Why Resistance to the Idea of Global Warming Is Rising: The “More So Syndrome”

This morning Richard Harris of NPR's Morning Edition filed a typically excellent report on why, according to polls, substantially fewer Americans believe in global warming than believed just two years ago.

According to the (unaffiliated) Harris Poll, now only 51% of Americans believe that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will cause the earth's temperature to rise, down from 71% just two years ago. 

Some chalk this up to the so-called "Cimategate" scandal. Others are not so sure. 

Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale University School of Forestry puts
one reason above all the rest: "First of all, it's the economy,
stupid."

People can only worry about so many issues at one
time, he says. So it's no surprise they worry about issues that hit
closest to home.

"And the economy is still by far the No. 1 concern of Americans, which just pushes all other issues off the table."

And there is data in the poll cited above to support his view. Most Americans don't know what the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is about, according to the poll, but 9% of those polled thought it was about the economy.

That's a partial explanation, but not nearly as convincing to yours truly as a compelling — if complex — paper published this year by an ecologist at Cornell named Janis Dickinson.

Her paper has a terrible title, methinks, so instead I'm going to call it the More So Syndrome.

Here's how it works, in simple language: As people age, they tend to become more set in their ways. The aging mother of one of my best friends noticed this among her friends and cohorts and dubbed it called it the "More So Syndrome," because people tend to become "more so" of whatever it is they were already. 

In the language of language of the paper, which based on the works of Ernst Becker, author of The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer back in l973, and has now become the basis of a new school of sociology/psychology called Terror Management Theory, this is known as "defense of the ego." 

It's a fascinating paper — truly. I'm tempted to insist that you all just go there right now and read it. But I know that few if any of us have the time to read academic papers, and after all what is blogging for but to make complex topics understandable quickly.

So instead of trying to present the whole paper in one paragraph, I'm going to present a) a central contention, b) evidence for that contention, and c) an example of that idea in our society today. 

Here's the central contention:

The behaviors that people exhibit [when reminded of death] are not necessarily those that reduce the risk of death, and in fact they may sometimes increase it as long as they also bolster the individual's symbolic self and the complex, immortality-striving hero system that defines it. 

The fascinating aspect of this concept of "mortality salience" is that it is testable, scientifically.

Here's evidence for the reality of the central contention:

Scientists in Israel, led by O.T. Ben-Ari, in l991 published the results of "an experiment in which subjects who linked driving with self-esteem drove faster and became more reckless in response to stimuli that made them think about death, sacrificing true safety for false safety in the form of defense of the ego." 

And here's what author Janis Dickinson predicts we will see, as people who feel threatened by climate change harden their attitudes:

If the perception of risk, including the risks associated with climate change, increases death thought accessibility, and this becomes increasingly likely as the impacts of climate change reveal themselves, then efforts to move people towards environmentally responsible behaviors may have the opposite effect, causing them to urchase large gas-guzzling vehicles, listen to Rush Limbaugh, join fundamentalist cults, or, in the case of university faculty, hunker down and write more scientific papers. 

Jeez. That doesn't sound like a prediction. That sounds like a present-day fact.