The idea that popular “disbelief in evolution” indicates a deficiency in “science literacy” is one of the most oft-repeated but least defensible propositions in popular commentary on the status of science in U.S. society.

It’s true only if one makes the analytically vacuous move of defining science literacy to mean “belief in evolution.”

It’s false, however, if one is interested in understanding, as an empirical matter, either what members of the public know about what is known to science or what the social meaning of “belief” in evolution is for members of culturally diverse groups.

Ultimately, I want to offer up some original data that helps to make my meaning clear.

But let’s start with some science of science communication basics. I’d be tempted to say they are ones that bear repeating over and over and over if I didn’t recognize that the persistence of disregard for them among popular commentators can’t plausibly be explained by the failure of those who have made or who are familiar with these findings to point them out time and again.

I start with these well-established findings, then, just so it will be clear what I see as the modest increment of corroboration and refinement to be added with the new data I'll describe.

Getting clear on what’s already known is what I’ll do in this post, which is part 1 of a 2-part series on evolution, ordinary science intelligence, religion, and (ultimately) how all of these are intertwined with the central constitutional difficulty of the Liberal Republic of Science. Part 2 is where I’ll get to the original data.

First, “believing in evolution” is not the same as “understanding” or even having the most rudimentary knowledge of science knows about the career of life on our planet. Believing and understanding are in fact wholly uncorrelated.

That is, those who say they “believe” in evolution are no more likely to be able to give a passable—as in high school biology passing grade—account of “natural selection,” “random mutation,” and “genetic variation” (the basic elements of the “modern synthesis” in evolutionary theory) than whose who “disbelieve.” Indeed, few people can.

Those who “believe,” then, don’t “know” more science than “nonbelievers.” They merely accept more of what it is that science knows but that they themselves don’t understand (which, by the way, is a very sensible thing for them to do; I’ve discussed this before).

Second, being enabled to understand evolution doesn’t cause people to “believe” in it.

It’s possible—with the aid of techniques devised by excellent science educators—to teach a thoughtful person the basic elements of evolutionary theory! Everyone ought to be taught it, not only because understanding this process enlarges their knowledge of all manner of natural and social phenomena but because seeing how human beings came to understand this process furnishes an object lesson in the awe inspiring-power of human beings to acquire genuine knowledge by applying their reason to observation.

But acquiring an understanding of evolution—that is, a meaningful comprehension of how the ferment of genetic variance and random mutation when leavened with natural selection endows all manner of life forms with a vital quality of self-reforming resilience—doesn’t make someone who before that time said they “disbelieved” evolution now say they “believe” it.

Empirical studies—ones with high school and university students—have shown this multiple times. Believe it or not. But if not, you are the one who closing your mind to insight generated by the application of human reason to observation.

Third, what people say they “believe” about evolution doesn’t reliably predict how much they know about science generally.

This is one of the lessons learned from use of the National Science Indicators.  

The Indicators, which comprise a wide-ranging longitudinal survey of public knowledge, attitudes, and practices, offer a monumentally useful font of knowledge for the study of science and society. Indeed, they are a monument to the insight and public spirit of the scientists (including the scientist administrators inside the NSF) who created and continue to administer it.

Integral the the Indicators is a measure of “science literacy” that has been standardly employed in the social sciences for many years. The Indicators include a “knowledge” battery—an inventory-like set of “facts” such as the decisive significance of the father’s genes in determining the sex of a child and the size of an electron relative to that of an atom.

The indicators include two true-false items, which state “human beings, as we know them today developed from earlier species of animals,” and “the universe began with a huge explosion,” respectively. Test-takers who consistently get 90+% of the remaining  questions on the NSF test correct are only slightly more than 50% likely to correctly answer these questions, which are known as “Evolution” and “Big Bang” respectively.

That tells you something, or does if you are applying reason to observation: it is that “Big Bang” and “Evolution” aren’t measuring the same thing as the remaining items. In fact, research suggests—not surprisingly—that they are measuring a latent or unobserved “religiosity” disposition that is distinct from the latent knowledge of basic science the remaining questions are measuring.

What people are doing, then, when they say they “believe” and “disbelieve” in evolution is expressing who they are. Evolution has a cultural meaning, positions on which signify membership in one or another competing group.

People reliably respond to “Evolution” and “Big Bang” in a manner that signifies their identities.  Moreover, many of the people for whom “false” correctly conveys their cultural identity know plenty of science.

Accordingly, many social scientists interested in reliably measuring how disposed members of the public are to come to know what’s known by science, particularly across place and time, have proposed dropping “Big Bang” and “Evolution" -- not from the survey regularly conducted by the NSF in compiling the Indicators, but from the scale one can form with the other items to measure what people know about what's known to science. 

This proposal has raised political hackles. How can one purport to measure science literacy and leave evolution and the big-bang theory of the origins of the universe out, they ask?  Someone who doesn’t know these things just is science illiterate!

Well, yes, if you simply define science literacy that way.  Moreover, if you do define it that way, you’ll be counting as “science literate” many people who harbor genuinely ignorant, embarrassing understandings of how evolution works.

Plus you’ll necessarily be dulling the precision of what is supposed to be an empirical measuring instrument for assessing what is known—since people who do know many many things will “say” they “don’t believe” in evolution. They'll say that even if they -- unlike the vast majority of the public who say they "believe" in evolution--are able to give an admirably cogent account of the modern synthesis.

Indeed, you’ll be converting what is supposed to be a measure of one thing—how much scientific knowledge people have acquired--into a symbol of something else: their willingness to assent to the cultural meaning that is conveyed by saying “true” to Evolution and Big Bang, as many people who do, and for that reason, without having any real comprehension of the science those items embody and without even doing very well on the remainder of the NSF Indicator battery.

Even then, the resulting “scale” won’t be a very reliable indicator of “identity,” since most of the remaining questions are ones that people whose identities are denigrated by answering “true” to Big Bang and Evolution are ones that bear no particular cultural meaning and thus don’t reliably even single out people of opposing cultural styles.

But insisting that the measure that social scientists use to study “science literacy” include Big Bang and Evolution under these circumstances will still convey a meaning.

It is that the enterprise of science is on one side of a cultural conflict between citizens whose disagreement about the best way of life in fact has nothing to do with the authority of science’s way of knowing, which in fact they all accept.

A “science literacy” test that insists that people profess “belief” in propositions that its citizens all understand to be expressions of cultural identity is really a pledge of allegiance, a loyalty oath to a partisan cultural orthodoxy.

Steadfastly insisting that the state teach its citizens what science genuinely knows  (about evolution, the origins of the universe, and myriad other things), and even more critically how science comes to know what it does, are essential to enabling culturally diverse people to attain happiness by means of their own choosing.

But insisting that they pledge allegiance to a particular cultural orthodoxy doesn't advance any of those ends.  Indeed, it subverts the very constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science.

Not what you'd expect if you thought that the source of the climate change controversy was a deficit in the public's ability to comprehend science.

