірка наукової літератури з теми "Climate change; public understanding of science; discursive psychology"

New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here “landscapes” a debate by displaying key “webby” relationships between organizations. “Debate-scaping” plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperlinking as well as their discursive affinities. The underlying claim is that hyperlinking and discursive maps provide a semblance of given socio-epistemic networks on the web. The climate change debate on the web in November 1998 serves as a test case. Three findings are reported. First, distinctive .com, .gov and .org linking styles were found. Second, organizations take care in making hyperlinks, leading to the premise that the hyperlinks (and the “missing links”) reveal which issue and debate framings organizations acknowledge, and find acceptable and unacceptable. Finally, it was learned that organizations take substantive positions and address other organizations' positions. Thus, we found the makings of a “debate” that may be mapped. Scenarios of use to support new public participation techniques and experiments are discussed by way of conclusion.

Publicly funded broadcasters with a track record in science programming would appear ideally placed to represent climate change to the lay public. Free from the constraints of vested interests and the economic imperative, public service providers are better equipped to represent the scientific, social and economic aspects of climate change than commercial media, where ownership conglomeration, corporate lobbyists and online competition have driven increasingly tabloid coverage with an emphasis on controversy. This prime-time snapshot of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s main television channel explores how the structural/rhetorical conventions of three established public service genres – a science programme, a documentary and a live public affairs talk show – impact on the representation of anthropogenic climate change. The study findings note implications for public trust, and discuss possibilities for innovation in the interests of better public understanding of climate change.

This theoretical article approaches Christian religious denominations within which skeptical arguments with regard to vaccination and climate change are developed. These two types of skeptical positioning towards science are rooted in postmodernity, and manifest themselves as similar phenomena. Religion, as a social institution, fulfills the need for meaning, community, and responds to uncertainties generated by science developments. By conducting a thematic synthesis of previous literature, I identify analytical themes that capture the theoretical approaches on religiosity as a justification resource for vaccine hesitancy and climate change denial. These two types of science skepticism are supported and encouraged by some religious actors, who provide discursive resources anchored in interpretations of religious dogma. The knowledge deficit model, which is largely used for information campaigns on vaccination and climate change, impedes the understanding of the role of socio-cultural resources, such as religiosity, in popularizing science skepticism, and distorts knowledge of this social phenomenon. Understanding the social construction of skeptical positions towards science, as well as the institutional role of religion, contributes to better public communication on scientific topics. Despite religious arguments for vaccine refusal and exploitation of the natural environment, religiosity can also sustain pro-scientific views. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have the potential to provide avenues for transcending the religion vs. science antagonism, by involving religious leaders in promoting scientific information and scientific products, such as vaccination.

Using interviews with residents of Idaho (a rural northwest US state) who identify as skeptical of climate change, we examine how skeptics rationalize their doubts about climate science. Skeptics tend to question the reality and human causes of climate change by (1) raising concerns about incentive structures in science that could bias climatology, (2) doubting the accuracy of data and models used by climate scientists, and (3) perceiving some practices of climate science and scientists as exclusionary. Despite these concerns, skeptics exhibit deference to scientific authority when using scientific assessments to make policy decisions, including environmental policy. Understanding skeptics’ concerns about climate science and areas where they support science-based policy, will lead to better dialogue between scientists, interest groups, policy makers, and the skeptical public, potentially clarifying avenues to communicate climate information and enact climate policy.

This article outlines pedagogical practices and methodologies for increasing student engagement in the classroom and in the broader community on the topic of climate change. The emphases are placed on (1) preliminary assessments of student understanding and emotional responses to the topic of climate change, (2) assignments that enable student groups to assess and increase campus-wide awareness of various aspects of climate change, and (3) public engagement and service-learning opportunities that allow students to expand their impact beyond the local campus and into their broader community. These practices have proven effective, for large format lecture courses as well as smaller seminar-style courses, in encouraging student participation, overcoming apathy and motivating student effort and action far beyond what can be stimulated by traditional classroom assignments and assessments.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change exists and is caused by human activity. It has been argued that communicating the consensus can counter climate scepticism, given that perceived scientific consensus is a major factor predicting public belief that climate change is anthropogenic. However, individuals may hold different models of science, potentially affecting their interpretation of scientific consensus. Using representative surveys in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Norway, we assessed whether the relationship between perceived scientific consensus and belief in anthropogenic climate change is conditioned by a person’s viewing science as ‘the search for truth’ or as ‘debate’. Results show that perceived scientific consensus is higher among climate change believers and moreover, significantly predicts belief in anthropogenic climate change. This relationship is stronger among people holding a model of science as the ‘search for truth’. These results help to disentangle the effect of implicit epistemological assumptions underlying the public understanding of the climate change debate.

