So my talk today is about trust and of course what’s going through my head is what you trust this guy with $10,000. We’re not going to explore that any further because we don’t have time. So let me start with a quick poll. How many Franksters trust what scientists have to say on climate change? Show of hands. Scientists. Okay, we’ve just established I’m at the right conference. We’ve also established that Franksters are not normal and I think that’s what the weather guy Jeff Huffman said on Monday. If you’ve watched the video he said Franksters are not normal and it’s true. Only about half of Americans think like scientists on the topic of climate change. You might say well half is better than 6% or something. But when it comes to climate change I think we need to do better than half. So what’s the problem with this? Well research has shown that people that do not trust scientists are less likely to believe in climate change and therefore they’re less likely to act on climate change. So a big question is what can we do about this? One of the most prominent solutions to this agreement gap is to close the gap. Essentially get more Americans to trust scientists. Now I would argue similarly actually to my co-competitor Brendan who said that you can’t just throw facts at people. These guys to trust scientists is like getting Franksters to trust Rush Limbaugh or Fox News on climate change. Now by these guys I mean people who are more conservative, more religious, less educated and more rural than Franksters. Now the second option that I’d like to talk to you about today is and wait for this, to meet people where they live on climate change. Yes, it’s now a tired cliche since yesterday. Nobody can say this anymore. But what I mean is not to send a watered down message on climate change to people, I really mean meet people where they live. Talk to people who are natural authorities in people’s lives, not experts. How might this work? So a person might trust somebody on solutions to climate change simply because she’s a member of her church. So trust in this case flows from value similarity. Now value similarity coincidentally also governs trust in scientists but just for very different audiences. So the idea is that the messenger is a powerful gatekeeper. We process trust first and then we might listen. If we don’t trust somebody we’re never going to listen to them. You would never listen to Rush Limbaugh on climate change even if he started to make sense. So the major premise of our work is to move away from this notion of expertise to notions of trust and goodwill. Trust is does this person have good intentions? Goodwill is does this person care about me? It’s a very different sort of components of credibility. So we put these notions to the test in a study we call the American Climate Value Survey which is a national probability sample of U.S. adults and it covers internet and non-internet households. A respondent doesn’t have internet. This firm that we used actually gives a laptop to the respondent so it’s really a representative survey of U.S. adults. And we asked more than 1700 Americans to rate how much they trust each of these communicators on potential solutions to climate change. By the way it’s very difficult to get good stock photography on bosses, especially nice bosses. So you’re going to have to sort of bear with me here. But we had really good reasons to choose all of these. Farmers for example live close to the land and have already observed changes in growing cycles and doctors are increasingly seeing the negative effects of climate change in their patients like allergies and asthma and even psychological effects like climate anxieties becoming more pronounced. Pastors can carry almost any initiative just on their good word that it’s the right thing to do which is why they’re pastors. Bosses and coworkers can be in charge of energy efficiency campaigns at work so we had really good reasons for all of these. What we found was that Americans who already trust scientists on climate solutions also trust everybody else. We felt like this gives us permission to forget about scientists and just move to informal communicators. It doesn’t hurt the base. Now people who do not trust scientists instead rely on various informal communicators on solutions to climate change. Conservatives for example trust pastors, congregants, neighbors, health professionals, bosses and coworkers and that’s controlling for all kinds of other variables like age, education, income, sex, where people live. So these are unique effects that I’m talking about. Less educated people trust firefighters, neighbors, bosses and farmers. More religious people trust almost anybody. Religious people tend to be more trusting in general and more rural people trust farmers. Now what does this mean? There’s a new sequence I’d like to introduce you to and it’s the Feel, Act, Learn sequence. I believe that people feel trust first in a communication sequence. It says quickly whether somebody can be trusted has their best interest in mind. Afterwards they’re more likely to act and what’s interesting is you might not even have to have a real good message. So a pastor that says I think we should have a solar panel initiative at our church. The congregants start talking and I said well the pastor said so so it must be a really good idea. If you like your boss you might sign up for that one month of biking to work just because it seems like the right thing to do because there’s somebody you respect has authority in your life that’s saying we should do this. So action follows from trust. Learning may be a convenient sort of last step if it happens and then if people learn something about solar panels or learn something about climate change or not that’s a nice bonus but it’s not necessarily required in a trust relationship. If there’s learning people may then become opinion leaders themselves and teach others about it. Here’s what I don’t want you to do. I don’t want you to go home and say to your friends and colleagues and coworkers this guy with this really progressive hyphenated last name said we need to use more farmers and pastors in our advertising. I think you need to do more than that and for one there’s an obvious conflict between the authenticity of a farmer Ed and the reach. This was a visionary ad that ran maybe seven years ago but it ran in the New York Times in the Washington Post which the target audience didn’t trust. It’s all about trust. That’s the tweet thing. I think you actually have to talk to a farmer Joe. There must be a farmer Joe. Create real people who are opinion leaders in other people’s lives and develop co-develop solutions to climate change with those natural authorities, natural opinion leaders. Our research shows in the same study actually that most people that are skeptical reject solutions to climate change because they’re framed guess what as scientific or regulatory solutions to climate change. Putting a price on carbon or having heat deflecting shields that sound very scientific. I think if you talk to real people they’ll develop solutions with you and for you for audiences that work. Those of you who work for foundations you might ask can we throw money at this somehow with informal communicators. I would say that informal outreach doesn’t have to be unsystematic. It can be very organized. My colleagues at Eco America that did this study with Bob Perkowitz and Megan Spicer they recently launched a new faith based climate outreach organization called Bless It Tomorrow. It’s all about getting pastors together to talk about climate change. Now you wouldn’t start with the Westboro Baptist Church. You start with the reformers like Pope Francis, new people. So anyway I’m out of time. I leave you with this final tweetable thought. The communicator is the message. Thanks for having me. I’m out.