But the culturally polarizing effect of science literacy isn't actually that unusual.  It's definitely not the case that all risk issues generate cultural polarization. But among those that do, division is often most intense among members of the public who are the most knowledgeable about science in general.

Actually, in the paper in which we reported the culturally polarizing effect of science literacy with respect to perceptions of climate change risks, we also reported data that showed the same phenomenon occurring with respect to perceptions of nuclear power risks.

Well, here are some more data that help to illustrate the relationship between science literacy and cultural polarization.  They come from a survey of a nationally representative sample of 2000 persons conducted in May and June of this year (that's right--even more fresh data! Mmmmmm mmmm!)

These figures illustrate how public perceptions of different risks vary in relation to science literacy. Risk perceptions were measured with the "industrial strength measure." Science literacy was assessed with the National Science Foundation's "Science Indicators," a battery of questions commonly used to measure general factual and conceptual knowledge about science. 

For each risk, I plotted (using a locally weighted regression smoother, a great device for conveying the profile of the raw data) the relationship between risk perception and science literacy for the sample as a whole (the dashed grey line) and the relationships between them for the cultural groups (whose members are identified based on their scores in relations to the means on the hierarchy-egalitarian and individualist-communitarian worldview scales) that are most polarized on the indicated risk

The upper-left panel essentially reproduces the pattern we observed and reported on in our Nature Climate Change study. Overall, science literacy has essentially impact on climate-change risk perceptions. But among egalitarian communitarians and hierarch individualists--the cultural groups who tend to agree most strongly on environmental and technological risks--science literacy has off-setting effects with respect to climate change and fracking: it makes egalitarian communitarians credit assertions of risk more, and hierarchical individualists less.

The same basic story applies to the bottom two panels. Those ones look at legalization of marijuana and legalization of prostitution, "social deviancy risks" of the sort that tend to divide hierarchical communitarians and egalitarian individualists.

Neither the level of concern nor the degree of cultural polarization is as intense as those associated with global warming and fracking. But the intensity of cultural disagreement does intensify with increasing science literacy (it seems to abate for legalization of prostitution among those highest in science litercy, although the appearance of convergence would have to be statistically interrogated before one could conclude that it is genuine).

What to make of this? Well, again, one interpretation --one supported by the study of cultural cognition generally--is that the source of cultural polarization over risk isn't plausibly attributed to a deficit in the public's knowledge or ability to comprehend science. 

Instead, it's caused by antagonistic cultural meanings that become attached to particular risks (and related facts), converting them into badges of membership in and loyalty to important affinity groups.

When that happens, the stake individuals have in maintaining their standing in their group will tend to dominate the stake they have in forming "accurate" understandings of the scientific evidence: mistakes on the latter won't increase their or anyone else's level of risk (ordinary individual's opinions are not of sufficient consequence to incrase or diminish the effects of climate change, etc); whereas being out of line with one's group can have huge, and hugely negative, consequences for people socially.

Ordinary individuals will thus attend to information about the risks in question (including, e.g., the position of "expert" scientists) in patterns that enable them to persist in the holding beliefs congruent with their cultural identities.  Individuals who enjoy a higher than average capacity to understand such information won't be immune to this effect; on the contrary, they will use their higher levels of knowledge and analytic skills to ferret out identity-supportive bits of information and defend them from attack, and thus form perceptions of risk that are even more reliably aligned with those that are characteristic of their groups.

That was the argument we made about climate change and science comprehension in our Nature Nanotechnology study.  And I think it generalizes to other culturally contested risks.

But not all socieal risks are contested. The number that are characterized by culturally antagonistic meaning is, as I've stressed before, quite small in relation to the number that generate intense cleavages of the sort that characterize climate change, nuclear power, gun control, the HPV vaccine, and (apparently now) fracking.

With respect to those issues, we shouldn't expect to see polarization generally. Nor should we expect to see it among those culturally diverse individuals who are highest in science literacy or in other qualities that reflect a higher capacity to comprehend quantitative information.

On the contrary, we should expect such individuals to be even more likely to be converging on the best scientific evidence.  They might be better able to understand such evidence themselves than people whose comprehension of science is more modest. 

But more realistically, I'd say, the reason to expect more convergence among the most science literate, most numerate, and most cognitively reflective citizens is that they are more reliably able to discern who knows what about what. 

The amount of decision-relevant science that it is valuable for citizens to make use of in their lives far exceeds the amount that they could hope to form a meaningful understanding of. Their ability to make use of such information, then, depends on the ability of people to recognize who knows what about what (even scientists need to be able to employ this form of perception and recognition for them to engage in collaborative production of knowledge within their fields).

Ordinary individuals--ones without advanced degrees in science etc. -- are ordinarily able to recognize who knows what about what without difficulty, but one would expect that those who have a refined capacity to comprehend scientific information would likely do even better.

It's the degrading or disrupting effect on this recognition capacity on citizens of ordinary and extraordinary science comprehension capacities that makes risks suffused with antagonistic meanings a source of persistent cultural dispute.

Okay, all of that is a matter of surmise and conjecture.  How about some data on the impact of science literacy on less polarizing issues.

I have to admit that I'm not as systematic as I should be -- as I think it is important for all who are studying the "science communication problem" to be -- in studying "ordinary," "boring," nonpolarizing risks.  

But consider this:

Here we see the impact of science literacy, generally and with respect to the cutural groiups (this time egalitarian communitarians and hierarch individualists) who are most "divided," on GM foods and childhood vaccination.

In fact, the division is exceedingly modest.  I think, in fact, to characterize the levels of disagreement seen here as reflecting "cultural polarization" would be extravagant.  As I've emphasized before, I see little evidence -- as opposed to casual assertions by commentators who I think should be more careful not to confuse agitation among subsegments of the population who are disposed to dramatic, noisy gestures but who are actually very small and quite remote from the attention of the ordinary, nonpolitical member of the public--that these are culturally polarizing issues in the U.S., at least for the time being.

Moreover,with respect to both issues, science literacy tends in general and among the cultural groups whose members are modestly divided to reduce concern about risk (again, a little "blip" like the one at the extreme science-literacy end of "egalitarian communitarians" in the fracking graph is almost certainly just noise-- statistically speaking; if we could find the one or two responsible survey respondents, they might in fact be unrepresentatively noisy on this issue).

That's not "smoking gun" evidence that science literacy tends to improve the public's use of decision-relevant science on societal risks for nonpolarizing issues.

For that, it would be useful to have more evidence of public opinion, on risks that provoke even less division and on which the evidence is very very clear (it is on vaccines; I am inclined, too, to believe that the evidence on GM foods suggests they pose exceedingly little risk and in fact offset myriad others, from ones associated with malnutrition to crop failure induced by climate-- but I feel I know less here than I do about vaccines and am less confident).

But the "picture" of how science literacy influences public opinion vaccines and GM foods-- two risk issues that aren't genuinely culturally polarizing -- is strikingly different from the one we see when we look at issues like climate change, or nuclear power, or fracking, where the toxic fog of antagonistic meanings clearly does impede ordinary citizens' ability to see who knows what about what.

