Food for thought:

…bombarding citizens with more information (“97% of SCIENTISTS AGREE”) doesn’t diminish polarization but instead aggravates it by amplifying the association between competing identities and competing positions on climate change... Kahan (2012)

Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. Kahan, Peters et al (2012)

...structured face-to-face policy discussions can transcend ideological differences...public deliberation can encompass multiple cultural orientations and encourage participants to look beyond their biases to discover common ground. ...cultural orientations appear to be surmountable obstacles. Gastin et al (2016)

A few words to the wise:

  1. Stop focusing on what we think people "believe". Professed beliefs are more signals of cultural allegiance than of knowledge.
  2. Stop focusing on what we think people "value". People often share values but have different priorities.
  3. Seek common ground and adopt an incremental problem-solving approach. Catastrophizing is not going to help.

References:

Gastil, J., Knobloch, K.R., Kahan, D., Braman, D., 2016. Participatory policymaking across cultural cognitive divides: two tests of cultural biasing in public forum design and deliberation. Public Admin. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padm.12255

Kahan, D. M., E. Peters, et al. (2012). "The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks." Nature Climate Change 2: 732. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1547

Kahan, D. M. (2015), Climate‐Science Communication and the Measurement Problem. Political Psychology, 36: 1-43. doi:10.1111/pops.12244