[Vision2020] The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

Thu Jun 20 13:04:30 PDT 2013

Well, it’s not short, but here are Mark Lynas’ pro-science comments to the
Oxford Farming Conference at the beginning of the year where he starts out
apologizing for being one of the original “anti” crowd and traces his . . .
maturity on the topic:

http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-janu
ary-2013/

Here’s the opening to whet your whistle:

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I
apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also
sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and
that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option
which can be used to benefit the environment.

And, here’s the conclusion:

So my message to the anti-GM lobby, from the ranks of the British
aristocrats and celebrity chefs to the US foodies to the peasant groups of
India is this. You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that
they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for
the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out
of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.

Hopefully, those teasers should be enough to motivate you to read the rest
J

To Roger’s addition of the left’s anti-science stance on GMO (as well as the
original article’s vaccine-autism example), I was going to add the
misogynistic planned home birth/”the medical profession is evil & untrained
midwives are good” & lactivist wacko crowds, but then I realized that just
as the anti-science left/right line isn’t so clear with the vaccine-autism
issue (a lot of those on the religious right have jumped on that bandwagon –
remember what Gresham Bouma had to say on the topic?), the same holds true
for the anti-science planned home birth & lactivist nuts.

Ron, the article was a very good one that provides lots of food for thought
– thanks for sharing it.

Saundra

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of Joe Campbell
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 1:31 PM
To: lfalen
Cc: Moscow Vision2020
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] [Spam 3.11] The Science of Why We Don't Believe
Science

I don't know much about the GMO debate. What are the main reasons for
rejecting, say, genetically modified foods? Anyone want to provide a short
list of reasons?

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 1:04 PM, lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote:

Good article. Another area in addition to  the vaccine-autism link where
some of the left is anti-science is GMO's or what they call Frankin Foods

Roger

-----Original Message-----
Subject: [Spam 3.11] [Vision2020] The Science of Why We Don't Believe
Science
From: "Ron Force" 
To: "Moscow Vision2020" 
Date: 06/19/13 17:33:28

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

 By  <https://twitter.com/chriscmooney> Chris Mooney 

 "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, 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
<http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781617202803-1> famous case study 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?

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 " <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2270237>
motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over
matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines,
"death panels," the birthplace and
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/obama-muslim.pdf> religion of the
president (PDF), and much else. 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
<https://motherjones.com/files/descartes.pdf> key insight of modern
neuroscience (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  <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lupia/> Arthur Lupia 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.

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
<http://www.stonybrook.edu/polsci/ctaber/> Charles Taber 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  <http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/> Jonathan Haidt: We may
think we're being scientists, but
<https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf> we're
actually being lawyers (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.

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.

 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.

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
<http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/lord_ross_lepper79_JPSP_biased-assimilati
on-and-attitude-polarization.pdf> a classic 1979 experiment (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
<http://psp.sagepub.com/content/23/6/636.abstract> accuracy of gay
stereotypes, and much else. Even when study subjects are explicitly
instructed to be unbiased and even-handed about the evidence, they often
fail.

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  <http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/DKahan.htm> Dan Kahan 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
<https://motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognition_of_scientific_
consesus.pdf> Kahan's research (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
<http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context
=fss_papers> another study (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 (
<http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context
=fss_papers> commerce, industry, a man's freedom to possess a gun to defend
his family) (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,"
<http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/blogs/communicatingclimate/transcripts/Epis
ode_10b_Dan_Kahan.html> says Kahan.

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
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf> showed subjects
fake newspaper articles (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
<http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/prasad/home.html> Monica
Prasad 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
<http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf> a
study (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 <http://www.factcheck.org/>
FactCheck.org, a team at Ohio State
<http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/FactcheckMosqueRumors.pdf>
presented subjects (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
<http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick/> Jon Krosnick. 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  <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/obama-muslim.pdf> tried to test
the fallacy (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.

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

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,
<http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf> a follow-up
study (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 "
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowcasting> narrowcast" 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."

 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
<http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-war
ming> a 2008 Pew survey, 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
<http://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz/> Anthony Leiserowitz,
director of the  <http://environment.yale.edu/climate/> Yale Project on
Climate Change Communication. 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 (
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-c
ourt-autism-deba_b_169673.html> Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and numerous
Hollywood celebrities (most notably
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857
.html> Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey). TheHuffington Post gives a very large
megaphone to denialists. And  <http://sethmnookin.com/> Seth Mnookin, author
of the new book  <http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439158647-0> The Panic
Virus, 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
<http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy
-live-on/article_print> has been undermined 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
<http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fullt
ext> his 1998 Lancet paper-which originated the current vaccine scare-was
retracted and he subsequently
<http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and_SANCTION.pdf_32595267.pdf> lost his
license (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.

We all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can
be done to counteract human nature?

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
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/3446682/The-Second-National-Risk-and-Culture-Stud
y-Making-Sense-of-and-Making-Progress-In-The-American-Culture-War-of-Fact>
one study, 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.

 This
<http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney>
story first appeared in  <http://www.motherjones.com/> Mother Jones
magazine. 

  _____  

=======================================================
List services made available by First Step Internet,
serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
              http://www.fsr.net
         mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
<http://index.html?_n[p][main]=win.main.tree&_n[p][content]=mail.compose&to=
Vision2020 at moscow.com> 
=======================================================

=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet,
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130620/6403f185/attachment-0001.html>