Science comprehension -- knowledge of important scientific information but even more important the habits of mind that make it possible to know things in the way science knows them -- is intrinsically valuable. Even if this capacity in citizens didn't make them better consumers of decision-relevant science, a good society would dedicate itself to propagating it as widely as possible in its citizens because in fact the ability to think is a primary human good.

But who could possibly doubt that science comprehension -- the greatest amount of it, dispersed as widely as possible among the populace -- wouldn't make it more likely that the value of decision-relevant science would be realized by ordinary people in their lives as individuals and as citizens of a democracy?  I certainly wouldn't question that!

The polarizing effect of science literacy on culturally contested issues like climate change is not evidence that popular science comprehension lacks value.

On the contrary, it is merely additional evidence of how damaging a polluted science-communication environment is for the welfare of the diverse citizenry of the Liberal Republic of Science.

Polls like this -- ones that purport to characterize what the public "thinks" about one or another hotly debated national policy issue -- are done all the time.  

It's my impression -- from observing how the surveys are covered in the media and blogosphere-- that people who closely follow public affairs regard these polls as filled with meaning (people who don't closely follow public affairs are unlikely to notice the polls or express views about them).  These highly engaged people infer that such surveys indicate how people all around them are reacting to significant and controversial policy issues. They think that the public sentiment that such surveys purport to measure is itself likely to be of consequence in shaping the positions that political actors in a democracy take on such policies.

Those understandings of what such polls mean strike me as naive.

The vast majority of the people being polled (assuming they are indeed representative of the US population; in Pew's case, I'm sure they are, but that clearly isn't so for a variety of other polling operations, particularly ones that use unstratified samples recruited in haphazard ways; consider studies based on Mechanical Turk workers, e.g.) have never heard of the policy in question. Never given them a moment's thought.  Their answers are pretty much random -- or at best a noisy indicator of partisan affiliation, if they are able to grasp what the partisan significance of the issue is (most people aren't very partisan and can't reliably grasp the partisan significance of issues that aren't high-profile, perennial ones, like gun control or climate change).

There's a vast literature on this in political science. That literature consistently shows that the vast majority of the U.S. public has precious little knowledge of even the most basic political matters. (Pew -- which usually doesn't do tabloid-style "issue du jour" polling but rather really interesting studies of what the public knows about what -- regularly issues surveys that measure public knowledge of politics too.)

To illustrate, here's something from the survey I featured in yesterday's post.  The survey was performed on a nationally representative on-line sample, assembled by YouGov with recruitment and stratification methods that have been validated in a variety of ways and generate results that Nate Silver gives 2 (+/- 0.07)  thumbs up to.

In the survey, I measured the "political knowledge" of the subjects, using a battery of questions that political scientists typically use to assess how civically engaged & aware people are.

One of the items asks:

How long is the term of office for a United States Senator? Is it

(a) two years

(b) four years

(c) five years or

(d) six years?

 Here are the results:

Got that? Only about 50% of the U.S. population says "6 yrs" is the term of a U.S. Senator (a result very much in keeping with what surveys asking this question generally report).

How should we feel about half the population not knowing the answer to this question?

Well, before you answer, realize that less than 50% actually know the answer.

If the survey respondents here had been blindly guessing, 25% would have said 6 yrs.  So we can be confident the proportion who picked 6 yrs because they knew that was the right answer was less than 50% (how much less? I'm sure there's a mathematically tractable way to form a reasonable estimate -- anyone want to tell us what it is and what figure applying it yields here?).

And now just answer this question: Why on earth would anyone think that even a tiny fraction of a sample less than half of whose members know something as basic as how long the term of a U.S. Senator is (and only 1/3 of whom can name their congressional Representative, and only 1/4 of whom can name both of their Senators...) has ever heard of the "NSA's phone tracking" policy before being asked about it by the pollster? 

Or to put it another way: when advised that "x% of the American public believes y about policy z," why should we think we are learning anything more informative than what a pollster discovered from the opinion-survey equivalent of tossing thousands and thousands of coins in the air and carefully recording which sides they landed on?

Actually, the "white male effect" is one of the most important phenomena -- one of the coolest findings ever -- in the study of public risk perceptions.

WME refers to the tendency of white males to express less concern with (seemingly) all manner of risk than do minorities and women. The finding was first observed by Flynn, Slovic & Mertz (1994) and thereafter systematically charted by Finucane, Slovic, Mertz, Flynn, & Satterfield (2000).

Lots of scholars have looked at it since, trying to figure out what explains it.  Does it reflect some sort of "hard wired" or "genetic" disposition on the part of women to be more concerned about the welfare of others (obvious question: if so, why are minority males more concerned?) Are men evolutionarily programmed to be more "risk seeking" (same obvious question.) Are white males less concerned because they are politically less vulnerable themselves than minorities and women? Or maybe white males are just "getting it right" -- because they are more educated, less vulnerable to cognitive biases?

None of the above is probably the best answer. 

What makes those explanations weak is that there really isn't a "white male effect."  Rather there's a white male hierarch individualist effect. 

In a study in which I collaborated with Slovic, Braman, Gastil & Mertz (2007), we used the cultural cognition worldview scales as a magnifier to inspect more closely cultural influences observed in Finucane et al. (2000).

What we found, in effect, was that white hierarchical and individualistic males are so extremely skeptical of risks involving, say, the environment or (another thing we looked at) guns that they create the appearance of a  sample-wide "white male" effect.  That effect "disappears" once the extreme skepticism of these individuals (less than 1/6 of the population) is taken into account.  There isn't any WME among individuals who are egalitarian and communitarian, hierarchical communitarian or (in the case of environmental risks) egalitarian and individualistic in their outlooks.

This finding fit the hypothesis that "identity protective cognition" was driving WME.  Identity protective cognition is a form of motivated reasoning.  It describes the tendency of people to fit their perceptions of risk (and related facts) to ones that reflect and reinforce their connection to important affinity groups, membership in which confers psychic, emotional, and material benefits.  The study of cultural cognition reflects the premise that the latent group affinities measured with the "cultural worldview scales" we employ in our studies are the ones motivating risk perceptions in conflicts that polarize the U.S. public.

The sorts of things white hierarchical individualistic males are "unafraid of" are activities essential to the the cultural roles they tend to occupy.  Among people who subscribe to that outlook, men attain status by occupying positions of authority in commerce and industry.  Gun possession plays an important role for men in such groups too--enabling hierarchical roles like father, protector, and provider and symbolizing individualistic (male) virtues like honor and courage and self-reliance.

Because the assertion that such activities are "dangerous" would justify restriction of them by the state -- and invite resentment and stigmatization of those individuals conspicuously identified with them -- hierarchical and individualistic white males have an especially powerful psychological incentive to resist such claims.

That was our conjecture-- one founded generally on Mary Douglas's and Aaron Wildavksy's "cultural theory of risk" -- and the evidence was more consistent with that than with other explanations, we suggested.  Other researchers have corroborated this hypothesis with related but distinct methods (that's a good thing; being able to verify a hypothesis with multiple methods furnishes assurance that the effect is really "there" and not an artifact of a particular way of trying to test for it).

