! Red State Panic as Children Told To Trust Science Instead of Rightwing Politicians

[Kurt Nicklas]

Many conservatives have a difficult relationship with science – we wanted
to find out why
August 9, 2021 6.44am EDT
Authors

Stephan Lewandowsky

Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol
Klaus Oberauer

Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Zurich



Many scientific findings continue to be disputed by politicians and parts
of the public long after a scholarly consensus has been established. For
example, nearly a third of Americans still do not accept that fossil fuel
emissions cause climate change, even though the scientific community
settled on a consensus that they do decades ago.

Research into why people reject scientific facts has identified people’s
political worldviews as the principal predictor variable. People with a
libertarian or conservative worldview are more likely to reject climate
change and evolution and are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-
19.

What explains this propensity for rejection of science by some of the
political right? Are there intrinsic attributes of the scientific
enterprise that are uniquely challenging to people with conservative or
libertarian worldviews? Or is the association merely the result of
conflicting imperatives between scientific findings and their economic
implications? In the case of climate change, for example, any mitigation
necessarily entails interference with current economic practice.

We recently conducted two large-scale surveys that explored the first
possibility – that some intrinsic attributes of science are in tension
with aspects of conservative thinking. We focused on two aspects of
science: the often tacit norms and principles that guide the scientific
enterprise, and the history of how scientific progress has led us to
understand that human beings are not the centre of the universe.
Written by academics, edited by journalists, backed by evidence.

Sociologist Robert Merton famously proposed norms for the conduct of
science in 1942. The norm of “communism” (different from the political
philosophy of communism) holds that the results of scientific research
should be the common property of the scientific community. “Universalism”
postulates that knowledge should transcend racial, class, national or
political barriers. “Disinteredness” mandates that scientists should
conduct research for the benefit of the scientific enterprise rather than
for personal gain.

These norms sit uneasily with strands of standard contemporary
conservative thought. Conservatism is typically associated with
nationalism and patriotism, at the expense of embracing cooperative
internationalism. And the notion of disinterestedness may not mesh well
with conservative emphasis on property rights.
Protesters hold up signs calling for Maryland to be released from COVID
restrictions.
Trump supporters come together to protest COVID health protection measures
in Maryland. EPA

Science has enabled us to explain the world around us but that may create
further tensions – especially with religious conservatism. The idea that
humans are exceptional is at the core of traditional Judeo-Christian
thought, which sees the human as an imago Dei, an image of God, that is
clearly separate from other beings and nature itself.

Against this human exceptionalism, the over-arching outcome of centuries
of research since the scientific revolution has been a diminution of the
status of human beings. We now recognise our planet to be a rather small
and insignificant object in a universe full of an untold number of
galaxies, rather than the centre of all creation.
Testing the issues

We tested how those two over-arching attributes of science – its intrinsic
norms and its historical effect on how humans see themselves – might
relate to conservative thought and acceptance of scientific facts in two
large-scale studies. Each involved a representative sample of around 1,000
US residents.

We focused on three scientific issues; climate change, vaccinations, and
the heritability of intelligence. The first two were chosen because of
their known tendency to be rejected by people on the political right,
allowing us to observe the potential moderating role of other predictors.

The latter was chosen because the belief that external forces such as
education can improve people and their circumstances is a focus of
liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is skeptical of that
possibility and leans more towards the idea that improvement comes from
the individual – implying a lesser role for the malleability of
intelligence.

The fact that individual differences in intelligence are related to
genetic differences, with current estimates of heritability hovering
around 50%, is therefore potentially challenging to liberals but might be
endorsed by conservatives.

The two studies differed slightly in how we measured political views and
people’s endorsement of the norms of science, but the overall findings
were quite clear. Conservatives were less likely to accept the norms of
science, suggesting that the worldviews of some people on the political
right may be in intrinsic conflict with the scientific enterprise.

Those people who accepted the norms of science were also more likely to
endorse vaccinations and support the need to fight climate change. This
suggests that people who embrace the scientific enterprise as a whole are
also more likely to accept specific scientific findings.

We found limited support for the possibility that belief in human
exceptionalism would predispose people to be more sceptical in their
acceptance of scientific propositions. Exceptionalism had little direct
effect on scientific attitudes. Therefore, our study provided no evidence
for the conjecture that the long history of science in displacing humans
from the centre of the world contributes to conversatives’ uneasiness with
science.

Finally, we found no strong evidence that people on the political left are
more likely to reject the genetic contribution to individual variation in
intelligence. This negative result adds to the evidence that science
denial is harder to find on the left, even concerning issues where basic
aspects of liberal thought – in this case the belief that people can be
improved – are in potential conflict with the evidence.

The two studies help explain why conservatives are more likely to reject
scientific findings than liberals. This rejection is not only dictated by
political interests clashing with a specific body of scientific knowledge
(such as human-caused climate change), but it appears to represent a
deeper tension between conservatism and the spirit in which science is
commonly conducted.

[Kurt Nicklas]

[Kurt Nicklas]

[Kurt Nicklas]

[Kurt Nicklas]

[Kurt Nicklas]