In this paper, we put forward a proposal for the design and the evaluation of teaching–learning sequences (TLSs) on the greenhouse effect (GHE), relying on the educational reconstruction model (MER). The first design, which starts from a critical analysis of textbook treatments of the GHE, is followed by a cyclic, recursive process, which consists of theoretical reflection, conceptual analysis, design, and test of a sequence. At each iteration, the analysis of the students’ learning progression provided relevant information for addressing the persistent hurdles and misunderstandings that affect it. Our findings show how design choices can support the learning of the GHE, leading to the formulation of design principles that help foster understanding. The iterative approach strongly improved the design and evaluation and allowed for a significant refinement of the TLSs. The implementation and evaluation process, which went on from 2017 to 2021, involved undergraduate students attending a course on “experimental physics laboratory” at the University of Trento in those years. The results indicate that, in the end, students can reach an effective understanding of the physical grounds of the GHE.

Musicians and music psychologists are acutely aware of the power of music and its ability to influence our emotions, moods, thoughts, wellbeing, identity, and behaviour towards others. Indeed, music is often used to help address specific problems, especially within health and wellbeing. The problem of climate change is becoming increasingly well-established in public discourse, and yet individuals frequently fail to act in an environmentally-friendly manner. Within the field of environmental psychology, several empirically-based theories have been developed to aid the understanding of why individuals behave in the ways that they do in relation to the environment. This article examines a selection of these theories, and makes an attempt to identify areas in which research in music psychology provides evidence to suggest that music could play a role in influencing environment-related beliefs and behaviours.

Cities both large and small, more and less economically advanced, are deeply involved in efforts to address the most challenging and complex issues of contemporary global governance, ranging from climate change and conditions of insecurity to human migration and public health. Yet this puzzling phenomenon is largely ignored within International Relations (IR) scholarship, and only partially theorized by scholars working in other fields of inquiry. Our premise in this article is that attempts to understand and assess city participation in world politics are augmented by focusing on the global identity of the city, since understanding what cities do in world politics is shaped by who cities (think they) are on the global stage. In proposing a subtle shift, from the passively labeled global city to what we call the globally engaged city, we direct analysis to the political and discursive forces shaping, delimiting, and informing this novel role for the city as a world-political actor. We propose that city identity is now fractured into local and global dimensions and set out two analytically distinct contexts in which the global identity of the city is forged through a process of differentiation from the nation-state. Our framework highlights in particular the politics of recognition shaping how the globally engaged city is defined and diffused. Through two empirical vignettes we illustrate the value of our framework as a means for IR scholarship to bring cities in from the analytic hinterlands and better understand their (potential) impact on the world stage.

Society is undergoing a transformation in the way people consume media: increasingly we are using online on-demand videos, with the fastest growing segment of online videos about science being user-generated content that uses an infotainment style of delivery, in contrast to the traditional expository narrations of professionally generated content. In this study, we produced two otherwise identical videos about climate change to test the effects of an infotainment or expository narration. A total of 870 survey participants (419 English; 451 Spanish) were randomly presented with either an infotainment or expository version of the video. The expository narration was liked and believed more, and this held irrespective of language, age, sex or online viewing habits. However, the infotainment version was liked more by viewers without a university education and, further, viewers were better able to recall information from it, suggesting that user-generated content with infotainment-style narrations may actually be good for increasing public understanding of science.