But here's another thing-- or some more evidence, really.  If identity-protective cognition is at work, there's no reason to believe that white hierarchical individualist males will be uniformly more "risk dismissive" than other people.  

They'll be that way only with regard to private activities the regulation which poses a threat to activities essential to their cultural status.  Where regulation itself poses such a threat, they should worry about the risks that such regulation poses.  Moreover, if we can find private activities that threaten their cultural identities, their stake in securing regulation of them should motivate them to be risk sensitive in regard to those activities!

And we see exactly that! I'll show you in brand new data, collected in April and May of this year.

But first let's use these fresh data (mmmm mmmm--don't you love the aroma of freshly regressed data?!) to observe the "classic" white male effect.

This figure illustrates the "effect" with regard to climate change:

Using the "industrial strength risk perception measure," we can see that white males are a lot less worried about climate change than "everyone else."

But consider this figure:

Click on me! Or I'll turn you into a white male hierarch individualist!This graphic, which uses a Monte Carlo simulation to illustrate the results of a multivariate regression analysis, shows that the "white male effect" is being driven by the extreme climate change skepticism of of white hierarchical individualistic males (who are, again, about 1/6 of the population).  There's no meaningful gender or race variance in the rest of the subjects in this nationally representative sample.

Now consider a larger collection of risks:

Holy smokes!

These are the mean scores for white male hierarchical individualists and "everyone else" on a range of risks, the perceptions of which are all measured with the "industrial strength" measure.

What do we see?  Lots of cool things!

For one, we see that those "fearless" white hierarchical individualistic males aren't so brave after all.  Sure climate change doesn't scare them, but the potential impact of restrictions on handguns on the "health, safety, and prosperity" of members of our society sends chills up their spine.

Environmental and government regulations are, of course, scary to them too. Those can wreck the economy. Ask any hierarchical individualistic white male for evidence & he'll have no trouble supplying it -- just look at the financial collapse of 2008.

And let's hope that Obama -- who in the eyes of a hierarchical white male individualist likely can't be counted on to do much of anything good -- will hold firm on marijuana criminalization.  Most people don't think so, but the white male hierarchical individualist knows that the dangers to society from decriminalization would be devastating. 

And what do you know: guns certainly aren't dangerous ("people kill people" etc); but privately owned drones-- yow! Terrifying! (Mystery -- who is disgusted, and why, by drones -- half-solved.)

Hey there are some other cool things here too, don't you think?  Look at childhood vaccines. No one -- not white hierarchical individualistic males nor everyone else -- is concerned.  A surprise only to those who believe what they read in the papers, where the ravings of a small sect regularly transmute into a "growing crisis of public confidence" in vaccines. (To anticipate comments: Yes, the small sect is an unreasoning, noxious health menace and should be opposed; but no, that doesn't mean that it's a sensible risk-communication strategy  to miselad the public about the facts, which show no slippage in the last decade in childhood vaccination rates from their historic levels of well over 90%, and no meaningful increase in the "exemption" rate, which has remained < 1%.)

And here's something I wasn't expecting at all: Look at genetically modified foods.  No cultural dissensus--that's not new. But the apparent consensus that GM foods are risky-- more certainly, than global warming, and more too than anything except terrorism -- that's a change relative to what I've observed in various surveys like this that I've done over the yrs.  

Is that evidence that the effort to protect the science communication environment from being polluted on this issue is failing? Could be; although I still think that the most important thing is to avoid cultural polarization, since that's the form of pollution, I'm convinced, most toxic to the reasoning faculty that ordinary members of the public-- of all cultural outlooks -- use to discern what's known to science.

Okay-- that was fun, wasn't it?

And don't forget about the wildly popular Cultural Cognition Site game show "WSMD?, JA!"  Been a long time since we played that!

References

Douglas, M. & Wildavsky, A.B. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. (University of California Press, Berkeley; 1982).

 Finucane, M., Slovic, P., Mertz, C.K., Flynn, J. & Satterfield, T.A. Gender, Race, and Perceived Risk: The "White Male" Effect. Health, Risk, & Soc'y 3, 159-172 (2000).

Flynn, J., Slovic, P. & Mertz, C.K. Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risk.Risk Analysis 14, 1101-1108 (1994).

Kahan, D.M., Braman, D., Gastil, J., Slovic, P. & Mertz, C.K. Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, 465-505 (2007).

McCright, A.M. & Dunlap, R.E. Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA. J Risk Res, doi:   (2012).

McCright, A.M. & Dunlap, R.E. Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change 21, 1163-1172 (2011).

Nelson, Julie.  Are Women Really More Risk-Averse than Men?, INET Researcn Note (Sept., 2012)

Nelson, Julie.  Is Dismissing the Precautionary Principle the Manly Thing to Do? Gender and the Economics of Climate Change, INET Research Note (Sept. 2012)

Finucane, M., Slovic, P., Mertz, C.K., Flynn, J. & Satterfield, T.A. Gender, Race, and Perceived Risk: The "White Male" Effect. Health, Risk, & Soc'y 3, 159-172 (2000).

The subject of the talk (slides here) was the public's understanding of what I called "decision relevant science" (DRS)--meaning science that's relevant to the decisions that ordinary members of the public make in the course of their everyday lives as consumers, as parents, as citizens, and the like.

Part 1 recounted a portion of the talk that I invited the audience to imagine came from a reality tv show called "Public comprehension of science--believe it or not!," a program, I said, dedicated to exploring oddities surrounding what the public knows about what's known to science.  The concluding portion of the talk, which I'll reconstruct now, presented five serious points --or points that I at least intend to be serious and be taken seriously--about DRS, each of which in fact could be supported by one of the three "strange but true" stories featured in the just-concluded episode of "Public comprehension of science--believe it or not!"

In the first story featured in the show, we learned that individuals belonging to that half of the US population that purports to "believe" in evolution are not more more likely to be able to give a cogent account of the "modern synthesis" (natural selection, genetic variance, and random mutation) than those belonging to the half that asserts "disbelief."  In fact, very small proportions of either group can give such an account.  

Thus, most of the people who quite properly accept evolution as "scientific fact" (including, I'm confident, the vast majority who view those who disbelive in it as pitifully ignorant) believe in something they don't understand.

That's actually not a problem, though.  Indeed, it's a necessity!

The number of things known to science that it makes sense for a practical person to accept as true (that a GPS systems, exquisitely calibrated in line with Einstein's theory of special relativity, will reliably guide him to where he wants to go, for example) far exceed what such an individual could ever hope to comprehend in any meaningful way on his own. Life is too short.

Indeed, it will be a good deal shorter if before accepting that it makes sense not to smoke such a person insists on verifying for himself that smoking causes cancer -- or that before taking antibiotics that they do in fact kill disease-causing bacteria but do not -- as 50% of the U.S. population thinks-- "believe it or not!"--kill viruses.

