We just disagree
by digby
Chris Mooney explains why we have such divergent views on climate change in this country:
For a long time, people have been using words like “polarizing” and “partisan” to describe the debate over climate change. Last week, I added “brutal and dysfunctional” to the descriptive pile.
But according to new research just out in Nature Climate Change, it may be even worse than that. The new study, by a group of Australian psychologists and social scientists, examines the clash between climate adherents and so-called “skeptics” as an “intergroup conflict” (a psychological buzzword) driven, in significant part, by anger at those on the other side.
Or to put it another way, the debate is a cultural clash between two groups with divergent social identities who define those identities, in part, by criticizing those on the other side.
“Believers and sceptics [sic] are united, but only insofar as they are united in opposition to each other,” notes the paper, whose lead author is Ana-Maria Bliuc of Monash University in Victoria.
What do social psychologists mean when they talk about “intergroup conflict”? Tom Postmes, a psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who wrote an accompanying essay about the new study, more or less defines the climate situation as tribal. He notes that on both sides of the climate debate, “believers” and “skeptics” are united by an in-group consciousness and identification as well as an out-group dislike or distrust. Or in other words, both see the issue in “us and them” terms. Such perceptions “revolve around the awareness of ‘us’ in opposition to ‘them’ with very clear boundaries between groups,” he writes.
Indeed, write Bliuc and her colleagues, the climate conflict “can be understood in similar terms to other social conflicts, such as that over abortion, the campaign for equality of the sexes, the US civil rights movement, and campaigns for marriage equality.”
One key aspect of in-group/out-group behavior is called “outgroup derogation” — negativity towards those who are members of the opposing group — and Postmes sees it here. “People tend to talk badly about the outgroup as a way of expressing solidarity with their own side,” writes Postmes.
This actually explains why we have such divergent views on everything despite the fact that our culture has actually become much more homogenous than it used to be. It’s almost as if we go out of our way to find reasons to disagree with each other. But then that would be America from the very beginning. We’ve always been two countries. Unlike most other countries which reached consensus in a reasonable way, we fought a war over the fundamental moral question of slavery.
Our differences are not quite as regionally defined as they used to be (although they still are to a surprisingly large degree) but the basic outlines of our differences have always been there. In simplistic terms, one America believes they are guardians of a tradition that must be preserved and protected and the other believes that change and progress are what define us. (I said it was simplistic.) The traditionalists have always felt perpetually under attack from the modernists and have developed a sense of resentment that pervades their entire worldview. And it’s not entirely unjustified. The modernists don’t care about their “traditions”, many of which perpetuate inequality and bigotry. I suppose all societies have this divide to some degree but America was organized around it from the beginning.
Not that we have nothing in common. We have tons in common, but this bitterness between the two factions bubbles up over and over again. Right now, we’re in the midst of one of those ugly periods when it boils over. Let’s hope it doesn’t do us in for good this time.
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