Grading the 2015 version of Pew study of public attitudes toward science - Cultural Cognition of Health

So everybody knows that the Pew Research Center released a cool study yesterday on public attitudes toward science & on differences between public & scientists (or at least AAAS members; it’s worth noting that AAAS membership isn’t limited to scientists per se).

It was a follow up to Pew’s classic 2009 study of the same — & it makes just as huge and valuable a contribution to scholarly understanding as that one, in my view.

Lots of people have said lots of things already & will say even more. But here are a few thoughts:

1. Pew does great work in measuring US public attitudes toward science & scientists.  They ask questions that it is sensible to believe measure general public regard for the enterprise of science, and keep track over time.

When one adds their findings to those collected by the National Science Foundation and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which conducts General Social Survey, source of most of the NSF’s annual “Science Indicator” measures, one can really form a good view of how the US public feels about science.

People should ignore all the bogus studies that administer strange questions to M turk workers — there are tons of those & they always report really weird, sensational findings.

2. This report, like the 2009 one, shows that Americans basically love science.  By overwhelming margins, they report admiration for scientists and positive appraisals of what scientists do.  This is consistent with what the NSF Science Indicators, which are released every year, show too.

3. Still, there is almost this weird reluctance in the Center’s press release and commentary to accept or clearly articulate this conclusion!

It’s common wisdom that public disputes over science stem from a “creeping anti-science” sensibility in American society.

Scholars who actually study public attitudes toward science, however, know that that view is unsupported by any convincing, valid data.  Indeed, the Pew and NSF Indicator reports show that there is overwhelming trust — across all demographic, political, and other types of cultural groups (religious & nonreligious, e.g.).

The 2009 Report helped to try to correct the “common wisdom” in this regard.

But the 2015 Report seems committed to avoiding any confrontation with this view. Instead, by employing a strategy of silence, inapt juxtaposition, and emphasis of irrelevant data, the Center commentary seems committed to consoling those who hold this fundamentally mistaken understanding of the sources of public conflict over science.

It’s almost as if Pew feels disappointed to pop the balloon of self-reinforcing popular misunderstanding on this issue with the needle of its own data.

4. Consider the “gap” between scientists & public on evolution.

But it is well established that public opinion responses to the question “do you believe in human evolution” have zero connection to what people know about either evolutionary science or science in general.

It’s also perfectly clear that this “gap” in public and scientific understandings has nothing to do with public respect for scientists.

The 2009 Pew Report made that clear, actually, reporting data showing that those who said they “disbelieved in” evolution as well as those who said they “did” both had highly positive views of science’s contribution to society.

The Report and Alan Leshner’s commentary for the 2009 Report both emphasized that there was no meaningful differences in that regard between people who said science sometimes conflicts w/ their religious views & those who said it doesn’t.

Nothing at all has changed– nothing . But is there anything comparable in this yr’s report? Nope!

Leshner himself did write a very thoughtful commentary in Science.