Cultivating Common Ground: An Identity Bias Approach to Trust, Knowledge, & the Rural Politics of Climate Change

• In Event: The Sociology of Climate Change

Abstract

In this paper, we emphasize the importance of identity bias (Bell 2024) in public debates over climate change – the common practice through which we resist or avoid information that undermines our identity, and accept and seek information that maintains it, even if that information is new. Focusing on the rural politics of climate belief, we introduce the identity bias approach as a more holistic and flexible approach to understanding human cognition and social relations concerning identity, knowledge, and trust. As part of this contribution, we distinguish between two forms of accepted knowledge – spoken and unspoken – to demonstrate that identity bias shapes not only what individuals come to accept as trustworthy, but also what they feel able or willing to express within their social networks. Further, we illustrate how identity bias can explain critical interrelationships among knowledge, identity, and trust as they relate to political identities. An identity bias approach opens up two key analytic possibilities that confirmation bias struggles to address: (1) that people often take on new knowledge, sometimes in ways that are quite divergent from ideas they formerly held; and (2) that knowledge often changes through identity change. In this article, we also detail the experience of phenomenological rupture and grounded knowledge, and point to the need for better understanding regarding political identity, knowledge, and trust in discussions of rural climate change belief.

Authors

• Rachel Gurney, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Michael M. Bell, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Marisa Lanker, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Valerie Stull, University of Wisconsin-Madison