generally and in the case of climate change the combination of misinformation and denial now seriously undermine our ability to deal with that local crisis tonight we have very good fortune to resent up pair of northeastern university professors who will explain on the one hand climate change facts related to coastal ecosystems and on the other hand the psychology be acceptance or rejection of scientific fact brian helm is a professor of marine and environmental sciences and also professor of policy and urban affairs at north eastern university his focus is on predicting the like likely ecological impacts of climate change on coastal ecosystems he provides decision makers with forecasts about climate change impact on coastal ecosystems and he also collaborates with colleagues around the world and just released that they came back from iraq and we are very lucky that he is actually in the country tonight we've got managed to get  coley is an associate professor of psychology at northeastern university and his research is concerned with the in a related structure of knowledge and reasoning and conceptual development we really need that now this science happens to be a very rich area at this time and it offer some insight into why people believe what they believe and how we all handle facts dr hellmouth and dr kohli combined their expertise tonight to discuss possible methods for more effectively educating the public about climate change and strategies for adaptation and it's a great pleasure to welcome brian hellmouth and john cooley probably up on climate change so tonight we're going to give you kind of a wide ranging rom of where our collaboration has is god and more so where it's heading into the future so just to start off with this is kind of a confession i never thought i scientists i never meant to be a climate scientist it just happened and you know to be perfectly honest i became a marine biologist because i wanted to go out and go scuba diving and see all sorts of really cool things like you see in this picture and then a graduate school site after site would turn into something like this and so i think it's true for a lot of us we come because of climate scientists because everything we study starts to die  so it's very easy to become depressed as a climate scientist but the answer to that is the focus on solutions and i think a lot of that's what we're going to do tonight is figure out how do we communicate this with a goal towards looking at solutions so how do we look at something like this communicate this to somebody who may not be able to experience this firsthand but yet convey some sort of emotional impact some sort of connection so that we can enact solutions to th says called ecological forecasting and i think the best explanation of this is one that a reporter gave me a couple years ago and so i kind of describe him what i what i do and he said aha you know that's really a lot like if you're an e m t at a train wreck that you show up and you've got one hundred victims and frankly you're not going to be able to save them all and this is where you go out and you put the toe tag and some of them no matter what you do you're not going to be able to save them if you try to all your effort all your resources on that one person you're going to miss a lot of people you could say some are fine if you let them sit for a while you can get back to them later but it's the ones that are really the kind of yellow tags if you do something right now if we do something right away we have a to coastal adaptation and so like other scientists what i was trained at doing was looking for patterns you know all those remember back to your third grade science class it's all about looking for patterns you look for patterns in the laundry so i mean i judge a lot of science fair competitions a lot of our laundry so it's how do you look for patterns how do you then explain them so you know we may look for this pattern of a mountainside where we see one species of plant replacing another one we then conceptualize this in a textbook as this nice what we think is the pattern based on what we know of the system already what other scientists of them we come up with a tentative hypothesis we come up with a way to try to falsify that have offices and then eventually if we do that enough times we come up with a theory to explain that and really that's where we're at with climate change right now is the level of theory words poked and prodded for so many different angles we're really confident that anthropogenic climate change is happening and we have some idea of the mechanisms driving it so that's where i am as a scientists but as you mentioned i'm also a school of public policy which means that a lot of what i do is try to figure out how to communicate this to people who can do something about this how do we communicate to the public have we communicate the decision makers and really this has very little in most of these cases to do with facts and we can show as many data in as many facts as we want to to most members of the public and it's not going to make any difference whatsoever so really i think a lot of what we're going to talk about and what drew me to the johns lab and his expertise is really this idea that you know we all have our different perceptions of reality we all have our different ways of processing patterns we see and you know we can have the same information so in this case of the three boards or other four i think most of you probably seen this optical illusion before where is this in all their woman where that is her nose is that a younger woman or that is with chen same information different interpretations of this this is of course gotten even more dire in recent in the past year where there's some discussion of are we really living in a post fact world that we can present as many you know what we call facts or reality  and they have absolutely no impact on policy whatsoever which we find really frustrating as a sign is and climate change is probably the ultimate expression of this right i mean we look at the same information you know are we denying what we see  or are we blowing it out of proportion or as scientists are we trying to find that middle ground to actually present some objective former reality so that we can do something about it so for the passover to john to talk a little bit about this idea of you know how do our perceptions of the world around us really affect our ability to recognize patterns to explain it to communicate it and in doing so how does that affect our willingness in our ability to find solutions thank you brian so my name is john call him very happy to be here when we're talking about recognizing patterns we're sort