Scientists, the argument goes, determine risk using the tools and habits of mind associated with "slow," System 1 thinking, which puts a premium on conscious reflection.

Lacking the time and technical acumen to make sense of complicated technical information, ordindary citizens (it's said) use visceral, affect-driven associations. Well, climate change provokes images -- melting ice, swimming polar bears -- that just aren't as compelling, as scary as, say, terrorism (fiery skyscrapers with the ends of planes sticking out of them, etc.). Accordingly, they underestimate the risks of climate change relative to a host of more gripping threats to health and safety that scientific assessment reveals to be smaller in magnitude. 

This is not a new argument. Scholars on risk perception have been advancing it for years (and reiterating/amplifying it as time passes).

The problem is that it is wrong.  Empirically demonstrably false.

Consider: 

• Variance in the disposition to use "fast" (heuristic, affect-driven, system 1) as opposed to "slow" (conscious, reflective, deliberate system 2) modes of reasoning in fact explains essentially none of the variance in public perception of climate change risks. In fact, when one correlates climate change risk perceptions with these dispositions, one finds that the tendency to rely on system 2 (slow) rather than 1 (fast) is associated with less concern, but the impact is so small as to be practically irrelevant. 

• What does explain variance in climate change risk perception -- evidence shows, and has for years -- are cultural or ideological dispositions. There is a huge gulf between citizens subscribing to a hierarchical and individualistic worldview, who attach high symbolic and material value to commerce and industry and who discount all manner of environmental and technological risk, and citizens subscribing to an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, who associate commerce and industry with unjust social disparities.

• Because climate change divides members of the public on cultural grounds, it must be the case that ordinary individuals who use system 1 ("fast") modes of reasoning form opposing intuitive or affective reactions to climate change -- "scary" for egalitarians and communitarians, "enh" for hierarchical individualists. Again, evidence bears this out! (Ellen Peters, a psychologist who studies the contribution that affect, numeracy, and cultural worldviews make to risk perception has done the best study on how cultural worldviews orient system 1/affective perceptions of risk, in my view.)
• Individuals who are disposed to use system 2 ("slow") are not more likely to hold beliefs in line with the scientific consensus on climate change. Instead, they are even more culturally polarized than individuals who are more disposed to use "fast," system 1 reasoning. This is a reflection of the (long-established but recently forgotten) impact of motivated reasoning on system 2 forms of reasoning (i.e., conscious, deliberate, reflective forms). 

So why do so many commentators keep attributing the climate change controversy to system 1/2 or "fast/slow"?

The answer is  system 1/2 or "fast/slow": that framework recommends itself -- is intuitively and emotionally appealing (especially to people frustrated over the failure of scientific consensus to make greater inroads in generating public consensus) and ultimately a lot easier to get than the empirically supported findings.

This is in fact part of the explanation for the "story telling" abuse of decision science mechanisms that I discussed in an earlier post.

There's only one remedy for that: genuinely scientific thinking.

Just as we are destined not to solve the problems associated with climate change without availing ourselves of the best available science on how the climate works, so we are destined to continue floundering in addressing the pathologies that generate public dissensus over climate change and a host of other issues unless we attend in a systematic, reflective, deliberate way to the science of science communication.

The answer — as it was for “do more educated people see more risk or less”—is neither. Until one takes their cultural values into account.

The data were collected in a survey (the same one discussed in the earlier post) of 1500 US adults drawn from a nationally representative panel. My colleagues and I measured the subjects’ climate change risk perceptions with the “Industrial Strength Measure.”

We also had them complete two tests: one developed by the National Science Foundation to measure science literacy; and another used by psychologists to measure “numeracy,” which is the capacity to engage in technical reasoning (what Kahneman calls “System 2”). Responses to these two tests form a psychometrically valid and reliable scale that measures a single disposition, one that I’m calling “science aptitude” here.

As we report in a working paper, science aptitude (and each component of it of it) is negatively correlated with climate change risk perceptions—i.e., as science literacy and numeracy go up, concern with climate change goes down. But by an utterly trivial amount (r = 0.09) that no one could view as practically significant—much less as a meaningful explanation for public conflict over climate change risks.

A reporter asked me to try to make this more digestible by computing the number of science-aptitude questions (out of 22 total) that were answered correctly (on average) by individuals who were less concerned with climate change risks and by those who were more concerned. The answer is: 12.6 vs. 12.3, respectively. Still a trivial difference.

