What's to explain? Kulkarni on "knowing disbelief" - Cultural Cognition of Health

As always, the investment in asking others for help in dispelling my confusion is paying off.

As the 15.5 billion regular readers of this blog (we’re up 1.5 billion with migration of subscribers from the recent cessation of posts in Russell Johnson’s theprofessor.com) know, I’ve been trying to get a handle on a phenomenon that I’m calling—for now & for lack of a better term— “knowing disbelief” (KD).

I’ve gotten various helpful tips in comments to the the original blog post & on a follow up, which itself featured some reflections by Steve Lewandowsky .

This time the help comes from Prajwal Kulkarni, a physicist who authors the reflective and provocative blog, “Do I need evolution?”

I’ll tell you what he said, and what I have to say about what he said.  But first a bit of background – which, if you have seen all the relevant previous episodes, you can efficiently skip by scrolling down to the bolded red text.

1. KD consists in (a) comprehension of and assent to a set of propositions that (b) appear to entail a proposition one professes not to “believe.”

“What is going on in their heads?” (WIGOITH) is the shorthand I’m using to refer to my interest in forming a working understanding (a cogent set of plausible mechanisms that are either supported by existing evidence or admit of empirical testing) for KD.

In that spirit, I formulated a provisional taxonomy consisting of four species of KD:

2. I am most interested in dualism for two reasons.  The first is that I think it is the most plausible candidate explanation for the sort of KD that I believe explains the results in the Measurement Problem (Kahan in press), which reports on a study that found that climate change “believers” and climate change “skeptics” achieve equivalent scores on a “ climate science comprehension” assessment test and yet, as indicated, form opposing “beliefs” about the existence of human-caused global warming (indeed, about the existence of global warming regardless of cause) .  Indeed, I believe I actually encounter dualism all the time when I observe how diverse citizens who are polarized in their “beliefs in” global warming use climate science that presupposes human-caused global warming when they make practical decisions .

The second is that I feel it is the member of the taxonomy of the psychological mechanisms that I least understand. It doesn’t answer the WIGOITH question but rather puts it for me in emphatic terms.

3. Here is where Prajwal Kulkarni helps me out.

As I adverted to, Kulkarni’s interest is in public opinion on evolution.  He has insights on KD because that’s another area in which we see KD.

Indeed, KD with respect to evolution supplies the prototype for the “dualism” variant of KD.

As I’ve discussed 439 separate times on this blog, there is zero correlation between “belief in” evolution and the most rudimentary comprehension of the mechanisms of it as represented in the dominant, “modern synthesis” account in evolutionary science.  “Disbelievers” are as likely to comprehend natural selection, random mutation, and genetic variance (and not comprehend them; most on both “sides” of the issue don’t) as “believers.”

Nor is there any connection between “belief in” evolution and science comprehension generally .

What’s more, “disbelief” is no impediment to learning evolutionary theory . Good teachers can teach smart “disbelieving” kids as readily as they can smart “believing” ones—but doing so doesn’t transform the former into the latter (Lawson & Worsnop 2006).

Indeed, “knowing disbelievers” of evolution can use what they know about the natural history of human beings.  This is the insight (for all of those who, like me I suppose, would otherwise be too obtuse just to notice this in everyday life) of Everhart and Hameed (2014) and Hameed (2014), who document that medical doctors from Islamic cultures simultaneously “reject” evolution “at home,” when they are occupying their identity as members of a religious community, and “accept” it “at work,” when they are occupying their identity—doing their jobs—as professionals.

They are displaying the “dualism” variant of KD .

In response to my admission that they are the occasion for WIGOITH on my part, Kulkarni asks whether I and others who experience WIGOITH are just too hung up on consistency:

I wonder if the problem is that Kahan thinks such people need to be explained in the first place. But why should people be consistent? Why even have that expectation? As Kahan himself notes, even scientists sometimes exhibit cognitive dissonance. Perhaps we should start from the premise that everyone is intellectually inconsistent at times. Knowing disbelievers should no more need a “satisfying understanding” than amazing basketball players who can’t shoot free-throws . In sports we accept that athletic ability is complicated and can manifest itself in all sorts of unpredictable ways . No one feels the need to explain it because that just the way it is. Why don’t we do the same for intellectual ability? If we did, we might then conduct research to account for the handful of people who are consistent all the time. Because that’s the behavior that needs explaining.