Photograph by Martin Rollins.

Thanks to Maria Konnikova on the New Yorker‘s website for this post showing how one’s personal experience, for example with weather, can impact one’s perception of broader range of phenomena, such as climate change:

The winter of 2010 was brutal. In February, three blizzards smashed into the mid-Atlantic in the span of three weeks, burying the region under record amounts of snow. Thousands of people lost power; grocery-store shelves were stripped bare; cars were abandoned on highways; even the federal government shut down. The first two blizzards, which were Category 3 winter storms, paralyzed cities from Washington, D.C., to New York and became known, collectively, as the Snowmageddon. Lisa Zaval, a researcher studying perceptions of global warming, told me that she noticed that the storm also had a “strange side effect: an increase in skeptical remarks about global warming.” News reports, she said, expressed disbelief in the phenomenon, while blogs like If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It So Cold? began to pop up. “People seemed to be taking the extreme cold weather as evidence against global climate change,” she said.

In the weeks that followed the Snowmageddon, Zaval and her colleagues at Columbia’s Center for Decision Sciences and Center for Research on Environmental Decisions conducted a survey. (I was briefly affiliated with both centers during my graduate work in Columbia’s Department of Psychology.) They asked eleven hundred people from the United States and Australia how they felt about global warming and had them rate—on a scale from zero (not at all convinced/worried) to three (completely convinced/a great deal worried)—how confident they were “that global warming is happening.” They also asked subjects whether they were “personally worried about global warming” and whether the temperature, at that moment, was colder or warmer than usual. If a participant said that it was chillier than normal, it turned out, her belief in global warming—that is, her conviction that it was happening—weakened, as did her concern about its consequences; if it seemed toastier than usual, her belief and anxiety intensified. Zaval and her colleagues named this effect “local warming.” To make certain that the cause and effect weren’t flipped—that beliefs in global warming weren’t influencing perceptions of temperature—they switched around the order of the questions and compared the beliefs in global warming to actual, and not just perceived, temperature deviation. The local-warming effect held.

A number of other researchers have since produced similar findings: temperatures that deviate from the norm affect people’s beliefs in climate change. In one study, subjects placed in a heated cubicle believed more acutely in global warming than people placed in non-heated ones.

In a series of more recent studies, Zaval attempted to determine why people’s beliefs about global warming are so susceptible to the weather. After finding that neither the wording of prior surveys—“global warming” versus “climate change”—nor participants’ simple ignorance of the facts was responsible for the earlier results, she settled on a more prosaic explanation: people tend to make decisions based on the information most immediately available to them.

The closer you are to an experience—be it a pain au chocolat you just ate, an article you just read, or the weather outside as you walked to the office—the more that experience colors your beliefs. In a phenomenon known as attribute substitution, we substitute the most immediately available, recent information for more general—and relevant—information when we make a judgment or a decision. In Zaval’s study, for instance, simply asking respondents whether the previous day’s temperature was unusual mitigated the “local warming” effect, because it distanced them from their current experience.

It’s not just proximity that makes a difference. The more extreme an experience is, the more deeply it effects one’s beliefs, so that a polar vortex or a withering heat wave will sway more minds—and be more persuasive—than a light dusting of snow or a particularly balmy afternoon. In one study of New Jersey residents, the Rutgers University psychologist Laurie Rudman and her colleagues found that before hurricanes Irene and Sandy, people were generally turned off by “green” politicians who linked climate change to extreme weather. But, after the storms swept through, their attitudes changed, especially if they had been personally affected by Hurricane Sandy; Irene, the weaker of the two storms, had a much weaker impact…

Read the whole post here.