Abstract
Bolsen, Toby, James N. Druckman, and Fay Lomax Cook. 2015. Citizens’, Scientists’, and Policy Advisors’ Beliefs about Global Warming. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 658 (1): 271–95. doi: 10.1177/0002716214558393
There is an error in the bottom half of Figure 2 in Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook (2015), which displays the predicted belief “Global Warming Is Anthropogenic” for conservatives and liberals at the minimum and maximum levels of knowledge. In the original Figure 2, the values for minimum knowledge and maximum knowledge conservatives and liberals were mistakenly transposed; therefore the slopes of the lines are the opposite of what was correctly communicated in the corresponding text. Also in the original Figure 2, lower values correspond to a greater belief that climate change is human-caused; this is unduly confusing, owing to the fact that we reverse-coded data from estimations presented in Table 2.
A revised Figure 2 (below) presents new simulated predicted values using Clarify for minimum knowledge and maximum knowledge liberals and conservatives in the public sample, with higher values indicating greater belief that climate change is human-induced and less belief that it is the result of Earth’s natural changes. The figure shows, as reported in Table 2 of the original manuscript and discussed in the article, that there are no significant differences in the beliefs of liberals and conservatives at low levels of knowledge; however, significant differences between these groups manifest at higher levels of knowledge.
Bottom half: higher scores associated with a greater belief that global warming is a result of anthropogenic causes