Empirical Study: Indoctrinated US Climate Activist Kids can be Used to Influence their Conservative Parents | Watts Up With That?

Empirical Study: Indoctrinated US Climate Activist Kids can be Used to Influence their Conservative Parents | Watts Up With That?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to the abstract this propaganda technique, indoctrinating children with educational material deliberately designed to help them influence parents, is particularly effective on Conservative men when the influencer is their daughter.

Children can foster climate change concern among their parents

Published: 06 May 2019--...The collective action that is required to mitigate and adapt to climate change is extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to socio-ideological biases that perpetuate polarization over climate change. Because climate change perceptions in children seem less susceptible to the influence of worldview or political context, it may be possible for them to inspire adults towards higher levels of climate concern, and in turn, collective action...The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents. Our results suggest that intergenerational learning may overcome barriers to building climate concern.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0463-3

Sadly the study is paywalled, so we don’t know who in North Carolina authorised this experiment, and whether parents gave full informed consent before their children were used by greens as social engineering guinea pigs."