What you "believe" about climate change doesn't reflect what you know...

What people “believe” about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.

www.culturalcognition.net - Cultural Cognition Blog - What you "believe" about climate change doesn't reflect what you know; it expresses *who you are*:

Accordingly, if you want to promote constructive public engagement with the best available evidence, you have to change the meaning of the climate change.
You have to disentangle positions on it from opposing cultural identities, so that people aren't put to a choice between freely appraising the evidence and being loyal to their defining commitments.
...
if you think the proportion of survey respondents who say they “believe in evolution” is an indicator of the quality of the science education that people are receiving in the U.S., you are misinformed.
Do you know what the correlation is between saying “I believe in evolution” and possessing even a basic understanding of “natural selection,” “random mutation,” and “genetic variance”—the core elements of the modern synthesis in evolutionary science?
Zero.
Those who say they “do believe” are no more likely to be able to give a high-school biology-exam-quality account of how evolution works than those who say they “don’t.”

Read the full article at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School

Related original content ... maybe:
I recently wrote "worth less: wind turbines as evaluations of property and people"

The separation of knowledge from policy position is, I think, common in both piece; I also imply reality is being misinterpretted based on policy positions.