Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

by Joshua D. Greene

Finally, the researchers asked those surveyed for their views on climate change. Contrary to conventional liberal wisdom, the researchers found that scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with slight decreases in the perceived risk of climate change. But the real story emerges when you sort people into tribes. The egalitarian communitarians, as expected, reported perceiving great risk in climate change, but within that group there was no correlation between scientific literacy/numeracy and perceived risk. Likewise, the hierarchical individualists were, as expected, skeptical about the risks of climate change, and within this group, those who were more scientifically literate/numerate were somewhat more skeptical about the risks of climate change. (This is why higher scientific literacy/numeracy was, overall, associated with more skepticism about climate change. The overall effect was driven by the effect within the hierarchical-individualist group.) But overall, scientific literacy and numeracy were not very good predictors of people’s beliefs about the risks of climate change. Instead, their beliefs were well predicted by their general cultural outlooks—by their tribal memberships (see figure 3.3).

Climate skeptics are individualists living in communities with other skeptical individualists around them and this, not scientific reasoning, is the reason for their not believing.