of starting to leave the area of ecology and starting to venture into the area of cognitive science and that's what i do i'm a cognitive scientist they study how people think so cognitive science can be thought of as the interdisciplinary interdisciplinary study of the mind we as cognitive scientists look at how we transform physical signals like light and sound into representations how we manipulate those representations mentally and how those kinds of manipulations give rise to things like predictions or explanations or behavior now one kind of process that cognitive science studies can be thought of as a domain general process and these are the sorts of cognitive operations that we use in lots of different areas lots of different subject areas so for example categorization we categorize all kinds of things memory decision making pattern recognition these are sort of general cognitive processes that we see at play over and over again in different subject areas so just to give you an example of pattern recognition you may or may not have seen these actual images before but they should be kind of familiar right and the reason that they should be kind of familiar is because you've probably seen this image before so what you did there it seems like a very simple act of cognition but you were able to look at a novel image and recognize it and classify it based on your prior experience here's another exercise in pattern recognition and i want you guys to take an active part here for a moment i have nine statements up here and i want you to talk with the people around you about how you might organize these statements into groups which of these statements seem like they have something in common so take a moment actually talk to the person next to you about how you might which of these statements go together all right what did you come up with you guys seem to be having a very interesting conversation can you say a little bit about what you came up with fantastic well done there's no right answer of course i'm a psychologist one way to organize them is sort of what you guys came up with so educators with so all of these by the way are misconceptions educators when they're dealing with people's misconceptions often do so by topic sort of how they break out in terms of how science divides the world up so one way to think about these particular statements is in terms of earth science volcanoes greenhouse effect and i chemistry molecules hydrogen and water and biology species and plants all right but what i want to propose is another half of cognitive science might have a different idea for how we might think about these so another side of cognitive science my side in particular looks at domain specific processes so how people come to think about particular air particular phenomenon particular groups of phenomenon in the world so in my lab we refer to these kinds of thinking as cognitive construal and that's just a fancy word for the kinds of ideas or theories of assumptions or assumptions that people spontaneously develop in response to their interaction with the world so every day we use these sorts of can struggles to make predictions to explain what happens to us and to basically get around so what i want to talk a little bit about is three of these cognitive construal and these are things that are called purely logical sensualist and anthropocentric thinking there will not be a quiz but just to kind of give you a sense of what i'm talking about teleological thinking might be related to some of the stuff you guys were talking about and it's the idea that you're developing a cause all explanation for some phenomenon based on a goal or an outcome or a function  example of to logical thinking might be brian and i came here to tell you about our research that was our goal and that's sort of what caused us to come here perfectly legitimate explanation for human behavior you might say the stock bubble burst in order to compensate for overvalued stocks i hope that it's not a sore point right now with one or species adapt in order to survive the latter two you might be sort of more questionable in terms of their correctness but they're all examples of teleological explanations another kind of thinking is essential is thinking and essential as thinking is sort of the belief the assumption that members of a class are relatively uniform static and share lots of properties because they share some underlying essence of reality this is a an assumption that people make in many different areas of life for example the problem with your computer is that it's a p c that's that's sort of based on the idea that there's some underlying failure in the p c that leads to the problems that you see or different cells contain different d n a again the idea that there's kind of a one on one correspondence between what you see and what's underneath the third one that i want to talk about is anthropocentric thinking and this is the idea that we often over attribute human characteristics or or think of humans as exceptional in ways that were really not exceptional so examples of that might be the unemployment rate resisted federal intervention or russia is encroaching on ukraine or plants get their food from the soil all right so these are three different flavors of cognitive constructs three different ways that are sort of domain specific thinking might impact our understanding of the  world and we see these systematically early in development so we see these in relatively young children and most of these we see consistently across cultural contexts so these are relatively stable and universal i don't want to say universal widespread in terms of characterizing human cognition so what we can do is we can take the misconceptions we were talking about earlier and we can sort of think about a different way of classifying which is like this the first three are pilia larger than the first column one six and seven are ultimately illogical these span different areas of science but they all involve the assumption that there is some goal or function that's causing an action because it wants to gain an electron so these are sort of anthropomorphism using humans as an analogy when they're not necessarily appropriate and essential is thinking these ideas are members of the  all water turns blue with copper sulphate because there's some internal chemical that has this causal property so these are examples of again misconceptions across these underlying ways of thinking give rise to systems of misconceptions systems of related misconceptions so for example even the most clearly presented and simple information is filtered through these construal that we have in order for us to understand it so for example