🚨 New in Nature Human Behavior! 🚨
Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change.
Both graphs in this image reflect equivalent climate change trends over time, yet people consistently perceive climate change as having a greater impact in the right plot than the left.
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Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change.
Both graphs in this image reflect equivalent climate change trends over time, yet people consistently perceive climate change as having a greater impact in the right plot than the left.
👇1/n
Comments
certainly explored by tukey, perhaps here
https://consoleflare.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Exploratory-Data-Analysis-1977-John-Tukey.pdf
The contribution of our work is robustly testing people's perception of climate data, studying the cognitive underpinnings of the "boiling frog" effect, and providing concrete recommendations for improving climate communication.
This leads to the "boiling frog" effect — where subtle, incremental changes fail to trigger alarm, resulting in apathy despite worsening conditions.
Can we make these gradual changes more salient?
2/n
Important: both displays reflected the same underlying climate trends!
3/n
Binary data again amplifies perceived impact of climate change (see below)
This finding was robust across multiple replications and with real-world lake freeze data.
4/n
People who perceived these "changepoints" reported significantly higher climate change impact.
5/n
And this is why climate change matters.
Everywhere, quantity becomes quality, transform things like lakes. independent of mind. Then, when we look, the transformed target of our perception produces
6/n
Also want to say special thanks to @volts.wtf, whose beautiful article on "shifting baselines syndrome" in Vox inspired this research.
7/n