Bridging the political divide: Highlighting explanatory power mitigates biased evaluation of climate arguments

Climate change beliefs' strong ties to political ideology remains one of the most significant impediments to productive public discourse about climate change. Ideologically-driven motivated reasoning leads to biased evaluation of climate change arguments. The current studies offer a novel cognitive approach to mitigate biased evaluation. Republicans and Democrats were randomly assigned to either focus carefully on an argument's quality or focus on how well an argument explained how the main point leads to the proposed outcome - termed, mechanistic explanatory power. Focusing on the mechanistic explanatory power of anti-climate change scientific explanations (Study 1) and pro-environmental behavior arguments (Study 2) substantially reduced biased evaluation and bridged the political ideological divide. These results have practical implications for policy makers and climate change communicators: 1) climate change material should contain mechanistic explanation, and 2) one should highlight the presence or absence of mechanistic explanatory power in an argument.