[THS] !!!!!! The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://motherjones.com/print/106166

"[For] Republicans, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science."


The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

By Chris Mooney | Mon Apr. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PDT


"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he
turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic
and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University
psychologist Leon Festinger [2] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to
climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans
today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too
early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous
case study [3] in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-
area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including
one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The
group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar
messages through automatic writing.

Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm:
December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their
property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split
asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even
went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal,
they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. First, the "boys
upstairs" (as the aliens were sometimes called) did not show up and rescue the
Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger
had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system
react, now that it had been soundly refuted?

Read also: the truth about Climategate. [1]Read also: the truth about Climategate
[4].At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A
new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute.
Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group,
sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from
destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the
prophecy!

From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent
toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. "Their sense of urgency was enormous,"
wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more
certain of their beliefs.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They
lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away
from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the
far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And
since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience
has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts,
can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and
logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [5]" helps
explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so
unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of
the president [6] (PDF), and much else.

 [NOT TO MENTION THE DEATH OF OBL, 9/11, the drug war... -ths]

 It would seem that expecting people to be
convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience
[7] (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call
"affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings
about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious
thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but
long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to
react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill,"
explains political scientist Arthur Lupia [8] of the University of Michigan. We push
threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-
flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But
reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an
emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking
that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges
her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary
origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber [9] of Stony
Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and
that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the
conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous
beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge
what they're hearing."

In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or
to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt [10]:
We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers [11] (PDF). Our
"reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot
through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed
to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in
which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and
arguments that we find uncongenial.

That's a lot of jargon, but we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to
interpersonal relationships. If I don't want to believe that my spouse is being
unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away
behavior that seems obvious to everybody else—everybody who isn't too emotionally
invested to accept it, anyway. That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to
perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do.
It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity
affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly
resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses—what
that great 17th century theorist of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, dubbed the
"idols of the mind." Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with
their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized
skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.
Scientific evidence is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Giving ideologues
scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-
reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite
another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and
strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly
susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation. Giving ideologues or partisans
scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-
reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Sure enough, a large number of psychological studies have shown that people
respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.
In a classic 1979 experiment [12] (PDF), pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were
exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies: one supporting and one
undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in
particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological critiques of the
fake studies—and in a scientific sense, neither study was stronger than the other. Yet
in each case, advocates more heavily criticized the study whose conclusions
disagreed with their own, while describing the study that was more ideologically
congenial as more "convincing."

Since then, similar results have been found for how people respond to "evidence"
about affirmative action, gun control, the accuracy of gay stereotypes [13], and
much else. Even when study subjects are explicitly instructed to be unbiased and
even-handed about the evidence, they often fail.

[And, one need hardly add, scientists themselves are not automatically immune to the syndrome because they have PhD's or any other 'qualifications' - ths]

And it's not just that people twist or selectively read scientific evidence to support
their preexisting views. According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan
Kahan [14] and his colleagues, people's deep-seated views about morality, and about
the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a
legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific
consensus" to lie on contested issues.

In Kahan's research [15] (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural
values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or
"egalitarian" in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical
individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as
liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help
a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering
nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: "The friend tells you that he or she is
planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on
whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert." A subject
was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert "depicted as a member of the
National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one
elite university and who was now on the faculty of another." The subject was then
shown a book excerpt by that "expert," in which the risk of the issue at hand was
portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When
the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for
instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a
"trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian
communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise. Similar divides were
observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether
letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another
study [16] (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would
compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians
were opposed.)

Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people
not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold
their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its
conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent
in each scenario. A hierarchal individualist finds it difficult to believe that the things
he prizes (commerce, industry, a man's freedom to possess a gun to defend his
family [16]) (PDF) could lead to outcomes deleterious to society. Whereas egalitarian
communitarians tend to think that the free market causes harm, that patriarchal
families mess up kids, and that people can't handle their guns. The study subjects
weren't "anti-science"—not in their own minds, anyway. It's just that "science" was
whatever they wanted it to be. "We've come to a misadventure, a bad situation
where diverse citizens, who rely on diverse systems of cultural certification, are in
conflict," says Kahan [17].

And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via
evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes
trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when
confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than
ever.

