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Record W4367676198 · doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad100

Reasoning about climate change

2023· article· en· W4367676198 on OpenAlexaff
Bence Bagó, David G. Rand, Gordon Pennycook

Bibliographic record

VenuePNAS Nexus · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicClimate Change Communication and Perception
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Regina
FundersAgence Nationale de la RechercheWilliam and Flora Hewlett FoundationJohn Templeton Foundation
KeywordsMotivated reasoningPopularityAnalytic reasoningClimate changeScientific consensusCoherence (philosophical gambling strategy)CognitionPsychologySocial psychologyConfirmation biasCognitive psychologyGlobal warmingDeductive reasoningEpistemologyPolitical scienceComputer scienceArtificial intelligencePoliticsLawEcologyMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change common despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely held explanation involves politically motivated (system 2) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover the truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior beliefs about the world and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants' extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results provide no support for the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account over other accounts: Engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior beliefs about climate change-a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning-and did not exacerbate the impact of partisanship once prior beliefs are accounted for.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.048
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.022

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.048
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.004
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.619
GPT teacher head0.498
Teacher spread0.121 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations31
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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