Yet it's okay, really, for a practical, intelligent person not to acquire the knowledge that antibiotics kill only bacteria and not viruses. He doesn't have to have an MD to get the benefits of what's known to medical science.  He only has to know that if he gets sick, the person he should consult and whose advice he should follow is the doctor.  She's the one who knows what science knows there.

That's how, in general, individuals get the benefit of DRS--not by understanding it themselves but by reliably recognizing who knows what about what because they know it in the way that science counts as knowing.  

Why not go to a faith healer or a shaman when one has a sore throat -- or a cancerous legion or persistent hacking cough? Actually, some very tiny fraction of the population does. But that underscores only that there really are in fact people out there whose "knowledge" on matters of consequence to ordinary people's lives are not ones that science would recognize and that precious few people (in a modern liberal market society) treat them as reliable sources of knowledge.

Ordinary people reliably make use of all manner of DRS -- medical science is only one of many kinds -- not because they are experts on all the matters to which DRS speaks but because they are themselves experts at discerning who knows what's known to science.

Yet ordinary members of the public do disagree--often quite spectacularly--about certain elements of DRS. These conflicts are not a consequence of defects in public comprehension of science, however. They are a product of the the failure of ordinary members of the public to converge in the exercise of their normal and normally reliable expert ability to recognize who knows what about what.

Believe it or not, one can work out this conclusion logically on the basis of information related in the "Public Comprehension of Science--Believe it or Not!" show.  

Members of the public, we learned, are (1) divided on climate science and (2) don't understand it (indeed, the ones who "believe" in it, like the ones who believe in evolution, generally don't have a meaningful understanding of what they believe).

But (2) doesn't cause (1).  If it did, we'd expect members of the public to be divided on zillions of additional forms of DRS on which they in fact are not.  Like the efficacy of antibiotics, which half the population believes (mistakenly) kill viruses.  

Or pasteurized milk.  No genuine cultural conflict over that, at least in the US.  And the reason isn't that people have a better grasp of biology than they do of climate science. Rather it's that there, as with the health benefits of antibiotics, they are reaching the same conclusion when they exercise their rational capacity to recognize who knows what science knows on this matter.  

Indeed, those of you who are leaping out your seats with excitement to point out the freaky outlier enclaves in which there is a dispute about pasteurization of milk in the US, save yourself the effort! What makes the spectacle of such conflicts newsworthy is precisely that the advocates of the health benefits of "raw milk" are people whom the media knows the vast run of ordinary people (the news media consumers) will regard as fascinatingly weird.

Because people acquire the insights of DRS by reliably recognizing who knows what science knows, conflicts over DRS must be ones in which they disagree about what those who know what science knows know.

This conclusion has been empirically verified time and again.  

On matters like the risks of climate change, the safety of nuclear power waste disposal, the effects of gun control on crime, and the efficacy and side effects of the HPV vaccine, no one (or no one of consequence, if we are trying to understand public conflict rather as opposed to circus sideshows) is saying "screw the scientists--who cares what they think!"

Rather, everyone is arguing about what "expert scientists" really believe. Using their normal and normally reliable rational powers of recognition, those on both sides are concluding that the view that their side accepts is the one consistent with "scientific consensus."

What distinguishes the small number issues on which we see cultural polarization over DRS from the vast number of ones in which we don't has nothing to do with how much science the public comprehends. Rather, it has everything to do with the peculiar tendency of the former to evade the common capacity enjoyed by culturally diverse citizens to recognize who knows what it is known to science.

A feature that these peculiar, recognition-defying issues share is their entanglement in antagonistic cultural meanings. 

For the most part, ordinary people exercise their capacity to recognize who knows what about what by consulting other people "like them."  They are better able to "read" people who share their particular outlooks on life; they enjoy interacting with them more than interacting with people who subscribe to significantly different understandings of the best way to live, and are less likely to get into squabbles with them as they exchange information. "Cultural communities" -- networks of people connected by intense, emotional and like affinities -- are the natural environment, then, for the exercise of ordinary citizen's rational recognition capacity.

Ordinarily, too, these communities, while plural and diverse, point their respective members in the same direction.  Any such community that consistently misled its members about DRS wouldn't last long given how critical DRS is to the flourishing -- indeed, simple survival -- of their members.

But every now and again, for reasons that are not a complete mystery but that are still far from adequately understood, some fact -- like whether the earth is heating up -- comes to be understood as a kind of marker of cultural identity.  

The position one holds on a fact like that will then be experienced by people -- and seen by others (the two are related, of course) -- as a badge of membership in, and loyalty to, one or another cultural group.

At that point, reasonable people become unreasonably resistant to changing their minds--and for reasons that, in a sad and tragic sense, are perfectly rational.  

The stake they have in maintaining group-convergent beliefs will usually be much bigger than any they might have in being "right." Making a "mistake" on the science of climate change, e.g., doesn't affect the risk that any ordinary member of the public or any person or any other thing she cares about faces: she just doesn't matter enough as a a consumer, a voter, a public deliberator etc. to make a difference.  But if she forms a view that is out of line on it from the point of view of those who share her cultural allegiances, then she is likely to suffer tremendous costs--psychic, emotional, and material--given the function that positions on climate change perform in identifying to members of such groups who belongs to it and can be trusted.

These antagonistic meanings, then, can be viewed as a form of pollution in the science communication environment.  They enfeeble the reliable operation of the normally reliable faculties of recognition that ordinarily members of the public use to discern DRS.

People overwhelmingly accept that doctors and public health officials are the authorities to turn to to have access to the health benefits of what's known to science, and ordinarily have little difficulty in discerning what those experts believe and are counseling them to do.  But when facts relating to medical treatments become suffused with culturally antagonistic meanings, ordinary members of the public are not able to figure out what such experts actually know.

The US public isn't divided over the risks and benefits of mandatory vaccination of children for Hepatitis B, a sexually transmitted disease that causes a deadly form of cancer.  Consistent with the recommendation of the CDC and pediatricians, well over 90% of children get the HBV vaccination every year.

Americans are culturally divided, however, over whether children should get the HPV vaccine, which likewise confers immunity to a sexually transmitted disease (the human papillomavirus) that causes a deadly form of cancer. For reasons having to do with the ill-advised process by which it as introduced into the US, the HPV vaccine became suffused with antagonistic cultural meanings--ones relating to gender norms, sexuality, religion, and parental sovereignty.

Parents who want to follow the advise of public health experts can't discern what their position is on the HPV vaccine, even though it is exactly he same as it is on the HBV vaccine.  Experimental studies have confirmed that their exposure to the antagonistic meanings surrounding the former make them unable to form confident judgments about what experts believe about the risks and benefits of the HPV vaccine, even though CDC and pediatricians support it to the same extent as they do the  HBV vaccine and for the same reasons.  

The antagonistic cultural meanings that suffuse issues like climate change and the HPV vaccine confront ordinary people with an extraordinary conflict between knowing what's known to science and being who they are. This toxic environment poses a singular threat to their capacity to make use of DRS to live happy and healthy lives. 

