Inspired by XKCD comics’ Thing Explainer, we are now posting descriptions of our new publications as they come out using the 1000 most commonly used English words (http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/). We find it not only clears out the jargon to help non-experts understand our research, it helps us understand our research better too.
Whitman, J.C., Zhao, J., Roberts, K. H., & Todd, R. M. (in press). Political orientation and climate concern shape attention to climate change. Climatic Change. Download 
Despite what people who study how things work tell us, we still have a hard time understanding and believing how what people do changes how hot the air is, how dry lands get, how much rain we get, and how strong winds are. What we know about this is not always right because we like to agree with state-people (those we choose to make choices for everyone) who hold the same beliefs as we do without even checking if the information they have is sound.
In this study, we also suggest that what people know about these changes in land, water, and air happening around us has to do with what easily grabs our attention. We thought that what our eyes like or do not like paying attention to would change with how much we actually care about the problem. So we studied how we see what is more important and less important about things that have something to do with these land-water-air changes when we do not have that much attention. To do this we asked people to tell us if they see words about these land-water-air changes and normal (boring) words when we showed these words very fast together with other words so they were very hard to see. People who were in school paid attention to land-water-air change words more easily than normal (boring) words. We found that that the more they feel they care about this land-water-air change problem, the more attention they pay these words.
We then asked these same questions in a bigger setting. We asked people outside school (like shopping centers) to answer a few questions about where they live, their beliefs, and if they have been through bad events like fire or heavy rain. We found that how much we care about this land-water-air change problem, and the state party we side with, play a part in whether we see land-water-air change words. People who did not care much about land-water-air change and people who liked more old time state parties did not see land-water-air change words very well at all.
Our findings suggest that in order to talk to people about our worries about land-water-air change, we should understand that people’s different worries, as well as the state-party people side with, change whether they see signs of land-water-air change at all. If you don’t worry about changes made by people in how hot the air is, you will not see the signs.
