Humans have an innate preference for “natural” things. If it comes from nature, the thinking goes, it must somehow be better, healthier, and maybe even more moral. Former debate club kids will recognize this rhetorical trick as the “appeal to nature” fallacy, but there’s a good reason it gets bandied about—it works (just take a stroll down a grocery aisle).
As our many inborn biases go, it’s not the worst, but it can be a double-edged sword. Now, a new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment is shedding light on how our opinions of climate-change solutions shift when we view them as “unnatural.”
A team of psychologists and environmental scientists led by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder surveyed 1,000 Americans about their views on 10 different methods for tackling climate change. The researchers included countermeasures that removed carbon from the atmosphere, like carbon capture and tree planting, and green energy solutions, like nuclear, wind, and solar power. Respondents were specifically asked if they’d support a broad-based program to implement the climate-change fixes with their tax dollars, as well as how natural, beneficial, risky, familiar, or frightening they deemed the solutions.
Read more: “Just Because It’s Natural Doesn’t Mean It’s Good”
The best predictor of support for the climate-change remedies was how natural people perceived them to be. Solar energy and planting trees, for example, scored higher than “unnatural” technologies like carbon capture and nuclear energy. In fact, “naturalness” showed a stronger association with support than risks, benefits, fears, and familiarity. The robust link between the two measures even held true across political parties (no small feat in our polarized political environment).
“That is a rare point of convergence, especially in the realm of climate change, where support for solutions can be incredibly polarized,” study author Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin of the University of Colorado Boulder said in a statement.
For the second part of the study, the team chose the four climate-change solutions at the extremes of perceived naturalness and unnaturalness (solar energy, tree planting, carbon capture, and nuclear energy) and asked a separate group of respondents about them. This time, however, they emphasized the natural aspects of each method. Carbon capture, for example, was described as a technology “that mimics natural processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, similar to the way that plants pull carbon from the atmosphere through their leaves.”
The green glow-up led to increased support for all the solutions (solar received a smaller bump, which may have been because its familiarity makes it more resilient to framing, the researchers hypothesized). “We sometimes assume that if we can just develop solutions to address climate change, the public will say, ‘OK. Let’s use them,’” study author Leaf Van Boven, also of the University of Colorado Boulder, said. “Our study shows that often it is not the technology itself, but the way we communicate about it that shapes public response.”
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Lead image: hrui / Adobe Stock