But as we make clear in the working paper, the inert effect of science literacy and numeracy when the sample is considered as a whole obscures the impact that science aptitude actually does have on climate change risks when subjects are assessed as members of opposing cultural groups.

Egalitarian communitarians—the individuals who are most concerned about climate change in general—become more concerned as they become more science literate and numerate. In contrast, hierarchical individualists—the individuals who are least concerned in general—become even less concerned.

The result is that cultural polarization, which is already substantial among people low in science aptitude, grows even more pronounced among individuals who are high in science aptitude.

Or to put it another way, knowing more science and thinking more scientifically doesn’t induce citizens to see things the way climate change scientists do. Instead, it just makes them more reliable indicators of what people with their values think about climate change generally.

This doesn’t mean that science literacy or numeracy causes conflict over climate change. The antagonistic cultural meanings in climate change communication do.

But because antagonistic cultural meanings are the source of the climate-change-debate pathology, just administering greater and greater does of scientifically valid information can't be expected to cure it.

We don’t need more information. We need better meanings.

Well, good news: Everyone loves robots! Liberals & conservatives, men & women (the latter apparently not as much, though), rich & poor, dogs & cats!

We all know that the Japanese feel this way, but now some hard evidence -- a very rigorous poll conducted by Sodahead on-line research -- that there is a universal warm and fuzzy feeling toward robots in the US too.

This is, of course, in marked contrast to the cultural polarization we see in our society over climate change, and is thus a phenomenon worthy of intense study by scholars of risk perception.

But the contrast is not merely of academic interest: the reservoir of affection for robots is a kind of national resource -- an insurance policy in case the deep political divisions over climate change persist.

If they do, then of course we will likely all die, either from the failure to stave off climate-change induced environmental catastrophe or from some unconsidered and perverse policy response to try to stave off catastrophe.

And at that point, it will be up to the artificially intelligent robots to carry on.

You might think this is a made up issue. It's not. Even now, there are misguided people trying to sow the seeds of division on AI & robots, for what perverse, evil reason one can only try to imagine.

We have learned a lot about science communication from the climate change debacle. Whether we'll be able to use it to cure the science-communication pathology afflicting deliberations over climate change is an open question.  But we can and should at least apply all the knowledge that studying this impasse has generated to avoid the spread of this disease to future science-and-technology issues. 

And I for one can't think of an emerging technology more important to insulate from this form of destructive and mindless fate than artificial intelligence & robotics!

******

disclaimer: I love robots!! So much!!!
Maybe that is unconsciously skewing my assessment of the issues here (I doubt it, but I did want to mention).

Very generally, one of these involves largely unconscious, intuitive reasoning and the other conscious, reflective reasoning.

Kahneman calls these "System 1" and "System 2," respectively, but as I said the distinction is of long standing, and earlier dual process theories used different labels (I myself like "heuristic" and "systematic,” the terms used by Shelley Chaiken and her collaborators; the “elaboration likelihood model” of Petty & Cacioppo uses different labels but is very similar to Chaiken’s “heuristic-systematic Model”).

Kahneman's work (including most recently his insightful and fun synthesis “Thinking Fast, Slow”) has done a lot to focus attention on dual process theory, both in scholarly research (particularly in economics, law, public policy & other fields not traditionally frequented by social psychologists) and in public discussion generally.

Still, there are recurring themes in works that use Kahneman’s framework that reflect misapprehensions that familiarity with the earlier work in dual process theorizing would have steered people away from.

I'm not saying that Kahneman — a true intellectual giant — makes these mistakes himself or that it is his fault others are making them. I'm just saying that it is the case that these mistakes get made, with depressing frequency, by those who have come to dual process theory solely through the Kahneman System 1-2 framework.

Here are two of those mistakes (there are more but these are the ones bugging me right now).

1. The association of motivated cognition with "system 1" reasoning.  

"Motivated cognition," which is enjoying a surge in interest recently (particularly in connection with disputes over climate change), refers to the conforming of various types of reasoning (and even perception) to some goal or interest extrinsic to that of reaching an accurate conclusion.  Motivated cognition is an unconscious process; people don't deliberately fit their interpretation of arguments or their search for information to their political allegiances, etc. -- this happens to them without their knowing, and often contrary to aims they consciously embrace and want to guide their thinking and acting.

The mistake is to think that because motivated cognition is unconscious, it affects only intuitive, affective, heuristic or "fast" "System 1" reasoning. That's just false. Conscious, deliberative, systematic, "slow" "System 2" can be affected be affected as well. That is, commitment to some extrinsic end or goal -- like one's connection to a cultural or political or other affinity group -- can unconsciously bias the way in which people consciously interpret and reason about arguments, empirical evidence and the like.

