Are climate change deniers bending the facts so they don't have to change their environmentally damaging behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) conducted an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study themselves were surprised by the results. Whether this is good or bad news for the fight against global warming remains to be seen. The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change .

A surprisingly large number of people still downplay  the impact of climate change or denies that it is primarily a product of human activity. But why? One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-delusion, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failures if they don't believe things will actually get that bad. "We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'" says Professor Florian Zimmermann, an economist at the University of Bonn and director of research at IZA. (University of Bonn)