Climate change split not that wide

The study also reveals that people are more likely to support the same climate policy proposal when they think that their own political party supports it. Further, both Democrats and Republicans overestimate how much their peers oppose the ideas of the other party.

“Democratic and Republican citizens alike evaluate a carbon tax or cap and trade policy based on who proposed it—above and beyond their thoughts on the details of the policy, or on whether it is consistent with their beliefs about the importance of climate change,” says David Sherman, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and senior author of the paper, which appears in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

“They do this despite stating themselves that policy considerations should be more important than partisanship.”

“We found that people routinely place party over policy and disagree for the sake of disagreeing,” says lead author Leaf Van Boven, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Source: Political split on climate change isn’t so wide after all – Futurity