Dan Pink covers this in Drive: the problem is not that climate skeptics don't believe in climate change, it's that the Tribe of Climate Skeptics accepts as one of their holy tenets that climate change is heresy. Should you allow thoughts of anthropocentric global warming into your cranium, you become a heretic. Should you voice these thoughts, you will be cast out as a heretic, left to wander the wastes alone with no cultural identity to speak of. This is how "ex-mormon" practically became a religion unto itself: breaking from the Mormon faith is more stressful than breaking from protestantism (for example) because it's such an insular, inward-facing religion that once you leave it, you are bereft of friends, family, culture.

Priming a research subject to recognize her affiliation with other tribes lowers the heresy quotient of their thought processes and allows them to analyze things more rationally. The same is true of vaccine deniers; after California passed mandatory vaccination it caused most of the fence-sitters to come back into the fold. If you weren't a fence-sitter, though, you ended up even deeper into the lunatic fringe. Before, you were on a delayed schedule. After, you were either caught up or doing encounter cruises with Andrew Wakefield.

The basic problem is that right-wing politics has become about cultural identity rather than ideas. I am Republican because I believe in God, because I believe in a strong military, because I believe in individual determination, because I believe in limited government. And when God is used as a club by cynics, when the military is made more expensive but less effective, when the social safety net is shot full of holes and when the profitable parts of government are made huge while the beneficial parts are left to die? Well, you're okay with it because it's Republicans that are doing it so it must be good.

The trick is not to get people to believe in things. The trick is to get tribes to believe in things.

I just realized I did this without noticing two months ago.

I was taking a carpool from berlin back to heidelberg with this guy. After a few minutes I find out that he is a "permanent test object". As in, his job is to drive from one Phase I pharamceutical trial to the next, to be a test object. Phase I trials are the first step to approval and only test the safety of the substance, on healthy individuals.

He has been doing that for 20 years and apparently, if you do it right, you can feed a household of 6 by doing that.

We discussed many subjects on this 7 hour ride, including climate change. I was very surprised that, as educated he sounded on the other subject, he was a complete climate change denier. After digging deeper, I found out that he believes in some other, more "simple" explanation for the weather playing crazy that had nothing to do with CO2.

At some point, it led to the core of the problem. He did not trust science. He believed that scientists, world wide, teamed up and fed the CO2-narrative to get funding. After explaining to him that the funding doesn't go into the scientist's pockets and that it is used for research, he mentioned that he did not believe in research...

Quite reactionary of me. And maybe with a slightly angry tone. I asked him, "if you don't believe in research, how do you trust the Phase I trials? How can you trust the substance that is first tested on you to not kill you?"

It did a click. I could literally see it happening. He fell silent for a while and just said "I guess you are right about that".

I thought that this was just a rogue example but according to that article. This is generally a good method!