• Corpus ID: 1055953

Motivated Rejection of Science 1 an Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science

@inproceedings{Lewandowsky2012MotivatedRO,
  title={Motivated Rejection of Science 1 an Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science},
  author={Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer and Gilles E. Gignac},
  year={2012}
}

• S. Lewandowsky, K. Oberauer, Gilles E. Gignac
• Published 2012
• Political Science

Although nearly all domain experts agree that human CO2 emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a vocal platform for climate denial, and bloggers have taken a prominent and influential role in questioning climate science. We report a survey (N > 1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r ' .80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists. Motivated rejection of science 3 NASA faked the moon landing—Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science More than 90% of climate scientists agree that the global climate is changing largely due to human CO2 emissions (Anderegg, Prall, Harold, & Schneider, 2010; Doran & Zimmerman, 2009).1 There are indications that the 2007 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was conservative rather than “alarmist” (Allison et al., 2009; Freudenburg & Muselli, 2010); however, those scientific indicators of increasing actual risk are accompanied by an apparent decrease in the public’s perception of those risks in some countries (Brulle, Carmichael, & Jenkins, 2012; Hanson, 2009; Scruggs & Benegal, 2012). The reasons for this declining public concern are manifold. Researchers in history and sociology frequently cite the “manufacture of doubt” by vested interests and political groups as a factor (Jacques, Dunlap, & Freeman, 2008; McCright & Dunlap, 2003, 2010; Mooney, 2007; Oreskes & Conway, 2010; Stocking & Holstein, 2009). For example, over 90% of environmentally sceptical books published since 1972 have been demonstrably sponsored by conservative think tanks (Jacques et al., 2008). Oreskes and Conway (2010) analyzed the shared ideological underpinnings of organized attempts to question well-established scientific findings over the last few decades, from the link between smoking and lung cancer to the causal role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) in eroding the ozone layer to, most recently, the findings from climate science. Oreskes and Conway documented that a small number of organizations and individuals have been instrumental in those contrarian activities, arguably motivated by a laissez-faire free-market ideology that views as threatening any scientific finding with potential regulatory impact, such as Motivated rejection of science 4 interference with the marketing of tobacco products, bans on CFC’s, or a price on carbon (cf. Dunlap & McCright, 2011). Those historical analyses mesh well with empirical results which show that people’s rejection of climate science is associated with the embrace of laissez-faire free-market economics (Heath & Gifford, 2006; Kahan, 2010). There is little doubt that people’s personal ideology—also often referred to as worldview or cultural cognition—is a major predictor of the rejection of climate science (Dunlap & McCright, 2008; Hamilton, 2011; Heath & Gifford, 2006; Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010; Kahan, 2010; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; McCright & Dunlap, 2011a, 2011b). In this article we investigate predictors of the rejection of climate science and investigate whether they generalize across content domains. We define the rejection of science as the dismissal of well-established scientific results for reasons that are not scientifically grounded (Diethelm & McKee, 2009; Jacques, 2012; McKee & Diethelm, 2010).2 Those reasons may comprise the psychological factors that are of interest here, but they may also include indecision arising from inaccurate or misleading media coverage—for example, the scientific consensus on climate change is often misrepresented in the media (e.g., Boykoff, 2007). Rejection of science must be distinguished from true scepticism, which may prompt the revision of a scientific claim on the basis of evidence and reasoned theorizing. Skepticism is not only at the core of scientific reasoning but has also been shown to improve people’s discrimination between true and false information (e.g., Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Oberauer, & Morales, 2005, 2009). Another variable that has been associated with the rejection of science is conspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). The presumed conspirators are typically perceived as virtually omnipotent (Bale, 2007): thus, internal documents of the tobacco industry Motivated rejection of science 5 referred to medical research on the health effects of smoking as “a vertically integrated, highly concentrated, oligopolistic cartel” which in combination with “public monopolies” . . . “manufactures alleged evidence, suggestive inferences linking smoking to various diseases, and publicity and dissemination and advertising of these so-called findings” (Abt, 1983). Likewise, rejection of the link between HIV and AIDS has been publicly associated with the conspiratorial belief that HIV was created by the U.S. Government to wipe out Black people (e.g., Bogart & Thorburn, 2005; Kalichman, Eaton, & Cherry, 2010). Rejection of climate science has also long been infused with notions of a conspiracy among scientists. As early as 1996, accusations of corruption in the IPCC were aired in the Wall Street Journal (Lahsen, 1999; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). More recently, a book by a U.S. Senator referred to a “Global Warming Conspiracy” as “The Greatest Hoax” (Inhofe, 2012). The prominence of conspiracist ideation in science denial is not entirely surprising because if an overwhelming scientific consensus cannot be accepted as the result of researchers independently converging on the same evidence-based view, then its very existence calls for an alternative explanation—a function readily fulfilled by the ideation of a complex and secretive conspiracy among researchers (Diethelm & McKee, 2009; McKee & Diethelm, 2010). However, no empirical evidence exists about how widespread such ideations are among people who reject scientific evidence, in particular as it relates to climate change. Moreover, to date, analyses of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science have exclusively focused on conspiracy theories pertaining to the issue under consideration: Thus, AIDS denial has been linked to the belief that the U.S. Government created HIV; the tobacco industry viewed lung cancer research as an “oligopolistic cartel,” and climate deniers believe that temperature records have been illegitimately adjusted to exaggerate warming (e.g., Condon, 2009). In all those cases, the conspiracy theory serves to explain away overwhelming scientific evidence. Thus, the conspiracist ideation may be Motivated rejection of science 6 an accoutrement of the denial of an inconvenient scientific fact, rather than reflecting an independent and potentially stable psychological variable that is associated with the rejection of science more generally. It is known that people’s propensity for conspiracist ideation is not limited to one theory in isolation. Instead, the belief that AIDS was created by the government is likely accompanied by the conviction that the FBI killed Martin Luther King or that the Air Force is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial visitors (Goertzel, 1994; Swami, Chamorro-Premuzic, & Furnham, 2009). In support of a general disposition towards conspiracist ideation, Douglas and Sutton (2011) showed that endorsement of conspiracy theories was associated with people’s willingness to engage in a conspiracy themselves when deemed necessary. It is therefore possible that this disposition predicts the rejection of science independently of the scientific domain in question: if conspiracist ideation reflects a stable personality or cognitive characteristic, then beliefs such as that NASA faked the moon landing may predict rejection of a range of scientific propositions, from HIV/AIDS to climate change. Another common attribute of the contemporary rejection of science is its reliance on the internet (Diethelm & McKee, 2009; McKee & Diethelm, 2010). By definition, denial is difficult to practice in the peer-reviewed literature; for example, questioning the link between HIV and AIDS lost intellectual respectability decades ago (Nattrass, 2010, 2011), and there are few contrarian climate publications (Anderegg et al., 2010). The internet, by contrast, provides opportunity for individuals who reject a scientific consensus to feed “each other’s feelings of persecution by a corrupt elite” (McKee & Diethelm, 2010, pp. 1310–1311). Accordingly, climate “skeptic” blogs have become a major staging post for denial, although blogs are also used to disseminate scientific evidence by supporters of climate science. The influence of blogs should not be underestimated: One “skeptic” blogger (Steven McIntyre of “Climateaudit”) has testified before the U.K. Parliament Motivated rejection of science 7 after triggering several Congressional investigations; one anonymous pro-science blogger (“Deep Clim