Mrebo said:
A new study finds climate change skeptics are more likely to behave in eco-friendly ways than those who are highly concerned about the issue.
Diving into the specifics of this study was interesting.
On a scale of 1-4, with one being never and 4 being every opportunity I have, the skeptics consistently rated themselves around 2.5 in terms of behaving in Eco-friendly ways. This is exactly in the middle. However, highly concerned and cautiously worried respondents rated themselves at 2.
I think this is indeed related to moral licensing like the study suggests, but in the opposite way they suggest. Consider this article that was linked in the paper:
Uzma Khan, a marketing professor at Stanford who studies the psychology of buying, once asked study participants to choose between buying a vacuum cleaner or designer jeans. Participants who were asked to imagine having committed a virtuous act before shopping were significantly more likely to choose jeans than those not thinking of themselves as virtuous.
“That’s the amazing thing here: People don’t even have to do good for this effect to happen,” Khan said. “Even if they plan to do something good, it will give them a boost in their self-image. Any type of situation where you have guilt involved, you will see this, and so this happens in luxury goods.”
The idea is that imagining oneself to be virtuous allows for cheating and bad behavior. The study’s authors assumed that under the theory of moral licensing people who are highly concerned or cautiously worried would view themselves as virtuous and thus increase their scores:
Other possibilities for these results involve the “Highly Concerned”: Perhaps they engaged in moral licensing (Merritt, Effron, & Monin, 2010), whereby their concern about climate change psychologically liberated them from engaging in (and reporting) pro-environmental behavior.
I suspect that their reasoning is backwards, for as someone who would identify themselves as highly concerned about Climate Change, I don’t feel virtuous or liberated by this view. Quite the contrary, believing in Anthropocentric Global Warming imparts the feeling of guilt on behalf of my species, exactly the type of feeling that would make people underrate their Eco-friendly behaviors. People who believe in AGW pretty much agree that humans aren’t doing enough in terms of these behaviors, themselves included.
Similarly, a person skeptical of Climate Change would be free of this guilt, and would be more likely to equivocate on their report and state an answer that was exactly in the middle of the scale.
TL:DR:
People concerned about Climate Change believe they really need to do better at buying green (and indicate this on reports), whereas skeptics place themselves comfortably right between never doing it and doing it all the time.
Oh, and the study isn’t exactly new (The data was from 2014-2015)