Andrew J. Hoffman at Stanford Social Innovation Review comments on a recent encounter with a denier:
In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a potential donor—a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest in environmental issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began at 7 a.m., and while I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, the potential donor began the conversation with “I think the scientific review process is corrupt.” I asked what he thought of a university based on that system, and he said that he thought that the university was then corrupt, too. He went on to describe the science of climate change as a hoax, using all the familiar lines of attack—sunspots and solar flares, the unscientific and politically flawed consensus model, and the environmental benefits of carbon dioxide. …
Why is this so? Why do such large numbers of Americans reject the consensus of the scientific community? With upwards of two-thirds of Americans not clearly understanding science or the scientific process and fewer able to pass even a basic scientific literacy test, according to a 2009 California Academy of Sciences survey, we are left to wonder: How do people interpret and validate the opinions of the scientific community? The answers to this question can be found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.
Precisely what I’ve thought about. My (always contingent) conclusion is that, for a denier, at this juncture, crucial ideologies and interpretations of history, and assumptions about the nature of that history, take precedence over the elements of science: observation, deduction, the testing of hypotheses. If a scientific conclusion clashes with an ideology then there is a problem with the science: bad observation, unknown variables, even vast conspiracies.
My remark about history encompasses this: an analysis of history is performed and certain lessons are drawn from that analysis; then an assumption is made that those same lessons will hold in the future. This is where I suspect intellectual mayhem is committed, as certain ideologies, effective in one environment, will not perform as expected in another environment – and, as anyone paying attention knows, environments are changing: population levels, available land, resources, pollution, understanding of justice.
Many groups perform such analyses, formal or informal, correctly or incorrectly, which is to say, with or without bias. Andrew continues down a different path than I had hoped, noting increasing polarization:
Then he briefly discusses the psychology behind group dynamics, and then moves on to communications strategies.
Here’s the thing for me: ideology is based on goals, on hopes, on dreams. It seems to me a subtle assumption of this article is that science is just another ideology. Science is not ideological, not at its best. Some practicioners are flawed, it’s true, but the very structure of science is designed to call them out and invalidate their conclusions. Science is all about understanding what’s happening right now, right here: the what, the why, the how, from abstract principle to gritty reality. That’s what needs to be communicated to any ideologue: science is neither for or against, it’s simply a way to study reality.
(Interrupt to help Deb with rogue crackers.)
And, just maybe, measure the ideology against reality. Perhaps that is one component of the reaction against the scientific consensus – people naturally, tribalistically, attach themselves to the ideology, and it takes on a significance greater than truth after a while. When the ideology is threatened, community is threatened: the interloper is demonized, even if it’s science, because the community is more important than the science.
(h/t NewScientist 28 February 2015)