This was one of the things that Chaiken and her collaborators established a long time ago. Motivated systematic reasoning continues to be featured in social psychology work (including studies associated with cultural cognition) today.

One way to understand this earlier and ongoing work is that where motivated reasoning is in play, people will predictably condition the degree of effortful mental processing on its contribution to some extrinsic goal. So if relatively effortless heuristic reasoning generates the result that is congenial to the extrinsic goal or interest, one will go no further. But if it doesn't -- if the answer one arrives at from a quick, impressionistic engagement with information frustrates that goal -- then one will step up one's mental effort, employing systematic (Kahneman's "System 2") reasoning.

But employing it for the sake of getting the answer that satisfies the extrinsic goal or interest (like affirmation of one's cultural identity defining group). As a result, the use of systematic or "System 2" reasoning will thus be biased, inaccurate.

But whatever: Motivated cognition is not a form of or a consequence of "system 1" reasoning. If you had been thinking & saying that, stop. 

2.  Equation of unconscious reasoning with "irrational" or biased reasoning, and equation of conscious with rational, unbiased.

The last error is included in this one, but this one is more general.

Expositors of Kahneman tend to describe "System 1" as "error prone" and "System 2" as "reliable" etc.

This leads lots of people to think that that heuristic or unconscious reasoning processes are irrational or at least "pre-rational" substitutes for conscious "rational" reasoning. System 1 might not always be biased or always result in error but it is where biases, which, on this view, are essentially otherwise benign or even useful heuristics that take a malignant turn, occur. System 2 doesn't use heuristics -- it thinks things through deductively, algorithmically  -- and so "corrects" any bias associated with heuristic, System 1 reasoning.

Wrong. Just wrong. 

Indeed, this view is not only wrong, but just plain incoherent.

There is nothing that makes it onto the screen of "conscious" thought that wasn't (moments earlier!) unconsciously yanked out of the stream of unconscious mental phenomena. 

Accordingly, if a person's conscious processing of information is unbiased or rational, that can only be because that person's unconscious processing was working in a rational and unbiased way -- in guiding him or her to attend to relevant information, e.g., and to use the sort of conscious process of reasoning (like logical deduction) that makes proper sense of it.

But the point is: This is old news! It simply would not have occurred to anyone who learned about the dual process theory from the earlier work to think that unconscious, heuristic, perceptive or intuitive forms of cognition are where "bias" come from, and that conscious, reflective, systematic reasoning is where "unbiased" thinking lives.

The original dual process theorizing conceives of the two forms of reasoning as integrated and mutually supportive, not as discrete and hierarchical. It tries to identify how the entire system works -- and why it sometimes doesn't, which is why you get bias, which then, rather than being "corrected" by systematic (System 2) reasoning, distorts it as well (see motivated systematic reasoning, per above).

Even today, the most interesting stuff (in my view) that is being done on the contribution that unconscious processes like "affect" or emotion make to reasoning uses the integrative, mutually supportive conceptualization associated with the earlier work rather than the discrete, hierarchical conceptualization associated (maybe misassociated; I'm not talking about Kahneman himself) with System 1/2.

Ellen Peters, e.g., has done work showing that people who are high in numeracy -- and who thus posses the capacity and disposition to use systematic (System 2) reasoning -- don't draw less on affective reasoning (System 1...) when they outperform people who are low in spotting positive-return opportunities. 

On the contrary, they use more affect, and more reliably.

In effect, their unconscious affective response (positive or negative) is what tells them that a "good deal" — or a raw one — might well be at hand, thus triggering the use of the conscious thought needed to figure out what course of action will in fact conduce to the person's well-being.

People who aren't good with numbers respond to these same situations in an affectively flat way, and as a result don't bother to engage them systematically.

This is evidence that the two processes are not discrete and hierarchical but rather are integrated and mutually supportive.  Greater capacity for systematic (okay, okay, "system 2"!) reasoning over time calibrates heuristic or affective processes (system 1), which thereafter, unconsciously but reliably, turns on systematic reasoning.

So: if you had been thinking or talking as if  System 1 equaled "bias" and System 2 "unbiased, rational," please just stop now.

Indeed, to help you stop, I will use a strategy founded in the original dual process work.

As I indicated, believing that consciousness leaps into being without any contribution of unconsciousness is just incoherent. It is like believing in "spontaneous generation."  

