In the US, the science of climate change is among the topics where public opinion is generally controlled by which political wing a person identifies with. Of course, human beings are a varied lot, and this dividing line is not without exceptions—some conservatives accept the conclusions of climate science, and some liberals reject them. If you’re an optimistic person, you might hope that this shows we could potentially overcome these political barriers and converge on a shared reality.

A common response is the expectation that people who are not convinced climate change is real simply don’t know about the extensive evidence and research. But this idea ignores the source of the division in public opinion. People are exceptionally talented at selectively noting and crediting information that reinforces their position while waving the rest aside. When this defense system is fully operational, information is largely just cannon fodder.

It gets even worse when you look to see if people who are generally knowledgeable about science or good with numbers will buck this trend. Research has shown that those who should be the best-equipped to recognize what the science is saying are actually the most polarized on climate change. It seems we just put our cognitive skills to work running a stronger defense system.

Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues call this behavior “cultural cognition.” Their hypothesis is that opinions on certain topics are badges of group identity—and it’s more important that you feel unified with friends, family, and tribe than that you hold scientifically accurate opinions. Generally, this research has found that any plausibly beneficial intellectual characteristic you can come up with—including deliberative reasoning, basic climate science knowledge, and measures of open-mindedness—turns out to magnify polarization rather than reduce it. But some recent work has uncovered a glimmer of hope.

The work started with a study to help makers of educational science films appeal to broader audiences. In their initial survey, researchers discovered something peculiar about the people most interested in watching science programming: they were less polarized on climate change.

Together with a follow-up study, the filmmakers surveyed 5,500 people. A characteristic referred to as “science curiosity” was measured with questions hidden within a “marketing survey” covering several topics that asked about things like reading and viewing preferences. People in the studies were then presented with a bank of Web articles organized by topic—science, sports, entertainment news, or financial news—and were given a random article to read from the topic of their choice.

They also chose a program to watch, with the ability to switch it off early or find out how to watch the rest when they got home. The earlier questions did a pretty good job of predicting who would choose to watch a science program and how much they would watch. So “science curiosity” here is a measure of how interested a person is in checking out science content.

The same people answered questions about concern over climate change and the environmental risks of oil and gas fracking, as well as some questions that assessed basic science knowledge. The conservative and liberal subjects that scored highest in science knowledge were actually the farthest apart on climate change and fracking. Liberals tended to be more concerned as science knowledge scores increased, but conservatives tended toward lower concern. But science curiosity showed a different pattern—conservatives showed lower concern than liberals across the board, but the gap between them was pretty much constant. Both liberals and conservatives grew slightly more concerned as science curiosity scores increased in this case.

In fact, the pattern of widening polarization among those with higher science knowledge scores is significantly weaker if you just look at people with higher curiosity scores.

So what’s going on here? The researchers hypothesized that the “science curious” were more likely to engage with information that contradicted their beliefs—because hey, they’re curious. To test this, they ran an experiment in which people looked at a pair of headlines and asked to pick the most interesting article.

In each pair of headlines, one was designed to appeal to those who reject climate change—something like “ice increasing in Antarctic”—while the other described a finding consistent with human-caused climate change. There were also two versions of each headline—one in which the finding was described as new and surprising and another that described it as “still more evidence." For example, some people chose between reading about a surprising new finding that contradicted their opinion and an unsurprising finding that supported their opinion.

While low-science-curiosity folks were more likely to select the article that agreed with their opinion, regardless of whether it sounded novel, high-science-curiosity people preferred whichever headline was “surprising.” If anything, they were even more likely to select that headline if it ran counter to their beliefs.

The authors emphasize that this is just the start of what would be a satisfying understanding of these tendencies. More experiments could confirm the conclusions drawn here and fill in some of the surrounding blanks—like how it is that science-curious people balance their interest in new information with their cultural identity and just how readily they will alter their opinions.

But even now, the researchers see two tantalizing, obvious implications for the real world. First, is there anything more we can do to encourage people to develop this curiosity? And for the science-curious folks out there, what is the best way to communicate publicly controversial science that engages curiosity over cultural triggers? (Please, no “this one weird fact” headlines…) An often-divided world is dying to know.

Advances in Political Psychology, 2017. DOI: 10.1111/pops.12396 (About DOIs).