Repelling that threat demands the development of a systematic societal capacity to protect the science communication environment form the pollution of antagonistic cultural meanings.

Technologies for abating the dangers human beings face are not born with antagonistic cultural meanings.  They acquire them through historical contingencies of myriad forms. Strategic behavior plays a role; but sheer accident and misadventure also contribute.

Understanding the dynamics that govern this pathology is a central aim of the science of science communication.  We can learn how to anticipate and avoid them in connection with emerging forms of practical science, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology. And we can perfect techniques for removing antagonistic meanings in the remaining instances in which intelligent, self-conscious protective action fails to prevent their release into the science communication environment.

The capacity to reliably recognize what is collectively known is not some form of substitute for attainment of scientific knowledge.  It is in fact a condition of it within the practice of science and outside of it.

In discerning DRS, the public is in fact exercising the most elemental form of human rationality.

Securing the political and social conditions in which that faculty can reliably function is the most important aim of the science of science communication. 

The Initiative is typical of the leadership role the NAS has fittingly assumed in integrating the practice of science with the scientific study of how ordinary citizens come to know what is known by science—a commitment on the Academy’s part that was highlighted in its Science of Science Communication Sackler colloquium in the Spring of 2012.

My talk was on how the pubic thinks about decision-relevant science. This is part 1 of 2. But slides for whole thing here. 

As is well-known to readers of this blog, I believe that doing and communicating science are very different things, even when the sort of science being done is the science of science communication.  Indeed, I believe the “science communication problem”—the persistent failure of the availability of valid science to quiet public controversy over risks and other policy-relevant facts to which that science speaks in a compelling way—is a consequence of our society's failure to devise practices and construct institutions that recognize fully the significance of the communicating-doing distinction.

To effectively communicate this point, I thought I would demonstrate what strikes me—as someone who only who does the science of science communication—as a clever way to communicate what I know to the public.

I told my audience that I would present the first part of my remarks in the style of a “reality tv” program or the like entitled, “Public comprehension of science—believe it or not!,” a show dedicated to sharing with viewers instances of the myriad “ ‘strange but true’ characteristics of the public’s knowledge of what science knows.”

This week’s episode (I told them) would feature three stories:

1.  Evolution: “believing,” “disbelieving” & understanding

About half of the general public in the U.S. does not “believe” that humans “evolved” from other animal species. They “believe” instead that humans were created, as is, by God.

This not surprising news to regular viewers of this program—or likely to anyone else. We are reminded of this fact at least once a year by Gallup, which has been polling Americans about their “belief” in evolution—and reporting more or less the same result—for many many years.

The “strange but true” thing is this: the half of the U.S. population that does “believe” in evolution is no more likely than the half that doesn’t to be able to be pass a high school biology test on the rudiments of how evolution works.

There is, researchers have found again and again, no correlation between whether someone says they “believe” in evolution and their understanding of the concepts of “natural selection,” “genetic variance,” and “random mutation”—the basic elements of the dominant, “modern synthesis” position in the science of evolution.

In fact, distressingly few of either the believers or disbelievers have an accurate comprehension of these dynamics.

And there’s another curious thing about “belief” & “disbelief” in evolution.

It’s definitely possible to teach people the basic elements of the modern synthesis, which are remarkably and elegantly simple. The evidence that supports them is reasonably straightforward too.

But imparting such understanding also has zero effect on the likelihood that those who then demonstrate basic comprehension of evolution say they “believe” in it! 

Researchers have demonstrated this multiple times, too, with both high school and college students.

Strange but true!

2.  Climate change risk perceptions: “fast” & “slow”

This week’s second story involves public comprehension of climate science.

The U.S. public doesn’t get it.

This was the conclusion of a very impressive 1992 study, which found that those members of the public who believed climate change was occurring tended to attribute it to holes in the ozone layer and other irrelevant phenomena.

When researchers re-did the study in 2009, the public was still woefully ignorant of elementary climate science. They found, of course, that a great many members of the public didn’t accept that global temperatures were increasing as a result of human CO2 emissions.

But even among the segment of the public who said they did accept this, the researchers found myriad, remarkable misunderstandings, including the belief that aerosol spray cans were one source of the problem and that cleaning up toxic waste sites would help to ameliorate it.

And here’s another thing.

The public tends to over-rely on cognitive heuristics in forming perceptions of risk. This is the theme, of course, of Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning work, and his excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  

Various commentators who draw on Kahneman’s work (but interestingly not Kahneman himself, to my knowledge) assert that “bounded rationality” of the sort documented in this work explains why members of the general public don’t universally share climate scientist’s concern about the dangers that climate change poses to human wellbeing.

But social science evidence has established that those members of the public who are the most science literate, and who score highest in measures of the disposition to use reflective modes of reasoning (the “slow” kind, in Kahneman’s typology) are in fact the most culturally polarized on climate change risks!

As members of the public become more science literate, more numerate, and the like, they don’t converge on what climate scientists know.  They just become more reliable “indicators” of what people who hold particular cultural values believe.

Believe it or not . . . .

3.  Antibiotics: consensus, scientific & public

The last story for this week concerns antibiotics.

There is really no meaningful public controversy—cultural or otherwise—over whether someone who is not feeling well should seek medical treatment, and should take antibiotics if his or her physician prescribes them. 

But 50% of the U.S. public believes that antibiotics kill viruses and not just bacteria.

This is a consistent finding in studies that administer the NSF’s “Science Indicators,” the standard “science literacy test” used to measure what members of the public know about basic science—not just in the U.S. but globally.

Now in fact, the question is a “true-false” one, and so one might conclude that members of the U.S. public are doing no better than chance in their responses here.

But interestingly, U.S. respondents score consistently higher than members of the public from other countries, including Japan, Russian, South Korea, and the EU nations.  So really, we “know more” science than they do here.

Indeed, members of the public in the US tend to score higher on lots of items on the NSF science literacy test.  It really is tempting to say that the US is more science literate than the rest of the world!

Except that members of the rest of the world do so much better than we do on the NSF indicator item that asks whether humans evolved from other animals . . . .

But you know what that actually signifies? That the NSF item on “evolution” isn’t measuring the same thing as the rest of the test.  Those who consistently get 90+% of the questions are only slightly more likely than 50% likely to correctly answer the evolution question.

Actually, that shouldn’t surprise you at this point: it follows, almost logically, from the first story in this show, which related that there is really no relationship between saying one “believes” evolution and having and being able to form an accurate scientific understanding of evolutionary theory.

Social scientists have demonstrated that the “evolution” question is actually not measuring the same “science comprehension” quality in people who take the NSF science literacy test as the other items.  It is measuring their religiosity.

Yet proposals to exclude the evolution question from measures of “science literacy”  in studies that correlate science literacy with other attitudes tend to provoke significant controversy.  Critics say the item should be included even though it indisputably reduces the precision of the science literacy score as a measure of a latent science comprehension aptitude or disposition.

Sad but true. . . .