Take, for instance, the question of whether Saddam Hussein possessed hidden
weapons of mass destruction just before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. When
political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler showed subjects fake newspaper
articles [18] (PDF) in which this was first suggested (in a 2004 quote from President
Bush) and then refuted (with the findings of the Bush-commissioned Iraq Survey
Group report, which found no evidence of active WMD programs in pre-invasion
Iraq), they found that conservatives were more likely than before to believe the
claim. (The researchers also tested how liberals responded when shown that Bush
did not actually "ban" embryonic stem-cell research. Liberals weren't particularly
amenable to persuasion, either, but no backfire effect was observed.)

Another study gives some inkling of what may be going through people's minds when
they resist persuasion. Northwestern University sociologist Monica Prasad [19] and
her colleagues wanted to test whether they could dislodge the notion that Saddam
Hussein and Al Qaeda were secretly collaborating among those most likely to believe
it—Republican partisans from highly GOP-friendly counties. So the researchers set up
a study [20] (PDF) in which they discussed the topic with some of these Republicans
in person. They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as well as a
statement in which George W. Bush himself denied his administration had "said the
9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda."

One study showed that not even Bush's own words could change the minds of Bush
voters who believed there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

As it turned out, not even Bush's own words could change the minds of these Bush
voters—just 1 of the 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim
changed his or her mind. Far more common was resisting the correction in a variety
of ways, either by coming up with counterarguments or by simply being unmovable:

Interviewer: [T]he September 11 Commission found no link between Saddam and
9/11, and this is what President Bush said. Do you have any comments on either of
those?

Respondent: Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn't have any proof of it but
I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.


The same types of responses are already being documented on divisive topics facing
the current administration. Take the "Ground Zero mosque." Using information from
the political myth-busting site FactCheck.org [21], a team at Ohio State presented
subjects [22] (PDF) with a detailed rebuttal to the claim that "Feisal Abdul Rauf, the
Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist-
sympathizer." Yet among those who were aware of the rumor and believed it, fewer
than a third changed their minds.

A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On
the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over
a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. "It is quite possible to say, 'I
reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived
at over my life,'" explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick [23]. Indeed,
there's a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly "rational." In
certain conservative communities, explains Yale's Kahan, "People who say, 'I think
there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind
of person, and their life is going to go less well."

This may help explain a curious pattern Nyhan and his colleagues found when they
tried to test the fallacy [6] (PDF) that President Obama is a Muslim. When a nonwhite
researcher was administering their study, research subjects were amenable to
changing their minds about the president's religion and updating incorrect views. But
when only white researchers were present, GOP survey subjects in particular were
more likely to believe the Obama Muslim myth than before. The subjects were using
"social desirabililty" to tailor their beliefs (or stated beliefs, anyway) to whoever was
listening.

Which leads us to the media. When people grow polarized over a body of evidence,
or a resolvable matter of fact, the cause may be some form of biased reasoning, but
they could also be receiving skewed information to begin with—or a complicated
combination of both. In the Ground Zero mosque case, for instance, a follow-up
study [24] (PDF) showed that survey respondents who watched Fox News were more
likely to believe the Rauf rumor and three related ones—and they believed them
more strongly than non-Fox watchers.

Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and
they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the
problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume
information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or
context, or "narrowcast [25]" and often highly ideological media that have relatively
small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says
Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."

A predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming? Whether you're a
Republican or a Democrat.

If you wanted to show how and why fact is ditched in favor of motivated reasoning,
you could find no better test case than climate change. After all, it's an issue where
you have highly technical information on one hand and very strong beliefs on the
other. And sure enough, one key predictor of whether you accept the science of
global warming is whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. The two groups have
been growing more divided in their views about the topic, even as the science
becomes more unequivocal.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that more education doesn't budge
Republican views. On the contrary: In a 2008 Pew survey [26], for instance, only 19
percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to
human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other
words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the
science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more
education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.

Other studies have shown a similar effect: Republicans who think they understand
the global warming issue best are least concerned about it; and among Republicans
and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the
issue doesn't increase one's concern about it. What's going on here? Well, according
to Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook, one insidious aspect of motivated
reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who
know less about the issues. "People who have a dislike of some policy—for example,
abortion—if they're unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand," says Lodge.
"But if they're sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with
counterarguments." These individuals are just as emotionally driven and biased as
the rest of us, but they're able to generate more and better reasons to explain why
they're right—and so their minds become harder to change.

That may be why the selectively quoted emails of Climategate were so quickly and
easily seized upon by partisans as evidence of scandal. Cherry-picking is precisely the
sort of behavior you would expect motivated reasoners to engage in to bolster their
views—and whatever you may think about Climategate, the emails were a rich trove
of new information upon which to impose one's ideology.

