MAPKIA! "answer" episode 1: The interaction effect of religion & science comprehension on perceptions of climate change risk - Cultural Cognition of Health

Okay– as promised: the “answer” to “ MAPKIA!” episode 1!

As you’ll recall, the “question” was:

What influence do religiosity and science comprehension have on (or relationship do they have with) climate change risk perceptions?

Some players understandably found the query to be vague.

It was meant to be in one sense.  I wanted to frame the question in a manner that didn’t presuppose any position on the nature of the causal dynamics that could be generating any observed relationships; I wanted the players to have the freedom — & to bear the explanatory burden — to spell that out.

Two players might have agreed, e.g., that religiosity would be negatively correlated with climate change risk perceptions but have disagreed on whether variance in the former was causing variance in the latter or instead whether the covariance of the two was being caused by some 3d influence (say, cultural outlooks or political ideology) operating on each independently.

Or they might have agreed that the influence of religiosity or science comprehension on climate change risk perceptions was causal but disagreed about whether the effect was “direct” or  instead “mediated” or “moderated” & if  so what the mediator/moderator was. Etc.

An essential part of the game (it says so in the rules!) is for players to venture a “cogent hypothesis,” and I didn’t want to rule anything out by suggesting any particular causal relationships had to be at work in whatever correlations a particular hypothesis might entail.

But I think reasonable players could have seen the vagueness as going to whether they were supposed to assume a particular causal relationship. That’s no good!

So if I were to do it again, I would say (and when I do something like this again I will say) something like:

If you had to predict someone’s climate change risk perceptions, would your prediction be affected by information about that person’s religiosity and science comprehension? If so, how and why?!

Okay, so now what’s the “answer”?

I’m unsure!  But I can report that the two predictors interact . That is, one can’t specify what the impact of either is without knowing the value of the other.

Actually, I was motivated to investigate this question myself because I had a vague hunch that would be true.  The reason is that I’ve now seen such an interaction in several other places.

One, which I’ve reported on previously , involves belief in evolution .  Science literacy (of the sort measured by the NSF indicators) predicts a higher probability that a person will say he or she “believes” in evolution (of the sort that operates without any “guidance” from God) only in people who are relatively nonreligious .

In relatively religious persons, the probability goes down a bit as science literacy increases (at least in part because the probability of believing in a “theistic” variant of evolution goes up).

This pattern is part of the reason that I think “belief in evolution” is an invalid measure of “science literacy” or “science comprehension” viewed as a disposition or aptitude as opposed to a simple score on a quiz (the latter is a bad way to investigate what “ ordinary science intelligence ” is & how to promote it).  Insofar as scoring high on other items in a valid science literacy or comprehension scale doesn’t reliably predict saying one “believes in evolution,” the “belief” item should be viewed as measuring something else –like some sense of identity that is generally indicated by low religiosity (indeed, saying one “believes” in evolution has no correlation with actually understanding natural selection, random mutation, and genetic variance– the core element of the prevailing “modern synthesis” theory of evolution).

But if this particular indicator of one’s sense of identity — “belief in evolution” — interacts with science comprehension, what about others?!

Actually, we know that there is such an interaction for various risk perceptions .  Perceptions of climate change risk increase with science comprehension for egalitarian communitarians , whose identities tend to be bound up with the perception that technology and commerce are dangerous, but decrease for hierarch individualists , whose identities tend to be bound up with the perception that technology and commerce are beneficial to human welfare.

Basically, when a position on some risk or other fact that admits of empirical investigation becomes a marker of identity, science comprehension becomes a kind of amplifier of the connection between that identity and the relevant position.  I’ve explained before why I view this as, in one sense, individually rational but, in another more fundamental one, collectively irrational .