Feds' psychology tricks fail
miserably on global warming, Government
program still can't get people to 'draw correct inferences', by Bob Unruh
9/17/16 WND
President Obama’s executive order to
federal agencies to integrate into their policies and programs
“behavioral-science insights” about how people make decisions and act on them
has had little effect on how Americans think about “climate change,” the
government-approved theory that mankind is causing irreparable damage to the
planet.
That’s according to the Social and
Behavioral Sciences Team in the executive office of the president, part of the
National and Science Technology Council.
It recently released its annual
report describing how it worked in eight
“policy areas.” The work included “promoting retirement security, advancing
economic opportunity, improving college access and affordability, responding to
climate change, supporting criminal-justice reform, assisting job seekers,
helping families get health coverage and stay healthy, and improving the
effectiveness and efficiency of federal government operations.”
The SBST’s objective is to help
federal agencies “leverage social and behavioral science insights to advance
the goals of their policies and programs.”
Many of the efforts were simple
applications of common sense. For example, the report’s executive summary
explains it had Department of Defense bases start asking those arriving for new
assignments whether they wanted to participate in a retirement savings program,
and the participation rate rose 8.3 percent.
It also set up a procedure for Medicaid
data submitted by families to be used by schools to “automatically enroll”
students in free or reduced price school lunch programs.
It also is providing information to
Social Security recipients about what their benefits will be if they start the payments
at various times, to maximum the benefit to the individuals.
And the program has started a
microloan program for farmers “who may have difficulty obtaining credit from a
commercial source.”
It has had less success on global
warming. The report said consumer adoption of “green-power plans remains low at
roughly 700,000 customers nationwide.”
To improve that, the team initiated
a dialogue with the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy to “identify the potential behavioral barriers underlying low
take-up of clean energy, as well as a suite of behavioral tools that can be
used to address these barriers.”
“For example, behavioral science
research indicates that prompting consumers to select a power plan from among
clean and non-clean options (rather than defaulting them into a standard
electricity plan) and presenting plan options in ways that facilitate informed
decision-making can improve take-up,” the report said.
It also wants to make consumers
better understand what the government wants them to do about global warming.“To
help households, communities and decision-makers better understand and adapt to
the effects of rising global temperatures, SBST, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Maryland have worked to help
the United States Global Change Research Program improve their ‘climate
indicators,’ which convey important information about climate patterns to
non-scientists,” the report said.
“This pilot yielded mixed results.
For example, simplifying a graph showing changes in the Annual Greenhouse Gas
Index increased successful interpretation of the indicator by 18 percent
points, but did not significantly increase how well people were able to draw
inferences from the indicator,” the report said.
Video: Climate Change Fight Is
'Critical'
It then goes into detail about how
it did research to show that simply changing a graph around might help convince
people of the agenda’s value.
“This project gauged comprehension
of 14 existing USGCRP indicators using an online survey that asked people
between three and six questions about the information
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/feds-psychology-tricks-fail-miserably-on-global-warming/#Uuadisjd5rpHRiWi.99
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