Next time: Five theses on public understanding and decision-relevant science, each of which can be illustrated using the three stories from this week’s episode of “Public Comprehension of Science—Believe it or Not!”

Not to give anything away, but if you think that what I’ve told you so far means (or even means that I think) the public is irrational, you are very wrong.

Wrong about what it means, and wrong about what public rationality and its relationship to decision-relevant science consist in. 

Part 2.

Didn't think so. 

As the Environmental Proection Agency explains, the Act (signed into law by President Obama on July 7, 2010, after being passed, obviously, by both Houses of Congress)

establishes limits for formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products: hardwood plywood, medium-density fiberboard, and particleboard. The national emission standards in the Act mirror standards previously established by the California Air Resources Board for products sold, offered for sale, supplied, used or manufactured for sale in California.

The legislation directs the EPA to promulgate implementing regulations relating to "labeling," "chain of custody requirements," "ultra low-emitting formaldehyde resins," "exceptions ... for products ... containing de minimis amounts of composite wood," etc.  The agency just issued proposed rules for notice & comment yesterday!

Why am I telling you about this?  Well, first of all, because I know you've never heard of this regulatory scheme (if you have, you are a freak and are proud of it, so the point I'm going to make still applies).

Because you haven't, the issue of formaldehyde regulation is absent from your mental inventory of risks managed through the application of scientific knowledge.

Because this law -- along with billions and billions (or at least 10^3's) of others informed by science -- is missing from your risk regulation inventory, there's a serious risk that you are overestimating the frequency with which risk issues provoke cultural polarization.

I'm sure some segment of the population somewhere is really freaked out by formaldehyde and another drinks a glass of it for breakfast everyday just to prove a point. But these citizens are really outliers; whatever group-based conflict there might be about formaldehyde is nothing like the ones over climate change, nuclear power, HPV, guns, etc.

Very very very few risk and other policy issues that turn on science provoke meaningful cultural conflict. The ratio of polarizing to nonpolarizing issues of that sort is miniscule.

That doesn't mean that those issues get regulated in an optimal manner.  But it means that one of the largest obstacles to rational engagement with science in policymaking is absent -- and that's an undeniably good thing for enlightened self-government.

The science-informed policy issues that don't provoke controversy are, of course, boring.  That's why most people don't know about them.

But if you do notice and give some thought to them, a couple of interesting and important things will occur to you.

First, insofar as the number of science-informed policy issues that could provoke cultural polarization is very small relative to the number that actually do, there must be something, and something strange, going on with the ones that actually do end up generating that sort of division.

It's critical to figure out how to fix a broken debate like the one over climate change.

But we should also be figuring out why this sort of weird pathology happens and how we can avoid it.

That's one of the objectives of the science of science communication. Indeed, it's probably the most important contribution this science can make to the welfare of democratic societies.

Second, if you notice all these boring, nonpolarized forms of science-informed risk regulation, you'll realize that the thing that makes some issues become polarized can't be lack of public knowledge about the science surrounding them.

It's true that members of the public don't know sicence much about climate change, nuclear power, the HPV vaccine, etc. But the public doesn't know anything more about the science relating to the vast range of issues that fail to generate polarization.  

Members of the public wouldn't score higher on a "formaldehyde science literacy" test than a climate science literacy test.

Formaldehyde scientists aren't better "science communicators" than climate scientists. 

That doesn't mean, either, that members of the public are necessarily uniformed.  

Obviously, members of the public couldn't possibly be expected to know and understand all the science that is relevant to protecting their health and wellbeing--whether that science informs regulations that protect them from exposure to toxic substances or medical procedures that protect them from diseases. 

But just as a reflective individual doesn't have to have an MD to participate in an informed and meaningful way in his or her receipt of high-quality medical care, so a  reflective citizen doesn't have to have a degree in toxicology or biology to know whether his or her government is making sensible decisions about how to protect the public generally from exposure to environmental toxins.  

In both cases, such a person only has to be able to make an informed judgment that the professionals he or she is relying on to use scientific knowledge know what they are doing and are using what they know to benefit him or her and others whose interests those agents are supposed to be promoting.

Reflective citizens do that all the time.  And one of the aims of science communication is to create and protect the conditions in which democratic citizens can reliably exercise this rational recognition capacity.

Those conditions are missing for climate change and other issues that culturally polarize the public.  In connection with those issues, citizens' rational recognition faculty is being impaired by toxins -- not ones emitted from "composite wood products" but ones being transmitted, either deliberately or by misadventure, by partisan discourse.

One goal of the science of science communication, then, is to protect the quality of the science communication environment from contamination by antagonistic cultural meanings that convert boring, mundane issues of fact that admit of scientific inquiry into divisive symbols of tribal loyalty.

To acquire and use the knowledge necessary to do that, researchers must avoid fixating only on pathological cases like climate change and ignoring the "silent denominator" (or silent members of the denominator) comprising all the science-informed policy issues that don't generate cultural polarization.

We can't expect to be able to accurately prevent and, failing that, diagnose and treat science-communication pathologies unless we start with an informed and psychologically realistic of what citizens know and how in a healthy body politic.

Hey--did you hear about the Chemical Safety Improvement Act that is garnering bipartisan support in the Senate?!  

I didn't think so.

But since I had occasion to construct this graphic to help a group of professional science communicators assess whether the failure to communicate scientific consensus can plausibly be viewed as the source of persistent cultural polarization over climate change in the US, I thought I'd post it.  I've included some "stills," but watch it in slide show mode if you want to get the nature of the empirical proof it embodies.

And here are the answers to the predictable questions:

1. Does that mean "scientific consensus" is irrelevant?

No.

People of all cultural outlooks support policies they believe are consistent with scientific consensus.

But they have to figure out what scientific consensus is, which means they have to assess any evidence that is presented to them on that.

In the current climate of polarization, members of opposing cultural groups predictably credit and discredit such evidence in patterns that reinforce their belief that the scientific consensus is in fact consistent with the position that predominates in their cultural group.

Until the atagonisitic cultural meanings that motivate this selective crediting and discrediting of evidence are dispelled, just flooding the information market with more and more studies of "scientific consensus" won't do any good.

Indeed, it will only amplify the signal of cultural contestation that sustains polarization. 

Meanings first, then facts.

2. Does this mean we should ignore people who are misinforming the public?

No.

But it means that just "correcting" misinformation won't work unless you convey affirming meanings.  

Indeed, in a state of polarized meanings, rapid-response "truth squads" also amplify polarization because they reliably convey the meaning "this is what your side believes -- and we think you are stupid!"

Meanings first, then facts!

3. Does this mean we should just give up?

No.

The only thing anyone should give up is a style of communicating "facts" or anything else that amplifies the message that positions on climate are part of an "us-them" cultural struggle.   

The reason the US and many other liberal democracies are polarized on climate change is not that people are science illiterate or over-rely on heuristic-driven reasoning processes. It isn't that they haven't been told that human CO2 emissions increase global temperatures.  It isn't that they are being exposed to biased news reports or misled by misinformation campaigns. And it certainly isn't that no one has advised them yet about the numerous studies finding "97% of scientists ..." agree that that human activity is causing climate change.

