Conservative climate denialists are a source of immense frustration to scientists and liberals — and have been for decades. As long as I’ve been writing, there’s been a perpetual quest to find just the right argument to appeal to conservatives and pierce their denial.

This has led to periodic flurries of headlines in the climate journosphere around various social science studies that purport to finally crack the nut, to find the argument that works. Dozens of “easy ways to get conservatives to care about climate change” have floated through the media over the years; oddly, with all these easy ways to change their minds floating around, conservatives continue denying climate change.

The latest chapter of this unending story began a few weeks ago, when a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to show a way to change pro-environmental attitudes in conservatives.

The studies were conducted online. Study participants were exposed to various messages about climate change (and other social problems) and then rated their feelings about the urgency of the problem.

The results showed that “past comparisons” — comparing the damage climate change has done to the past purity of ecosystems — do more to increase conservatives’ pro-environmental feelings than warnings about the future. “Past comparisons largely bridged the political divide in addressing global warming,” the authors write.

“Our studies describe in words and pictures what the past used to be like, an almost Eden-like version of the planet, one with clean forests and little traffic and pollution. Then we draw a comparison to today, without any references to the future,” Matthew Baldwin, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Cologne and one of the authors, told Climate Progress. “It is much harder to avoid the reality of change when the comparison is to the beautiful planet in its ‘untouched’ form.”

This research, the authors say, “opens up a promising avenue to convince conservatives effectively of the need to address climate change and global warming.”

I think this is a bit silly, for reasons I’ll get into. But immediately, the research was hyped beyond all reason.

The Climate Progress piece suggests we’ve been “talking about climate change all wrong.” Fusion says “we need to get way better at talking about climate change in the age of Trump.” The LA Times says, “to mobilize Trump's America for environmental protection, invoke the past.” Quartz declares, “conservatives can be convinced to fight climate change with a specific kind of language.” Finally, Care2 promises: “Here’s an Easy Way to Get Conservatives to Care about the Environment.”

Oy. All of this reveals a basic misunderstanding, on the part of social scientists and journalists alike, about what drives conservative opinion and political action on climate change.

To see the nature of the misunderstanding, we have to back up a little. We have to think about how people form beliefs (and are moved to action) in the actual world, as opposed to the artificial environment of a social science study.

Knowledge is social

Individualism has misled many areas of inquiry in the West (someday I’ll write about how it has screwed up ethics), but among the victims is epistemology. We imagine people coming to know things inside their heads, using their own thoughts and sense data. When you start there, it becomes difficult to prove that the shared world exists at all, that we are not brains in vats.

But we don’t start there, not in real life. We do not primarily come to know things through individual cognitive efforts — assembling evidence and evaluating it. Individually, we are in a position to critically assess only a tiny fraction of what we claim to know.

The vast bulk of our knowledge, we take on faith. Or to put it more charitably, we take on trust. We absorb what we know from trusted peers and authorities. Our trust in them is a kind of heuristic that allows us to navigate a wildly complex and uncertain reality, of which we will directly experience only a tiny fraction.

Having an understanding of the world and your place in it — an understanding shared by your tribe — feels like safety. It feels like control. Questions that unsettle that understanding are instinctively treated with skepticism or outright hostility.

This is the great insight of the work done on “motivated reasoning” by Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale. (I’ve written about that work before, here, and Ezra Klein has written about it here.) For most people, most of the time, social bonds matter far more than any particular bit of knowledge, any fact or belief.

This is especially true when it comes to the kinds of things defined as political “issues,” like inequality, climate change, and other societal risks, which tend to be somewhat abstract and distant from daily experience. Most people don’t have settled, coherent opinions on issues at all, just bits and bobs they’ve picked up from their tribes. They certainly don’t have enough invested in issues to warrant risking their tribal ties on behalf of particular beliefs.

Most people will settle for their parochial, inherited tribal beliefs most of the time. Humans gonna human.

The cure for individual limitations is society

The remedy for this deeply rooted limitation of individual human cognition is also not found at the individual level. Liberals and scientists are always fantasizing about improving education, teaching critical reasoning skills, informing the public, etc. They want to create better thinkers, individuals in possession of the available evidence and the intellectual skills and habits necessary to critically evaluate it.

This hope is almost certainly forlorn.

While I’m sure there are ways to improve education and better inform the public, we are unlikely ever to reach an exalted state in which the majority of people think and behave like proto-scientists, assessing evidence and drawing their own conclusions about matters of social import.

Happily, we’ve already created a technology capable of mitigating the various quirks and shortcomings of individual human cognition. It’s called society.

We create institutions meant to counterbalance our worst demons, temptations, and limitations.

Where short-termism and tribalism will tend to yield armed conflict, we create institutions capable of binding us together in long-term political and economic cooperation.

