In 2015, ace social scientists Timothy Ballard and Stephan Lewandowsky published an exciting
peer-reviewed paper in which they concluded that people’s certainty and concern about climate change are greater when the inherent uncertainty about projected future climate impacts is expressed in terms of when a specific impact is likely to occur (when, not if) rather than in terms of how much of the impact is likely to occur by a given year (if, not when).
The conclusion that a novel “when, not if” framing of climate projections is more effective at helping people reach appropriate conclusions than the traditional “if, not when” framing immediately struck Mason 4C researchers Connie Roser-Renouf, Teresa Myers and Ed Maibach as intriguing and potentially important. So, Connie, Teresa and Ed did what skeptical scientists tend to do: they attempted to replicate Tim and Steve’s findings.
Great, right? That’s how science is supposed to work…our confidence in a finding grows to the extent that the finding is replicated by independent researchers.
Despite the intuitive appeal of the original “when, not if” experiment, our replication failed to confirm the findings of the Ballard & Lewandowsky paper—“when, not if” was not more effective than “if, not
when.”
To investigate why the replication failed, the two teams agreed to work together to conduct a second replication of the original paper—this time
pre-registering the study with the Open Science Framework—in hopes of determining if “when” really does feel more certain than “if”. A sixth social scientist—Mason 4C Affiliated Researcher David Sleeth-Keppler--joined the research team to help make sense of the findings and take the lead in writing up the results. (If the old joke about how many social scientists it takes to screw in a light bulb comes to mind, that would be understandable.)
The results of these two replication studies were published today in Royal Society Open Science in a paper titled,
“Does ‘when’ really feel more certain than ‘if’: Two failures to replicate Ballard and Lewandowsky (2015)"
. Given that the title of the paper reveals the conclusion of our story, you might feel you don’t need to actually download and read the paper, but we hope you will because we’re confident that learning ab
out our journey will give you greater confidence that we reached a reliable destination.
We always get there in the end, it’s just a question of when, not if.
As always, thanks for your interest in our work.