you might take a brilliant professor trying to communicate information  professor might be communicating information about thermo regulation for example in an extremely clear and straightforward way and you might have a highly motivated learner trying to learn this information this could be in the classroom it could be outside of the classroom could be someone listening to a news report but the point you want to make is that this person is understanding of what they're being told is going to be filtered through this intuitive thinking filtered through this sort of construe always thinking which might result in systematic misconceptions and these misconceptions are not merely factual errors they're they're the result of using the intuitive cognitive construe olds to understand what is essentially non intuitive or counter intuitive scientific information  ok more i'm going to keep talking right in my lab we've done some research on this in the area of biology so we focused on how people learn and think about biology and what we've done is we measured these three kinds of thinking with a number of measures from the cognitive science literature and we've also measured people's misconceptions about biology and the question is how are these kinds of intuitive c strolls predictive of people's misconceptions and when the way that we ask this question is we actually divide misconceptions up sort of in a way that i showed you before so we have and the idea is to look at whether the relations between these things are sort of specific whether essential is thinking is its own thing or whether in general these construe laws are related to misconceptions all right does that make sense so the question that the prediction is that purely logical thinking should predict the logical misconceptions if are right about this it might not be that related to other kinds of misconceptions and likewise you can make the same sort of prediction for ant essential is thinking so these should relate to related misconceptions but not necessarily i know only misconceptions i mean the alternative this is perfectly plausible right that people use a lot no i'm not i'm not putting people into one of these groups that's a great question what i'm saying is people my people vary in the degree to which they find these three kinds of constr convincing or useful and and that variability is independent of one another so you might be really really logical but not very anthropocentric and so what i'm saying is if you're someone who's really logical are you or is the degree to which your teleological or not predictive of the degree to which you tend to hold a logical misconceptions in biology doesn't make sense ok and here is just a very quick summary of what we found essential is thinking is significantly related to essential list misconceptions and unrelated to the other two kinds of misconceptions likewise an thinking is strongly related to anthropocentric misconceptions it's not related to the other kinds of misconceptions in the world is not quite a perfect place to logical thinking is strongly related to illogical misconceptions but it's also has some relation so people who are high in this also tended to agree with anthropocentric misconceptions the idea maybe there's something about intent something about goals that's sort of a question for another day but i think the take home message here is that these kinds of construe as these kinds of intuitive thinking give rise in a very systematic way to kinds of misconceptions at least in the domain  so how is that related to understanding of climate change right that's our next move all right so there are couple reasons why this is a particularly thorny issue when it comes to climate change and part of it really isn't  and this is something that i think it's lost in the public discussion and there is a difference between climate and weather and i love this catchphrase by the current climate trains the weather but weather throws the punches climate by definition is a thirty plus year trend in weather so we're looking at walang term trends in weather condition but all timidly it is weather that you really care about sort of put this in kind of a local context it is bets that you fear hopefully if you are a yankee  alternately it is the trainer that picks the team that decides the lineup that affects that and over time we have climate change hopefully in this case for the better but this is what you end up being affected by and so this is what organisms really care about but this often is not the way we talk about it so for example this shows the temperature anomalies of the surface of the globe there are places that are getting colder in some cases significantly called there are places that are staying about the same and places especially at high latitudes are getting markedly warmer so but all of this gets condensed down to a soundbite like this is a one degree increase in average global surface temperature really what that means is there are some places getting colder some getting same the same but the vast majority are getting warmer but that can encapsulate everything from a minus six degree decrease to a plus almost seven degree increase in that simple cation that's how we tend to talk about climate change you think about you're a tree frog sitting in the not to treat you could care less with a thirty year running average of global average surface temperature is you air about whether you're a little nook or cranny is too warm or too cold or too dry or too wet for you to survive and so this is what throws the punch is that these these very hyper local levels and what argues that the same way that we experience it now that doesn't mean the climate doesn't matter i mean the difference in the average global temperature is about the average the difference between  ice age so we're talking about increases six degrees c by twenty one hundred or beyond it's the same magnitude of now in the last ice age so it's certainly not insignificant but as a biologist i have to interpret that changing climate to change in weather and as we talk about communication again it's how people's perception of climate is affected by weather so one really good example of this comes locally i mean for those of you who don't know the gulf of maine is warming faster than temperature they grew faster the molten faster and it flooded the market in this part of the world the way that works is the u s lobster fishers get their pots in the water before the canadians do so in this case the market was flooded by the u s before the canadians even got the the water it led to a huge international debacle where the canadian fishers some of them went bankrupt and the good news for us is that