Brainwashing Children Works?

That is the conclusion of a study reported on at Watts Up With That?. Experimenters used middle-school children in North Carolina to try to influence their parents to believe in climate change hysteria:

The collective action that is required to mitigate and adapt to climate change is extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to socio-ideological biases that perpetuate polarization over climate change.

Also due to the fact that the arguments in favor of CAGW are weak.

Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents — may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern. Here we present an experimental evaluation of an educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.

It would be interesting to know what, exactly, the researchers did to put the children up to propagandizing their parents, but the abstract doesn’t tell us that.

Parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group.

The “treatment group.”

The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.

Someone should do a study on whether inculcating children with pro-Trump administration propaganda would enable them to influence liberal parents. But I don’t suppose that is part of the agenda of the public schools.

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