Because the idea that System 2 reasoning can correct unconscious bias without the prior assistance of unconscious, system 2 reasoning is illogical, I propose to call this view "System 2 ab initio bias.”

The effort it will take, systematically,  to figure out why this is an appropraite thing for someone to accuse you of if you make this error will calibrate your emotions: you'll come to be a bit miffed when you see examples; and you'll develop a distinctive (heuristic) aversion to becoming someone who makes this mistakes and gets stigmatized with a humiliating label.

And voila! -- you'll be as smart (not really; but even half would be great!) as Shelly Chaiken, Ellen Peters, et al. in no time!

References:

Chaiken, S. & Maheswaran, D. Heuristic Processing Can Bias Systematic Processing - Effects of Source Credibility, Argument Ambiguity, and Task Importance on Attitude Judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66, 460-473 (1994).

Chaiken, S. & Trope, Y. Dual-process theories in social psychology, (Guilford Press, New York, 1999).

Chen, S., Duckworth, K. & Chaiken, S. Motivated Heuristic and Systematic Processing. Psychol Inq 10, 44-49 (1999).

Dunning, E.B.a.D. See What You Want to See: Motivational Influences on Visual Perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, 612-625 (2006).

Giner-Sorolla, R. & Chaiken, S. Selective Use of Heuristic and Systematic Processing Under Defense Motivation. Pers Soc Psychol B 23, 84-97 (1997).

Hsee, C.K. Elastic Justification: How Unjustifiable Factors Influence Judgments. Organ Behav Hum Dec 66, 122-129 (1996).

Kahan, D.M. The Supreme Court 2010 Term—Foreword: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law Harv. L. Rev. 126, 1 (2011). 

Kahan, D.M., Wittlin, M., Peters, E., Slovic, P., Ouellette L.L., Braman, D., Mandel, G. The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change. CCP Working Paper No. 89 (June 24, 2011).

Kahneman, D. Thinking, fast and slow, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011).

Kahneman, D. Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics. Am Econ Rev 93, 1449-1475 (2003).

Kunda, Z. The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 108, 480-498 (1990).

Peters, E., et al. Numeracy and Decision Making. Psychol Sci 17, 407-413 (2006).

Peters, E., Slovic, P. & Gregory, R. The role of affect in the WTA/WTP disparity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 16, 309-330 (2003).

Yet many commentators who credit  this account also warn us not to raise public hopes by even engaging in research on -- much less discussion of -- the feasibility of geoengeineering. These analysts worry that any intimation that there's a technological "fix" for global warming will lull the public into a sense of false security, dissipating political resolve to clamp down on CO2 emissions.

So one might infer that what's needed is a "Goldilocks strategy" of science communication -- one that conveys neither too much alarm nor too little but instead evokes just the right mix of fear and hope to coax the democratic process into rational engagement with the facts.

Or one might infer that what's needed is a better theory--or simply a real theory--of public opinion on climate change.

Here's a possibility: individuals form perceptions of risk that reflect their cultural commitments.

Here's what that theory implies about "dire" and "hopeful" information on climate change: what impact it has will be conditional on what response -- fear or hope, reasoned consideration or dismissiveness-- best expresses the particular cultural commitments individuals happen to have.

And finally here's some evidence from an actual empirical test conducted (with both US & UK samples) to test this conjecture:  

• When individuals are furnished with a "dire" message -- that substantial increases in CO2 emissions are essential to avert catastrophic effects for the environment and human well-being -- they don't react uniformly.  Hierarchical individualists, who have strong pro-commerce and pro-technology values, do become more dismissive of scientific evidence relating to climate change. However, egalitarian communitarians, who view commerce and industry as sources of unjust social disparities, react to the same information by crediting that evidence even more forcefully.
   
• Likewise, individuals don't react uniformly when furnished "hopeful" information about the contribution that geoengineering might make to mitigating the consequences of climate change. Egalitarian communitarians — the ones who ordinarily are most worried — do become less inclined to credit scientific information that climate change is such a serious problem after all. But when given the same information about geoengineering, the normally skeptical hierarchical individualists respond by crediting such scientific information more.

Am I saying that this account is conclusively established & unassailably right, that everything else one might say in addition or instead is wrong, and that therefore this, that, or the other thing ineluctably follows about what to do and how to do it? No, at least not at the moment.

The only point, for now, is about Goldilocks. When you see her, watch out.