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according to Anthony
Leiserowitz [27], director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication [28].
It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a
significant loss of trust in scientists. But—as we should expect by now—these declines
were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans,
conservatives, and those with "individualistic" values. Liberals and those with
"egalitarian" values didn't lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. "In
some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test," Leiserowitz says, "with different
groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very different ways."

Is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the
claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism.

So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes:
the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous
proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [29]) and numerous
Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy [30] and Jim Carrey). The
Huffington Post gives a very large megaphone to denialists. And Seth Mnookin [31],
author of the new book The Panic Virus [32], notes that if you want to find vaccine
deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.

Vaccine denial has all the hallmarks of a belief system that's not amenable to
refutation. Over the past decade, the assertion that childhood vaccines are driving
autism rates has been undermined [33] by multiple epidemiological studies—as well
as the simple fact that autism rates continue to rise, even though the alleged
offending agent in vaccines (a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal) has
long since been removed.

Yet the true believers persist—critiquing each new study that challenges their views,
and even rallying to the defense of vaccine-autism researcher Andrew Wakefield,
after his 1998 Lancet paper [34]—which originated the current vaccine scare—was
retracted and he subsequently lost his license [35] (PDF) to practice medicine. But
then, why should we be surprised? Vaccine deniers created their own partisan
media, such as the website Age of Autism, that instantly blast out critiques and
counterarguments whenever any new development casts further doubt on anti-
vaccine views.

It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it
comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?

There are some clear differences. Science denial today is considerably more
prominent on the political right—once you survey climate and related environmental
issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian
right, and stem-cell and biomedical matters. More tellingly, anti-vaccine positions are
virtually nonexistent among Democratic officeholders today—whereas anti-climate-
science views are becoming monolithic among Republican elected officials.

Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological differences between
the left and the right that might impact responses to new information—that
conservatives are more rigid and authoritarian, and liberals more tolerant of
ambiguity. Psychologist John Jost of New York University has further argued that
conservatives are "system justifiers": They engage in motivated reasoning to defend
the status quo.

This is a contested area, however, because as soon as one tries to psychoanalyze
inherent political differences, a battery of counterarguments emerges: What about
dogmatic and militant communists? What about how the parties have differed
through history? After all, the most canonical case of ideologically driven science
denial is probably the rejection of genetics in the Soviet Union, where researchers
disagreeing with the anti-Mendelian scientist (and Stalin stooge) Trofim Lysenko were
executed, and genetics itself was denounced as a "bourgeois" science and officially
banned.

The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some
situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human
nature itself?

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one
thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to
present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan's work at Yale. In one study
[36], he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake
newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—"Scientific Panel
Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming" and "Scientific Panel
Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming"—and then tested how citizens
with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical
individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global
warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written
into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace
climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the
issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or
scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has
called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the
facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting
chance.
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate
[2] https://motherjones.com/files/lfestinger.pdf
[3] http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781617202803-1
[4] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/field-guide-climate-change-skeptics
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2270237
[6] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/obama-muslim.pdf
[7] https://motherjones.com/files/descartes.pdf
[8] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lupia/
[9] http://www.stonybrook.edu/polsci/ctaber/
[10] http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
[11] https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf
[12]
http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/lord_ross_lepper79_JPSP_biased-assimilation-
and-attitude-polarization.pdf
[13] http://psp.sagepub.com/content/23/6/636.abstract
[14] http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/DKahan.htm
[15]
https://motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognition_of_scientific_consesus.
pdf
[16]
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=
fss_papers
[17]
http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/blogs/communicatingclimate/transcripts/Episode_10
b_Dan_Kahan.html
[18] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
[19] http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/prasad/home.html
[20] http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf
[21] http://www.factcheck.org/
[22] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/FactcheckMosqueRumors.pdf
[23] http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick/
[24] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf
[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowcasting
[26]
http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming
[27] http://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz/
[28] http://environment.yale.edu/climate/
[29]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-
autism-deba_b_169673.html
[30]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-
debate_b_806857.html
[31] http://sethmnookin.com/
[32] http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439158647-0
[33]
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy-live-
on/article_print
[34] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext
[35] http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and_SANCTION.pdf_32595267.pdf
[36]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3446682/The-Second-National-Risk-and-Culture-Study-
Making-Sense-of-and-Making-Progress-In-The-American-Culture-War-of-Fact