Where loss aversion and mistrust will tend to inhibit trade, we create institutions to structure and enforce the rule of law. (Markets themselves are human institutions, not, as libertarians have it, a state of nature.)

Where confirmation bias, saliency bias, the bandwagon effect, and various other vulnerabilities to fallacy tend to reinforce myth and retard economic and technological progress, we create institutions to produce and rigorously vet knowledge, exposing it to dispassionate scrutiny and falsification.

We imbue these institutions with an authority that extends across various tribal lines. That is how society functions — with individual and group differences playing out against a backdrop of common institutional architecture.

Institutions are, almost by their nature, non-zero-sum. They are premised on the idea that some forms of sustained cooperation benefit everyone, even if everyone has to sacrifice some short-term interests along the way.

The message of every political demagogue in history is the opposite: society is a zero-sum game. Institutions no longer transcend tribal boundaries -- they have become corrupt, weapons of a hostile tribe. Nothing transcends tribal boundaries. You can only trust the demagogue; only he is on your side.

When trust in institutions declines, when they lose the authority and social license they’ve been granted, no amount of individual effort can substitute. Until and unless new trusted institutions develop to bring stability, society decays and becomes vulnerable to authoritarianism.

Knowledge about climate change is social too

All right, let’s bring it back around to climate change.

No human being can hope to absorb and critically assess all the evidence on climate change. It comes from hundreds of studies spanning dozens of disciplines. Scientists who devote their lives to it develop direct expertise in only a small fraction.

So for ordinary schmoes like us, developing beliefs about climate change centrally involves choosing who to trust. For the most part, it’s not first-order questions about evidence that make the difference, it’s second-order questions about who to believe.

Luckily, society has created institutions specifically designed to produce valid knowledge. That’s all science is — just a network of human institutions with particular rules and practices.

Scientific institutions have typically been granted an authority that transcends partisan opinion. But there is nothing inherent or necessary about that. People trust those institutions because that is the tribal norm, as communicated by trusted peers and authorities.

When it comes to climate change, leaders of the conservative movement have waged a decades-long war to weaken the authority of scientific institutions, to cast them as tools of the liberal tribe, distorting truth for political ends.

Respected authorities in the American conservative movement reject the authority of climate science. And so that’s what members of the movement do.

Only conservative elites can change conservative climate beliefs

The literature on how public opinion is formed and influenced is fairly clear. I summarized it (drawing on this great Jerry Taylor post, which in turn draws on John Zaller’s The Nature & Origins of Mass Opinion) here:

One, most people have no coherent ideology and no firm opinions on "issues," as they are defined in politics. Two, partially as a consequence, "elite discourse is the most important driver of public opinion."

Conservative elites have made climate denialism part of conservative identity. If an individual conservative questions climate denialism, he or she risks being attacked, shamed, or shunned by trusted peers and authorities within the tribe. Real, tangible social damage could be done.

And for what? Why would an average individual risk that?

So all the focus — decades and decades of focus — by earnest liberals and scientists on particular climate skeptic arguments is pointless. Sunspots. Natural variation. Milankovitch cycles. “They predicted an ice age in the ’70s.” None of it matters. The arguments are adopted in service of the denialist conclusion; they do not precede or determine it. Rebuttals of particular arguments will only lead to a shift to other arguments. The arguments were not the route to the conclusion, so they are not the road out of it.

It might be possible to get a conservative to check a particular box in the artificial environment of a social science study, wherein they have only their individual cognition to rely on. Different words might solicit different affective reactions.

But are different arguments going to “mobilize Trump’s America” or “convince conservatives to fight climate change”? No. Because outside the confines of the social-science study, the conservative reverts from isolated cognition unit to human being, i.e., social creature embedded in overlapping tribes.

Here’s how that conversation would go:

“You know, the world does seem different than in the pre-industrial past. Maybe climate change is responsible for some of that?” “Ha ha you got pwned by a libtard!” “Heh, yeah, never mind.”

And thus were “pro-environmental feelings” crushed under the vastly more powerful force of social conformity.

All of us are conformists like this, of course, including those who accept climate change. As I said, it’s true of almost everyone about almost everything. We absorb knowledge socially; we resist revising beliefs that are constitutive of our social identities.

The difference lies not in the cognitive abilities, intelligence, or education level of individuals within the tribes, but in the fact that some tribal norms enforce deference to scientific institutions, and some do not.

Conservatives will accept the scientific facts of climate change when conservative elites signal that that’s what conservatives do — when they demonstrate trust in the institutions of climate science. When that happens, there will be no particular grassroots resistance, because there’s no particular commitment to climate denialism outside its role in the culture war. Once it is not constitutive of conservative identity, it will be easily shed.

How can conservative elites be persuaded to think and communicate differently about climate change? That’s a subject for another post, but here’s a spoiler: The answer won’t be found in clever arguments or skillful persuasion, but in money, power, and material interests.