Decision science has supplied us with a rich inventory of mechanisms. Afforded complete freedom to pick and choose among them,  any analyst with even a modicum of imagination can explain pretty much any observed pattern in risk perception however he or she chooses and thus invest whatever communication strategy strikes his or her fancy with a patina of "empirical" support.

One of the ways to prevent being taken in by this type of faux explanation is to be very skeptical about Goldilocks. Her appearance -- the need to engage in ad hoc "fine tuning" to fit a theory to seemingly disparate observations -- is usually a sign that someone doesn't actually have a valid theory and is instead abusing decision science by mining it for tropes to construct just-so stories motivated (consciously or otherwise) by some extrinsic commitment.

The account I gave of how members of the public react to information about climate change risks didn't involve adjusting one dial up and another down to try to account for multiple off-setting effects.

That's because it showed there really aren't offsetting effects here. There's only one: the crediting of  information in proportion to its congeniality to cultural predispositions. 

The account is open to empirical challenge, certainly.  But that's exactly the problem with Goldilocks theorizing: with it anything can be explained, and thus no conclusion deduced from it can be refuted.

Hi, Chris.

Your response was very thoughtful -- and educational! the connection to Haidt's moral psychology research added an important dimension -- as always. Thanks!

As you can see, in "Hey Chris Mooney ...," I didn't actually have in mind the project to advance the science of science communication.

I also didn't -- don't -- have in mind the "framing of science" as a communication strategy aimed at promoting support for enlightened policies, better democratic deliberations, etc., as valuable as those things might be.

I have in mind the idea that enjoyment of the wonder, as well as the wisdom, of scientific knowledge should be viewed as a good that a Liberal society enables all its citizens readily to enjoy without regard to their moral or cultural or ideological or religious orientations.

I think our Liberal society isn't doing this as well as it should. 

I'm pretty sure that it is a lot easier to build into one's life the thrill of seeing our species resolve the mysteries of nature (inevitably revealing even more astonishing mysteries) if one has a particular set of cultural commitments (ones I have, in fact) than if one has a very different set.  

The reason, in my view, is not that there is something antagonistic to science in the latter set of commitments.

Rather, it is that the content of the information that science communicators are conveying (with tremendous craft; some people are happy to be alive in the age of the microwave oven or on-demand movies; I am glad to be here when it possible to get continuous streams of great science reporting from sources like ScienceNow, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Dot Earth, etc.) tends to be embedded in cultural meanings that fit one outlook much better than another. 

That's why I mentioned the "hypothetical citizen" (who is not hypothetical) who wants science to show him or her all the miraculous devices in God's workshop. He or she gets just as much of a thrill in getting to know something about how much our species knows as I do, but doesn't get to experience it nearly as readily or as easily. 

But instead of staying on this narrow message – eat healthier to avoid these health risks – they take the argument further. Here’s where they risk undermining receptiveness to their main message by unnecessarily making two culturally polarizing arguments: (a) they take a strong anti-industry bent – urging we repudiate the exploitative national food industry (and switch to local farming, or raw vegan diets, etc.), and (b) they link obesity to global warming. The films argue: ‘Not only should you reform diet to promote your own health, but you should change your diet in order to thwart the exploitative national food industry and save the planet from global warming.’ These films are not alone in connecting obesity to global warming. (See also, e.g., CNN; ABC; U.K. medical journal The Lancet; and Nature, Global Warming: Is Weight Loss a Solution?); one recent article even uses the tagline “obesity is the new global warming.” 

By infusing messages about healthier diet with demands to repudiate the national food industry and threats of global warming, these films seem to unnecessarily tie healthy eating to culturally polarizing issues. The call for healthier dieting urges reduced consumption of beef and dairy products – a deeply rooted American industrial and cultural tradition. This threat to beef and dairy, when joined with arguments to revolutionize the national food industry and stop global warming, unnecessarily implicates and threatens the entire traditional American industrial way of life (meat & potatoes) associated with dominance and masculinity – trucks, farms, factories, steaks and burgers.  It seems that this connection – reform your diet in order to stop exploitative national industry and avert global warming – might make the idea of dietary reform particularly threatening to hierarchical values. This might induce biased processing, or cause some audience members to discredit (out of cultural defensiveness) evidence on the risks of over-consumption of animal product cholesterol, saturated fat, and sugar. Thus, generating culturally protective resistance to dietary reform that promotes the seemingly secular, universal values of health and longevity. One commentator writing about Forks Over Knives, otherwise receptive to film’s message about dietary reform, captures this problem: “[T]he documentary just may be the Inconvenient Truth of the digestive system… My problem with the documentary is where it crosses into puritanical proselytizing about the value of a vegan lifestyle. Here food becomes something unappetizingly pragmatic, and elements of what eating means to a society – from cultural to religious to familial – are downplayed.”

