If you’re debating on social media about climate change, which do you think will garner the most support for your position?

🟡 Taking a civil or uncivil tone?

⚫ Making well-reasoned arguments or being generally uninformative?

My first thought was that being civil and informative would always be the way to gain support, but one study by Lauren Lutzke (University of Pennsylvania) and colleagues suggests that isn’t necessarily the case.

They have just over 1800 X (Twitter) users in the USA read a made-up X conversation between a Democrat and a Republican politician who were debating climate policy. The researchers manipulated these made-up conversations so that the politicians would be either civil or uncivil to each other, or make well-reasoned arguments to each other, or not. They didn’t set up conversations where one politician was rude and the other polite or where one was making informed arguments and the other wasn’t

Regardless of whether the person reading the conversation was a Democrat or a Republican, they found that:

🤝When the politicians were civil, people said they learned more and viewed the politicians better. They were more likely to think that the arguments the politicians made were stronger, too.

💡When politicians made well-reasoned arguments, people felt they learned more. Again, they also tended to feel the arguments were stronger.

But did a civil tone or well-reasoned arguments impact people’s support for climate policy?

In a word, no.

At least not at the time the experiment was done. As the researchers note,

“Ultimately, while policy support was not affected by our manipulations, the perceptions people have of arguments for climate policy, and the perceptions people have of political representatives, are likely important factors for garnering policy support over time.

Therefore, the takeaway for those communicating about climate change may still be to favor civil and informative communication styles on social media, with the important ethical caveat that communicating civilly may cause people to have a false sense of feeling informed.“

Want to read the study for yourself?

Unfortunately, the study is paywalled. If you don’t have access, you can always email the contact author (as I did) for a copy. Details are in the link 👇

Lauren Lutzke, Caitlin Drummond Otten, Sanghamitra Sen & Joseph Árvai (2024) All atwitter about climate change: do civil and informative Twitter debates influence support for climate policy?, Journal of Risk Research, DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2024.2317320