The science of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is not new, but has been built up like any science over the course of more than a century. Despite this, ACC has only been marked by controversy since the 1970s (Kellogg, I987), when it became apparent that action must be taken to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses. Subsequent debate has ensued not only around the type of action necessary to reduce humanity's impact on the climate, but around the accuracy of the theory itself. This thesis aims to explore this debate and the scientific, social and political nature of ACC using a mixed methods approach. The first chapter of the thesis provides a review of the social science literature, to address the broad question: what contributes to the debate around the reality of ACC? I review literature examining the nature of ACC scepticism, contrarianism and denial, the range of positions exisiting with this alternative attitudinal and discursive space, the prevalence of such positions, and the connection such positions have with traditional conservative ideology. In addition, I review literature highlighting how collective views on ACC have changed over time, in line with the political and social events that naturally transpire, before reviewing literature focused on issues of morality and ethics around the ACC problem. From here I highlight areas for further inquiry, and present five analytic chapters to address these areas, Chapter 3 uses a quantitative approach to explore an area of ACC research that has received little attention to date: differences in views about ACC between students enrolled in different academic disciplines, with a particular focus on the views of those enrolled in business degrees. I conducted a comparative analysis on University students enrolled in business degrees, with those enrolled in the sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences, and environmental sciences, and find that those enrolled in business degrees, and particularly male students enrolled in business degrees, are significantly more likely to reject the human contribution to climate change and reject the science of climate change. Chapter four furthers this analysis by using qualitative data collected simultaneously with the quantitative data, to examine the ideological influences on these students' views about ACC with a focus on the system-challenging rhetoric emerging from the student comments in response to the survey questions. This second phase of the study highlights the importance of utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data to capture the details of perceptions of ACC, providing a much richer view of the prevailing discourses people use to make sense of ACC. Chapter five focuses on the theoretical and methodological bases of my rationale and aims for the following three analytic chapters. Social Representations Theory (SRT: Moscovici, 1984), the Information Deficit Model of science communication, and more recent psychological approaches such as Discursive Psychology (DP: Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Edwards,2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), and Rhetorical Psychology (Billig, I987), are presented to explore the theoretical thinking on the ways in which science is constructed, contested, and mobilized to generate competing accounts of ACC. I highlight the importance of understanding ACC not just from a scientific perspective, but also from a perspective that can help elucidate the complex ways in which meanings are constructed. Chapter 6 explores the challenges posed when those within the scientific establishment itself publicly undermine scientific theories of political, social and environmental significance. Here, I analyse interviews with a well-known climate change sceptic and a leading Australian climate scientist, in addition to newspaper articles written by other prominent Australian scientists holding competing views about anthropogenic climate change [ACC), I demonstrate how the two competing sides of the debate draw from different constructions of science to argue their positions on ACC in the public sphere. This chapter demonstrates that competing constructions of science are not simply abstract ideas but are used as rhetorical resources deployed in concrete ways to construct problematic identities for scientists, the public, and science itself. Chapter 7 presents extracts from the same data corpus presented in chapter 6. Here, the role played by distancing oneself from ideological bias is explored, in the discourse of two prominent Australian scientists - Ian Plimer and Barry Brook. Distancing oneself from ideological thinking, whilst simultaneously accusing one's opponent of ideological thinking, is a pervasive rhetorical technique used by these scientists. Drawing from the 'end of ideology' framework [see Weltman,2004; Weltman & Billig, 200I), I argue that appeals to science to inform policy about ACC are undermined by the contentious nature of ACC science as it appears in popular culture. Such appeals to a non-ideological approach to ACC policy have stymied attempts to implement policy, and if we are to generate effective policy to reduce GHG emissions, we must consider reframing ACC such that issues of morality and values are brought to the fore. Chapter 8 extends the ideological conundrums inherent in the ACC debate by examining the political rhetoric used by Australia's political elites over the course of the development of market-based climate change policy. Here I explore the ways in which environmental imperatives are subordinate to economic ones, creating an ideological dilemma (Billig, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton & Radley, 1988) that serves as a barrier to generating the support of a voting public whose immediate livelihoods may be threatened by economic action on ACC. In conclusion, I argue that the ideological imperatives fuelling the ACC debate pit the environment against the economy, as if the two are incompatible. Paradoxically, however, such a move has resulted in a technocratic approach to climate change policy, whereby to deny one's position as ideological serves as a rhetorical mechanism for asserting the pragmatics of ACC action. Whilst this may work well as a rhetorical move for political purposes, it does little to generate a substantial ACC narrative that encompasses the moral reasons for action. As such, the conversations required to explain precisely why action is so important and in everyone's best interest, remain absent from public discourse. Given the power good rhetoric has over public opinion, and subsequent support for policy, the need for a strong and substantial narrative around the importance of ACC action is parament. I argue therefore, that without a redrawing of the moral landscape that underpins this dilemma, and without a fundamental re-working of the discourses that shape ACC in the public sphere, the possibilities for advocating structural action to reduce GHG emissions will continue to be compromised.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 2014

While there is overwhelming scientific agreement on climate change, the public has become polarized over fundamental questions such as human-caused global warming. Communication strategies to reduce polarization rarely address the underlying cause: ideologically-driven misinformation. In order to effectively counter misinformation campaigns, scientists, communicators, and educators need to understand the arguments and techniques in climate science denial, as well as adopt evidence-based approaches to neutralizing misinforming content. This chapter reviews analyses of climate misinformation, outlining a range of denialist arguments and fallacies. Identifying and deconstructing these different types of arguments is necessary to design appropriate interventions that effectively neutralize the misinformation. This chapter also reviews research into how to counter misinformation using communication interventions such as inoculation, educational approaches such as misconception-based learning, and the interdisciplinary combination of technology and psychology known as technocognition.

While there is overwhelming scientific agreement on climate change, the public has become polarized over fundamental questions such as human-caused global warming. Communication strategies to reduce polarization rarely address the underlying cause: ideologically-driven misinformation. In order to effectively counter misinformation campaigns, scientists, communicators, and educators need to understand the arguments and techniques in climate science denial, as well as adopt evidence-based approaches to neutralizing misinforming content. This chapter reviews analyses of climate misinformation, outlining a range of denialist arguments and fallacies. Identifying and deconstructing these different types of arguments is necessary to design appropriate interventions that effectively neutralize the misinformation. This chapter also reviews research into how to counter misinformation using communication interventions such as inoculation, educational approaches such as misconception-based learning, and the interdisciplinary combination of technology and psychology known as technocognition.