lobster tails are cheap for a long time but these are things that happen  because of weather because of these short term extremes and so when we talk about climate really a lot of it is the increase in these these extremes but the other way to look at this th is we have these these extremes that punctuate long term change but some of these impacts are difficult to perceive because so much of our perception is based on recent memory so you know this is the proverbial frog in the  be idea that if change happened slowly it up it's very difficult to proceed so as one example i mean this is a picture taken at the recreational fishing landing where you know i think most of us say this is a pretty good catch if we went out we caught that catch in one day we'd say that was pretty good intel compared to the same location in one thousand nine hundred fifty eight where these a whale caught in this is what used to be caught here in new england with and it's only that comparison by looking at the data by looking at in this case images that really shows us how our perception of normal has changed and we can look at this over over time seriously look in one thousand fifty eight sixty five seventy nine eighty five two thousand seven and while initially this looked like a pretty good haul now comparing this to what the baseline was all of a sudden doesn't seem so good so just like a cup of coffee used to cost five cents now it's four bucks we accept that as normal because that's what we perceive based on our recent memory so these these changes are hard to technologically says so as scientists we rely on data right so i can show for example the increase in global average temperature here it is an inverse function of something axis looks like a really good relationship it looks like we're on to something it tell you that that is the number of pirates so this is the global average temperature versus the inverse of the number of pirates so if we go along with this the solution to climate change is basically to increase the number of pirates and that will solve the whole thing now of course we know that's not true but why is it that we're we're pretty confident that we understand this relationship were carbon dioxide and other drivers  the the causal factor of changes in temperature so even though this is a lot more complex why is it that as scientists we have a much higher confidence in our understanding of this relationship than we think we do in this one just as an example of how this plays out then in the public sphere this is a paper in science and science is the journal where you see grown scientists cry when they get rejected i mean we've all been rejected by science on multiple occasions but this is a paper that looked at contradicted new science it was all over the kind of denier literature well if you read the paper why is that is because not only the temperature increase but precipitation also increased in other words it's a science paper that shows that plants respond to temperature and water which and i don't fault the authors at all i actually had a very similar paper that had a very similar response and is now in the the heartland institute climate denier literature showing supposedly the climate changes and happened one way to think about how people understand climate change is to go back to this sort of constraints that i was talking about before so maybe like other areas of science we're filtering what we learn about climate change through these intuitive lenses that we've developed this is work done by my ph d student nicole betts for her dissertation and it's currently ongoing but what she's done is measure  in a sample of right now shockingly their undergraduate psychology majors measured the degree to which these different kinds of thinking are present and what she is looking at is the degree to which these different kinds of thinking might predict people's understanding of climate change so not misconceptions per se but they're kind of factual responses to an assessment of your understanding of climate change so the question is is this kind of intuitive thinking that we've seen relevant for biology also relevant for understanding climate change and so what she did that she asked people to the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about climate change that were misconceptions and that were set sort of related to these different kinds of these different construal and simply looked at relations between people's acceptance of these kinds of misconceptions in their performance on a measure of climate understanding understand climate change but interestingly the relationship was reversed for anthropocentric think so people who sort of overestimated the role of humans in the world or who reasoned about the rest of the world with kind of by comparison to people actually showed more understanding of both the causes and the effects of climate change so i think one point this makes is that our intuitive understanding can lead to systematic misunderstandings of climate science but it also might give us some hope for leveraging people's understanding if we can present information in a way that is consistent with at least some of our intuitive can stroll space thinking we might that might be a way to help people understand behave in a way that helps to mitigate climate change part ok so we don't have any solutions yet unfortunately what we've tried to the point we've tried to make tonight is that the realities of climate change  very complicated they're not something that can be summarized in a sound bite it's as brian has said it's a global phenomenon that plays out on a local level and it different localities it plays out in very different ways it could be increase in temperature could be a decrease in temperature it could be an increase in rainfall it could be a decrease in rainfall it's a very complicated pattern and not only that another factor that brian has made clear is that these kinds of changes always interact with other factors so it's a complicated phenomenon to begin with and moreover the point i've tried to make is that even the clearest information is filtered through our intuitive cognitive can stores are the lenses we've developed for understanding them and this can be bad because it can lead to systematic misconceptions it also can be good because it offers some hope for for leveraging these intuitive ways of thinking to help people understand and behave appropriately with respect to climate change and i guess the message we want to walk away with is the idea that the interdisciplinary study of ecological and psychological factors may help us understand and address these challenges for people's understanding of climate change i thin