by Nathan Van Damme
I recently attended a wonderful event about climate change and sustainability in Washington D.C. which drew the attendance of interested students as well as individuals in government roles. As these events tend to go, some extraordinary and extremely inventive ideas were discussed on how the global warming of our planet can be slowed down or even reversed. This occasion was yet another well-organized opportunity for like-minded people to network and mingle. That like-mindedness, however, may have actually been quite an issue…
You see, I attended this event with a school friend who grew up in a more conservative environment than I. His stance on climate change is fairly neutral: ‘Well, if it happens, it happens, I guess?’ Perhaps a common way to look at the situation for many people. Although he thoroughly enjoyed the event, he asked me a pivotal question about the way I viewed science policy and diplomacy: ‘Why are you all organizing these nice events for people that already care about the environment? Shouldn’t you be trying to convince people like me instead?’ I wanted to respond with something witty, but I realized it took me a while to answer his question. Why aren’t we approaching people that don’t care or don’t even believe in climate change? Of course, we need to collaborate with people that engage with climate change to enact change, but does it even make sense to talk to people that don’t care? I want to open this debate by answering this through the eyes of an engineer: with math!
Let me introduce you to Nate’s Debate. Imagine you are in a room with 3 other people: a collaborator, a neutral, and an opposing party. You need to vote on a law, but the law only passes with a majority of 3 out of 4 people. You can only speak with 1 of the 3 people in hopes of increasing the chances they vote in favor for your law. Who do you choose to debate? Let us add some probabilities to this problem.
SCENARIO 1
Let’s assume the following scenario:
The top row represents the probability of someone voting pro if we talk to them and the bottom row displays the probabilities of someone voting pro if we do not talk to them. In this scenario, the opposition will always vote against us if we do not talk to them, a neutral voter has a 50-50 chance to vote pro, and a collaborator still has a slight chance to vote against our law due to external factors. So if we do not choose to debate, there is a 0%, 50%, and 80% chance that the opposition, neutral, and collaborative positions vote pro, respectively. We then assume talking to an individual increases their odds of voting pro by 20%. The table below shows the probability of the law passing or not. The probabilities on the right side of the table are calculated by multiplying the probability of a person’s choice times for every correct combination of choices for a given outcome. As an example, the law being passed, if we talk to the opposing party, is calculated as:
The black border in the table below represents the person we debate with. So who do we talk to in this scenario?
We should talk to the neutral person! You have a 56% chance of winning the vote with this choice. What is interesting here is that talking to your collaborator has the same pass-rate as talking to the opposition.
SCENARIO 2
Let us now consider a slightly different scenario. What if we assume our collaborator is almost certain to vote ‘yes’ on our matter. They are our friend after all, right?
How does this impact the results? Intuitively, we could argue it does not make much sense to convince our collaborator; they are very likely to be in favor anyway. Looking at the table below, we can indeed see that this results in the lowest chance of passing our law. Talking to the neutral party or the opposition becomes even more attractive the more in favor our collaborator is.
SCENARIO 3
In this last scenario we highlight the power of convincing on a member of the opposition. Turning the opposition into a collaborator with a single talk might be a challenging task. However, we never know when talking to the opposition might combine with other factors to bring them to the other side. Let’s assume here our talk with the opposition has a greater effect due to a previous lack of knowledge on their side. When choosing to talk to the opposition, the odds of them voting in our favor are now 40%.
How does this affect our results? We now see talking to the opposition surpasses the other 2 options and is the smartest choice in this scenario.
It is up to the reader to decide which of these scenarios is the most realistic. In reality, these scenarios cannot be perfectly represented by simple probabilities and are highly context dependent. I happily invite the reader to experiment with the probabilities in the excel sheet below. What I want to highlight with these scenarios is that talking to the opposition is never the worst choice, and talking solely with collaborators is often not enough to form a winning coalition. Talking to people with vastly different opinions can be intimidating but with enough understanding from both sides, there can be progress.
Like-minded people in the fight against global warming can achieve great things due to their common interest in the matter. However, we should not head towards a closed bubble where we solely focus our attention on people already heavily engaged in the field. Talking to people with different opinions holds real value. A potential benefit of this is understanding arguments based on false information. It could teach us how to avoid other people falling into the same forms of misinformation and in the end help us convert more contra voters into neutral voters.
Nathan Van Damme received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University , where he also served as Science Policy Corodinator for the Science Policy and DIplomacy Group. Nathan is currently a Product Development Engineer at Congruence Medical Solutions.
Edited by Corinna Torabi, Kaila Rehfuss, and Brendon Davis.