Cognitive Climate Change Website
Check it out below! 👇
For my project I decided to create a website centered around the role that cognitive dissonance (CD) plays in the way we think about climate change and some ways we can overcome this type of dissonance. I decided on doing a website pretty early on because it was something I had never done before and I thought it would be a unique way to get the information learned in class across to a wide audience in a COVID safe way!
I knew I wanted to focus on cognitive dissonance, specifically, because I believe it plays a huge role in how we may think or act on climate change. In a lot of ways, it's this psychological effect that is holding people back from truly taking action on fighting against something like climate change.
Stoknes describes cognitive dissonance as that uncomfortable inner tension you feel when you experience conflicting thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We know that our brain's ways of overcoming cognitive dissonance have to do with modifying our perceptions of reality, weakening the importance of a concern, adding extra cognitions, or even flat out denial if we try hard enough (Stoknes, 2015). That is something I tried to address by including a 'Tips' page on how to hopefully stop ourselves from falling back on these mental comforts so much.
Our worldviews and the people we surround ourselves with play a much larger role in our own cognitive dissonance than we may think, because, even though we and many others may consider ourselves scientifically literate we know that these kind of folks are not actually those to be most concerned with climate change, it all stems down to a conflict of interests (Kahan et al., 2012).
The creation of the site itself was a bit of a challenge at first but Squarespace offers thousands of templates to start with and it is pretty navigable once you pick a base. I highly recommend it for a foundation if anyone is planning on making a website any time soon. Though putting the site together itself took about a week.
The site is sectioned into six pages. The 'Home' page giving a brief introduction to the project with some easy access links to the rest of the site. The 'Climate Change' page I made sure to include because I knew that anyone could visit my site and not everyone may know what we know about the facts behind climate change so I just wanted to include some of the basic information that I have learned throughout my time at Eckerd on things like greenhouse gases, rising seas, and ocean warming/acidification. The 'Cognitive Dissonance' page would explain CD and the way in which it affects our thinking and some of the reasons behind it. The 'Tips' page would include some of the ways I personally believe people could overcome that uncomfortable feeling preventing them from taking action.
Then the last two pages were simply a brief background on the project and then a section for feedback, which was one of the big measures of success for my project! This section was a way to hear back from readers on what they enjoyed, learned, etc.
Another big measure of success for my project was the ability to read the analytics of my site that let me how many people were visiting, from what devices or apps, where in the world they were looking from, etc. I was able to reach beyond my goal of 50 visits to my site, with most of those visits coming from the US, but interestingly enough, from other countries as well like Canada, Ireland and even one from the Netherlands! One of my other goals for 30 responses was not able to be reached after about two weeks of sharing on social media so I was forced to make the choice of cutting that goal in half and with great effort of asking those around me I was able to reach about half of the goal with 12 responses of feedback. I had the issue of not being able to directly link the comment section to the 'Feedback' page so I assumed that stopped people from interacting as much.
Ultimately this project was successful in getting information out to a good amount of people in just a couple of weeks. The website has reached almost 100 visits and even though this project is ending I would really like to keep it up and running as the comments that have been left have found the site really informative and useful, especially when it came to learning about something they had no idea about like CD or even some of the basic facts on climate change! And hopefully I will have the chance to just keep updating it in the future, who knows?
- Melissa Marandola 5/10/21
References
Kahan, D., Peters, E., Wittlin, M. et al. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Clim Change 2, 732–735 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1547
Stoknes, P. (2015). What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
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