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

by Joshua D. Greene

The people polled in this study were not climate science experts. They were ordinary U.S. adults whose scientific literacy and numeracy scores formed a bell curve around the mean for U.S. adults. While there is widespread disagreement about climate change among nonexperts, there is, once again, overwhelming consensus among experts that climate change is real and that the risks are serious. The lesson, then, is not that it’s all “relative” or that there’s no way to cut through the cultural clatter and find out the truth about climate change. Nor is the lesson that ordinary people are, in general, hopeless slaves to tribal prejudice. On the contrary, when it comes to most issues, people of all tribes are perfectly happy to accept the advice of experts. (People’s views about treating psoriasis are not well predicted by their tribal allegiances.) Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people. In 1998, Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to believe that climate change is already under way. Since then, the scientific case for climate change has only gotten stronger, but the views of Republicans and Democrats have diverged sharply, to the point that in 2010, Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to believe in the reality of climate change. This didn’t happen because Republican scientifi...