skip to content

Department of Psychology

Tor Tarantola, a graduate student in the Department, has recently had a paper published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Here, Tor talks about his research findings, his collaboration with researchers at Yale, and his background in public policy.

Despite scientific consensus about the risks of climate change, people are still polarized along cultural and political lines about whether it poses a real threat. We conducted a large-scale study in England and the U.S. (1,500 participants in each country) and found that people were less polarized about the underlying science when geoengineering -- rather than more severe restrictions on emissions -- was presented as the necessary solution. (Geoengineering is the use of technology, like large-scale air-scrubbers or solar reflectors, to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment.)

Our study suggests that rethinking how we communicate science to the public might help alleviate some of the polarization that inhibits addressing big problems like climate change.

I got in touch with Dan Kahan, the lead author on the study, a few years ago while doing my masters. He heads the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and does a lot of great work looking at cultural cognition -- how people's cultural commitments motivate different types of thinking -- and its effect on public and legal policy challenges. He invited me to work on this project and help modify the study instruments for an English sample.

I worked in public policy before coming to Cambridge, and I'm interested in policymakers' and the public's relationship with science. I think science communication is an important part of our work, and doing it well can help motivate communities to address many of the problems that we study.

Tor Tarantola

Details of Tor's recently published paper:

Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Tor Tarantola, Carol L. Silva, and Donald Braman. Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-Channel Model of Science Communication. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 2015; vol. 658, 1: pp. 192-222. doi: 10.1177/0002716214559002