Professor Sol Hart is a professor of Public Communication. He received his B.S at UCD in Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning, his M.S. at OU in Environmental Studies, and a Ph.D. at Cornell in Communication. Now he works at AU and is a researcher. He has always been interested in environmental issues and after reading many newspapers and seeing stories on TV he looked for holes in their research and saw where he could fill in his own interest. A couple years before he had worked with Sahara Byrne on other “Boomerang Effect” research and has been interested in that ever since. All of this has lead to his recent research programs; “Boomerang Effects in Science Communication: How Motivated Reasoning and Identity Cues Amplify Opinion Polarization About Climate Mitigation Policies.”
In this research program gave 240 adults one of two stories about climate change and then surveyed them. The first story talked about climate change and the victims using a close location and social distance (upstate New York), the second used a far away location and high social distance (state of Georgia or the country France). They preformed a mall intercept in New York malls and paid each subject $5 to participate. This is a convenience sample so it was non-random. Then they had participants read either of the stories and surveyed them after. Their theory was the theory of motivated reasoning, social identity, and persuasion to “examine how science-based messages may increase public polarization on controversial science issues such as climate change.”
They found that if the person were a Democrat it wouldn’t matter if the subjects of harm were of a low or high social distance. But if the person identified as a Republican there was a big increase in support from someone of a high social distance (which was low in support) to low social distance (much higher in support).
Read the whole study here: http://www.climateaccess.org/resource/boomerang-effects-science-communication-how-motivated-reasoning-and-identity-cues-amplify-o
Brianna Kelley