The reason is that we inhabit a science communication environment polluted with toxic partisan meanings on climate change.

Conveying to people -- a large segment of the population in the US & in other countries too-- that accepting evidence on climate change means accepting that members of their cultural community are stupid or corrupt is itself a form of science-communication pollution.  

If you don't think that many ways of communicating "facts" (including the extent of scientific consensus on climate change) convey that meaning, then you just aren't paying attention.

If you think there's no way to communicate facts that avoids conveying this meaning, and in fact affirms the identity of culturally diverse people, you aren't thinking hard enough.

Navin uses an interpretive, conjectural style of analysis, mining the expression of anti-vaccine themes in popular discourse.  

I think he is likely overestimating the extent of public concern about vaccines. As Seth Mnookin has chronicled, there is definitely an "anti-vaccine" subculture, and it is definitely a menace--particularly when adherents of it end up concentrated in local communities. But they are tiny, tiny minority of the population. Childhood vaccination rate have been 90-95% (depending on the vaccine), & exemption from vaccination under 1%, for many many years without any meaningful changes.

But I don't think this feature of the paper is particularly significant or casts doubt on Navin's extraction of the dominant moral/emotional themes that pervade anti-vaccine discourse.  Disgust--toward puncturing of the body with needles and the introduction of foreign agents into the blood; toward the aspiration to substitute fabricated and self-consciously managed processes for the ones that "nature" has created for governing human health (including nurturing and protection by mothers)--unmistakably animates the sentiments of the vaccine opponents, historical and contemporary, whom Navin surveys.

There are two cool links between Navin's account & the themes explored in my previous posts.  One is the degree to which the evaluative orientation in these disgust sensibilities cannot be reduced in a satisfactory way to a "conservative" ideology or "moral" outlook.

Navin cites some popular works that suggest that anti-vaccine sentiment is correlated with a "left wing" or "liberal" political view. I've never seen any good evidence of this & the idea that something as peculiar -- as boutiquey -- as being anti-vaccine correlates w/ any widespread cultural style strikes me as implausible. But it is clear enough from Navin's account that the distinctive melange of evaluative themes that inform "disgust" with vaccines are not the sorts of things we'd expect to come out of the mouth of a typical political conservative (or typical anything, really).

This feature of the analysis is in tension with the now-popular claim in moral psychology-- associated most conspicuously with Jonathan Haidt and to a lesser degree with Martha Nussbaum -- that "disgust" is a peculiarly or at least disproportionately "conservative" moral sentiment as opposed to a "liberal" one  (frankly, I think it is odd to classify people in these ways, given how manifestly non-ideological the average member of the public is!). That was a point I was stressing in my account of the role of disgust in aversion to guns (and maybe drones, too!).

The second interesting element of Navin's account is the relationship between disgust and perceptions of harm.  Navin notes that in fact those disgusted by vaccines inevitably do put primary emphasis on the argument that vaccines are inimical to human health.  They rely on "evidence" to make out their claim. But almost certainly what makes them see harm in vaccines -- what guides them selectively to credit and discredit evidence that vaccines poison humans and weaken rather than bolster immunity -- is their disgust with the cultural meaning of vaccines.

This point, too, I think is in tension with the contemporary moral psychology view that sees "liberals" as concerned with "harm" as opposed to "purity," "sanctity" etc.  

The alternative position -- the one I argued for in my previous posts -- is that the moral sensibilities of "liberals" are guided by disgust every bit as just as much those of "conservatives," who are every bit as much as focused, consciously speaking, on "harm" as liberals are.  Both see harm in what disgusts them -- and then seek regulation of such behavior or such activities as a form of harm  prevention.  What distinguishes "liberals" and "conservatives" is only what they find disgusting, a matter that reflects their adherence to opposing cultural norms.

Although the people Navin are describing aren't really either "liberals" or "conservatives" -- and in fact don't subscribe to cultural norms that are very widespread at all in contemporary American society -- his account supports the claim that disgust is in fact a universal moral sentiment, and one that universally informs perceptions of harm.

In this respect, he is aligned with William Miller and Mary Douglas, both of whom he draws on.

Cool paper -- or book chapter!  Indeed, I'm eager to find & read the rest of the manuscript.

Logic of prediction markets explained by professional science communicators

Basically the point is this: 

1. A reflective person could understandably be uncertain how to assess the weight of scientific evidence on climate change and its practical impact (indeed, anyone who professes not to understand this proves only that he or she is not reflective).

2. Such a person can't reasonably be expected to see a social scientist's opinion survey of natural scientists or literature survey of peer-reviewed articles as settling the matter. In constructing the sample for such a survey, the social scientist has to make a judgment about which scientists or which scientific papers to include in the sample. Evaluating the adequacy of the sample-inclusion criteria used for that purposes will confront a reasonable person with issues as open to dispute as the ones that he or she would have had to resolve to assess the weight and practical significance of scientific evidence on climate change. Indeed, many of the issues will be exactly the same.

3. However, a reasonable person would see an index of securities (and like instruments) the value of which depend on global warming actually occurring  as helpful evidence in such circumstances. Market actors are economically, not ideologically motivated. Moreover, cognitive biases are likely to cancel out, leaving only the signal associated with informed assessments, by multiple rational and self-interested actors, of the weight and practical importance of the best available evidence on climate. Indeed, such a person could observe movement in the value of such instruments in relation to the publication of scientific papers or the issuances of IPCC reports etc. as measures of the soundness of those scientific assessments.

Here's another thing:

If reasonable people see that other resonable people, including ones whose priors are different from theirs, are also willing to treat an index of  as a relevant source of evidence that gives them reason to adjust their priors in one way or another (& who don't make the science-illiterate mistake of thinking that 'evidence' "proves' things as opposed to supply reason for treating a hypothsis as more or less likely to be true than one otherwise woudl have estimated), they'll be able to observe evidence of how many people are willing to proceed in this open-minded way. 

That evidence not only allows them to adjust their priors about how many people are like that; it also supplies them, as emotional and moral reciprocators, w/ reason to contribute to the common good of being a person of exactly that sort, modeling for the rest of humanity how sensible people w/ different perceptions about a matter subject to empirical investigation should proceed.

Maybe this would catch on?

So let's listen to the money people and let them lead us into a love-filled, harmonious world.

BTW, if such an index already exists, I wouldn't be surprised. I'd be surprised if it didn't.  So anyone who knows where to find it, please speak up.  

The index, btw, has to consist in securities (and the like) that reflect economic opportunities created by global warming.

It cannot include economic opportunities created by government policies to promote carbon-reduction.  That market will reflect expectations about political forces, not natural ones (a matter that might be interesting but that isn't probative of beliefs in whether climate change will occur--only in what sorts of things will occur in democratic politics, which is governed by its own peculiar laws).

Please join the discussion -- in the comment thread for the "97% of insurance companies -- & hedge funds-- agree!" post.