Who Is Against Science?

We hear a lot of talk today from the left about the conservative rejection of science. By their telling, the religious focus of conservatives makes them believers in magic and angels over evolution; their rejection of a climate emergency means they refuse to accept reality; and their opposition to COVID lockdowns made them a danger to all Americans.

The right’s criticism of the left’s view of science is more narrowly focused. The right believes the left puts its own extreme ideology above science. For example, the multiple genders argument turns upside down basic biological principles in favor of identity politics.

Conservative positions hold that addressing climate change involves weighing trade-offs rather than panic over predictions that may not be reliable. A third area of conservative concern is crime. Conservatives reject the left’s notions that all criminals are rehabilitatable and that their crimes should be mitigated by their oppressed status. They believe the foundation of any stable society is law and order, so the public needs to know that its safety is protected by law enforcement.

An analysis of right and left positions on denial of science shows that both conservatives AND liberals can be science deniers. Why? Because scientific skepticism is a human trait, not a political one.

Science is a child of the Enlightenment, when mankind realized he could control his environment through technologies that were developed using scientific principles. Early in the Enlightenment, scientists believed that the world could be understood through the acquisition of absolute knowledge. This idea was debunked by the philosopher David Hume, who asserted that perceptions of reality can be mistaken. In other words, there was no absolute way to know reality.

The solution to Hume’s obstacle was Fallibilism, a philosophical principle holding that human knowledge is never certain and is always open to revision. Our beliefs may be false or mistaken. The important conclusion is that not knowing for certain about the world is an acceptable reality, as long as we continue to test what we believe to be the truth. That practical approach to understanding the world is the scientific method. Scientific theories arise when evidence supports a hypothesis, using observable laws (e.g., the law of gravity). Theories can be revised or discarded if the data no longer support them.

Given its remarkable track record, we should be aware of threats to science and its continued progress. One such threat is science denial: the groundless rejection of well-established scientific conclusions. Scientists themselves have been especially keen to sound the alarm about this widespread tendency, while social scientists have begun to investigate.

One common assertion is that science denial is primarily an issue on the political right. Consistent with this idea, right-leaning individuals are more likely than their left-leaning counterparts to deny various pivotal scientific claims.

Why do conservative people deny science? According to many psychologists, it’s because people on the right have certain cognitive tendencies that make science denial more tempting for them. These include a strong need for verifiable knowledge, rigidity in their worldview, and a tendency toward system-justifying beliefs. People on the left are less prone to these cognitive foibles and thus less likely to engage in science denial.

These ideas seem plausible enough at first glance, but they have to be tested. A problem with testing at the outset is that most psychologists and social scientists are themselves on the political left. This creates potential problems for research on science denial.

First, because most psychologists lean left, they may be more inclined to characterize people on the right as having behavioral biases that explain why they get everything wrong - and to portray themselves as having various traits that explain why they get everything right. Because there are relatively few right-leaning researchers, these conclusions may receive less attention than they should.

Second, psychologists may be quick to identify science denial on the right but slower to spot it among themselves. Although we’re less likely to hear about it, the left does have certain blind spots when it comes to accepting scientific findings.

Left-leaning individuals are often highly skeptical of the idea that genes help shape individual differences in mind and behavior. Many reject evolutionary psychology, thereby denying the evolution of the mind. Many deny the validity of IQ research. Many downplay or deny evolved differences between the sexes. And some even deny that the sex binary is one of the best-established findings in biology.

A study was conducted in 2016, and the resulting paper was titled “Science Denial Across the Political Divide: Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science,” by Anthony N. Washburn (awas hbu1@uic.edu) and Linda J. Skitka, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Volume 9, Issue 8, September 14, 2017.

The authors tested two main hypotheses:

1. The Uniquely-Right-Wing-Pathology Hypothesis: the idea that the right is more prone to science denial than the left.

2. The Symmetry Hypothesis: the idea that right and left are equally likely to reject scientific claims that clash with their political preferences.

Washburn and Skitka randomly assigned more than 1,000 participants to review scientific findings on various political topics. The topics included immigration, gun control, carbon emissions, health-care reform, nuclear power, and same-sex marriage. There were two versions of each reading: one with findings more aligned with the left, and one with findings more aligned with the right.

After completing their assignment, participants were asked which conclusion was supported by interpreting a set of numerical results included in the reading.

The findings largely supported the symmetry hypothesis over the uniquely right-wing hypothesis.

People on both sides of the political aisle were more likely to interpret the findings in ways that supported their pre-existing views than in ways that refuted them. After choosing an interpretation, participants were told the correct answer. They were then asked whether they agreed with it, whether they thought the researchers were knowledgeable, and whether they trusted the researchers’ interpretation. Finally, participants were asked for their own views on the issues covered in the study.

A twist was also added. For each reading, there was a simple but incorrect interpretation of the result, and a complex but correct interpretation. This was done to test the theory that, if the simple interpretation fit people’s pre-existing views, they’d be more likely to stop there. In contrast, if it didn’t fit, they’d be more likely to keep thinking until they arrived at the more complex - and correct - interpretation.

The findings largely supported the symmetry hypothesis over the uniquely right-wing or uniquely left-wing pathology hypotheses. People on both sides of the political aisle were more likely to interpret the findings in a way that supported their pre-existing views rather than in ways that refuted them.

Science denial is often construed as an ideological issue that is typically a problem for those on the political right (e.g., conservatives are anti-climate change science). The data suggest that this conceptualization is incorrect. When scientific conclusions conflict with people’s ideological stances and attitudes, people on the left and right are motivated both to perceive the evidence in a way that supports their preferred conclusions or to deny the validity of the findings when provided an interpretation that is inconsistent with their preferred conclusions.

Explanations for ideologically motivated reasoning, however, go beyond simple attitude preferences and most likely indicate inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals that account for ideological differences in science reasoning.

The description of the study above includes excerpts from a Substack post titled “Who Engages in More Science Denial, Left or Right?” By Steve Stewart-Williams.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.