Dan Jones discusses the post-fact world in NewScientist (3 December 2016, paywall) and who may be the worst malefactors:
In the real world of flesh-and-blood humans, reasoning often starts with established conclusions and works back to find “facts” that support what we already believe. And if we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we find clever ways to dismiss them. We’re more wily defence lawyer than objective scientist.
Psychologists call this lawyerly tendency motivated reasoning. Take climate change. The science here is unambiguous: climate change is happening and human activity is driving it. Yet despite this, and the risks it poses to our descendants, many people still deny it is happening.
The major driver, especially in the US, is political ideology. A Pew Research Center survey released a month before the US election showed that, compared with Democrats, Republicans are less likely to believe that scientists know that climate change is occurring, that they understand its causes, or that they fully and accurately report their findings. They are also more likely to believe that scientists’ research is driven by careerism and political views.
Many liberals like to think this is a product of scientific illiteracy, which if addressed would bring everyone round to the same position. If only. Studies by Dan Kahan at Yale University have shown that, in contrast to liberals, among conservatives it is the most scientifically literate who are least likely to accept climate change. “Polarisation over climate change isn’t due to a lack of capacity to understand the issues,” says Kahan. “Those who are most proficient at making sense of scientific information are the most polarised.”
I wouldn’t call it motivated reasoning, but rather retrograde reasoning – know your conclusion, then prove it. Classic bad logic.
I suspect this simply betrays the background of the conservatives, which is not, for the overwhelmingly most part, in science. They have backgrounds in business and/or politics – where the motivations they attribute the scientists’ behavior to is common and even mythic. (A religious background is even worse, as the conclusion is divinely mandated.) But that’s not how scientists function; in my experience, they are driven individuals who search relentlessly for the truth.
Not a sinecure.
This also reminds me of the Skeptical Inquirer article (discussed here) on who believes and disbelieves Evolution – with highly educated conservatives being the least likely to believe in evolution, rather than the poorly educated. (Incidentally, the original article is now available online here. While a trifle dry, its surprising findings are fascinating.)
Jones continues:
For Kahan, this apparent paradox comes down to motivated reasoning: the better you are at handling scientific information, the better you’ll be at confirming your own bias and writing off inconvenient truths. In the case of climate-change deniers, studies suggest that motivation is often endorsement of free-market ideology, which fuels objections to the government regulation of business that is required to tackle climate change. “If I ask people four questions about the free market, I can predict their attitudes towards climate science with 60 per cent certainty,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK.
I can’t help speculating if plotting understanding scientific information against properly applying the information to a specific problem would not yield a linear result, but rather a non-linear result. By this I mean that until mastery is achieved, the application of the scientific information yields wildly improper results, even without realizing it. Only when mastery is achieved do results correspond with reality.
I know I certainly experienced that in my formal education.
And sometimes the anti-regulation stance of libertarians just appears to be a denial that there is something like responsibility to the community. Here in the USA, where Money is the idol, the red-hot pursuit burns away the concepts of responsibility to anyone beyond the immediate family; thus when people are caught pouring pollution into rivers, there’s not even embarrassment.
It’s just a cost of doing business. We’re caught, we pay a fine. No shame here, no sirree.
Sort of like Trump refusing to pay his bills. If he can win in court, then the money is all his.
Sad, really. It’s so divorced from the underlying foundation of being able to run a just society, the ability to trust the person with which you’re doing business. Well, enough of this tangent. Trump will destroy the elevator he’s ridden to the top, and he’ll tumble to the ground, far below, in disgrace and dishonor. My guess is he’ll never even realize it.
Anyways, back to Dan’s article, which I found personally encouraging in one respect: who’s not as vulnerable to motivated reasoning.
Until recently, researchers had found no personality trait that mitigates motivated reasoning. But earlier this year, Kahan discovered something intriguing about people who seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure, a trait he calls scientific curiosity. Having devised a scale for measuring this trait, he and his colleagues found that, unlike scientific literacy, scientific curiosity is linked to greater acceptance of human-caused climate change, regardless of political orientation. On a host of issues, from attitudes to porn and the legalisation of marijuana, to immigration and fracking, scientific curiosity makes both liberals and conservatives converge on views closer to what the facts say.
Perhaps even more encouragingly, Kahan’s team found that scientifically curious people were also more eager to read views that clashed with those of their political tribe. So finding ways to increase scientific curiosity, perhaps by increasing the influence of people with this trait, could take the heat out of partisan disputes more effectively than promoting scientific literacy.
Which explains my conservative climate change scientist friend. And I think I fit right in there – I know I read about science with relish. So perhaps I haven’t misled myself as badly as some.
