This article, by Dinesh Baskaran, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
Accessing knowledge has become increasingly easy in recent decades. Scientific facts about climate change and global warming can be found with the flick of a finger — yet this has not been enough to persuade emerging climate change deniers to acknowledge its reality and urgency.
Lyn Van Swol, a professor at the Department of Communication Arts at UW–Madison, tries to understand the persistence of climate denial through her research on factors that increase acceptance of information during an interaction.
“We found that information was much less important than the emotions people felt” toward the source of information, she said.
Van Swol’s research involves conducting group discussions, workshops, and interaction sessions on climate change and environmental issues with small groups of people to understand how communication influences attitudes toward climate change and sustainability.
Scientists can develop new methods to mitigate climate change. Governments can introduce new policies based on the research. But all finally falls into the hands of the public to support new policies and adapt to environmentally friendly behaviors. The most popular strategy is to provide information so that people can make educated decisions. While this might work for some, a majority suffer from information overload and stop caring about the issue.
Van Swol’s research could help guide corresponding stakeholders to overcome this point and structure their public communications efficiently.
“Often people develop opinions from the norms of the people around them,” Van Swol said.
Any attitude that we have toward a subject matter is influenced by our interactions with society. Today, a society would encompass not only our friends, family, and neighbors, but also our friends and influencers on social media platforms.
So what does it take to develop positive attitudes toward climate change? Van Swol tries to answer this question by conducting group discussions on the subject. These sessions involve interactions between a group of people with different perspectives about climate change, either as in-person or online exchanges, that ask participants to respond to a series of messages about climate change that are either statements from other participants or facts
These studies showed a clear disconnect between information and positive attitude.
“It actually led to negative feelings in the groups,” Van Swol explained. “A lot of people who feel like climate change is an important issue often feel like they have gotten there through information. … so they think that’s what they will use to persuade other people.”
Van Swol’s research progresses in the direction of eco-paralysis, a term that describes a condition in which people receive so much information about climate change that they feel nothing can be done about it. In the next phases of her research, Van Swol seeks to answer the question: At what point do people feel hopeless, and how does that affect their behavior?