There has been great resistance from parents to improving school lunch programs, loaded with fatty, high cholesterol, and sugary ingredients that have been linked to obesity and associated health problems.   Resistance persists even when the schools are shown they can produce healthy lunches for the same cost, without much structural change. Certainly, there is institutional and industry resistance to change, but I wonder whether part of parental resistance (i.e., parents insisting that french fries be served at least three times a week) is a defensive response to dietary reform perceived as a cultural threat? Messages aiming to encourage healthier eating should be cautious to avoid the implication that healthier dieting requires rejecting an entire lifestyle as American as, well, McDonalds drive thru windows and apple pie.

In part one, I showed that “too pessimistic, so wrong”—in addition to being simultaneously fallacious and self-refuting (that’s actually pretty cool, if you think about it)—reflects a truncated familiarity with cultural cognition research. Studies of cultural cognition examine not only how it can interfere with open-minded consideration of scientific information but also what can be done to counteract this effect and generate open-minded evaluation of evidence that is critical of one’s existing beliefs.

Now I’ll identify another thing that “too pessimistic, so wrong” doesn't get: the contours of the contemporary normative and political debate over risk regulation and democracy.

2.  "Too pessimistic, so wrong" is innocent of the real debate about reason and risk regulation.

Those who make the “too pessimistic, must be wrong” argument are partisans of reason (nothing wrong with that). But ironically, by “refusing to accept” cultural cognition, these commentators are actually throwing away one of the few psychologically realistic programs for harmonizing self-government with scientifically enlightened regulation of risk.

The dominant view of risk regulation in social psychology, behavioral economics, and legal scholarship asserts that members of the public are too irrational to figure out what dangers society faces and how effectively to abate them. They don't know enough science; they have to use emotional heuristic substitutes for technical reasoning. They are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Well, if that is right, democracy is sunk. We can't make the median citizen into a climate scientist or a nuclear physicist. So either we govern ourselves and die from our stupidity; or, as many influential commentators in the academy (one day) and government (the next) argue, we hand over power to super smart politically insulated experts to protect us from myriad dangers.

Cultural cognition is an alternative to this position. It suggests a different diagnosis of the science communication crisis, and also a feasible cure that makes enlightened self-government a psychologically realistic prospect.

Cultural cognition implies that political conflicts over policy-relevant science occur when the questions of fact to which that evidence speaks become infused with antagonistic cultural meanings.

This is a pathological state—both in the sense that it is inimical to societal well-being and in the sense that it is unusual, not the norm, rare.  

The problem, according to the cultural cognition diagnosis, is not that people lack reason. It is that the reasoning capacity that normally helps them to converge on the best available information at society’s disposal is being disabled by a distinctive pathology in science communication.

The number of scientific insights that make our lives better and that don’t culturally polarize us is orders of magnitude greater than the ones that do. There’s not a “culture war” over going to doctors when we are sick and following their advice to take antibiotics when they figure out we have infections. Individualists aren’t throttling egalitarians over whether it makes sense to pasteurize milk or whether high-voltage power lines are causing children to die of leukemia.

People (the vast majority of them) form the right beliefs on these and countless issues, moreover, not because they “understand the science” involved but because they are enmeshed in networks of trust and authority that certify whom to believe about what.

For sure, people with different cultural identities don’t rely on the same certification networks. But in the vast run of cases, those distinct cultural certifiers do converge on the best available information. Cultural communities that didn’t possess mechanisms for enabling their members to recognize the best information—ones that consistently made them distrust those who do know something about how the world works and trust those who don’t—just wouldn’t last very long: their adherents would end up dead.

Rational democratic deliberations about policy-relevant science, then, doesn’t require that people become experts on risk. It requires only that our society take the steps necessary to protect its science communication environment from a distinctive pathology that enfeebles ordinary citizens from using their (ordinarily) reliable ability to discern what it is that experts know.

“Only” that? But how?

Well, that’s something cultural cognition addresses too — in the studies that “too pessimistic, so wrong” ignores and that I described in part one.

Don’t get me wrong: the program to devise strategies for protecting the science communication enviornment has a long way to go.

But we won’t even make one step toward perfecting the science of science communication if we resolve to “resist” evidence because we find its implications to be a bummer.

Reference: