The declining authority of science? (Science of Science Communication course, Session 3) - Cultural Cognition of Health

This semester I’m teaching a course entitled the Science of Science Communication. I have posted general information on the course and will be posting the reading list at regular intervals. I will also post syntheses of the readings and the (provisional, as always) impressions I have formed based on them and on class discussion. This is this third such synthesis. I eagerly invite others to offer their own views, particularly if they are at variance with my own, and to call attention to additional sources that can inform understanding of the particular topic in question and of the scientific study of science communication in general.

In Session 3, we finished off “science literacy and public attitudes” by looking at “public attitudes” toward science.  The theory for investigating the literature here is that one if one wants to understand the mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is transmitted in various settings, it likely is pretty important to consider how much value people attach to being informed of what science knows.

1.  So what are we talking about here? I’m going to refer to the “authority of science” to mean assent to its distinctive understanding of “knowing” as valid and as superior to competing understandings (e.g., a religious one that treats as known matters revealed by the word of God, etc.). The relevant literature on “attitudes toward science” tries to assess the extent of the authority of science, including variation in it among different groups and over time.

Indeed, a dominant theme in this literature is the declining or contested status of the authority of science. “Many scholars and policy makers fear that public trust in organized science has declined or remains inadequate,” summarizes Gauchat, a leading researcher in this field. What accounts for that?

2. Well, what are they talking about? But before examining the explanations for the growing resistance to the authority of science, it’s useful to interrogate the premise: why exactly would anyone worry that the authority of science is seriously in doubt in American society?

Pew did an amazingly thorough and informative survey in 2009 and concluded “Americans like science.” They “believe overwhelmingly that science has benefited society and has helped make life easier for most people.”

This sentiment, moreover, is pretty widespread. “Partisans largely agree on the beneficial effects of science,” the Pew Report continues, “with 88% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 83% of Democrats saying the impact is mostly positive. There are differences—though not large—tied to race, education, and income.”

“[L]arge percentages,” too, “think that government investments in basic scientific research (73%) and engineering and technology (74%) pay off in the long run.” Again, this is not something that generates meaningful political divisions.

Data collected over three decades’ time by the NSF suggests that this 2009 picture from Pew is a but a frame in a thirty-year moving picture that shows — well, a stationary object. Americans love science for all the wonderful things it does for them, want government to keep funding it, and have for decades.

Amusingly, the Pew Report seems to feel compelled to pay respect to the “declining authority” perception, even in the course of casting immense doubt on it.  The subtitle of the Report is “ Scientific Achievements Less Prominent Than a Decade Ago .” The basis of this representation turns out to be a question that asked subjects to select the “Nation’s greatest achievement” from a specified list.  Whereas 47% picked “Science/medicine/technology” in 1999, only 27% did in 2009.  Most of the difference, though, was reflected in the 12 percentage point increase in “Civil rights/Equal rights,” and nearly all the rest in “Nothing/Don’t Know,” the only option chosen more often than Science/medicine/technology.”

A better subtitle, then, would have been “ After Election of America’s First African-American President, Recognition of Gains in Civil Rights Eats Away at American’s Awe of Science.”

3.  Uncritically examined assumptions tend to multiply…. I keep mentioning the bipartisan or nonpartisan aspect of the public’s warm feeling toward science because my guess is that the premise that the authority of science is in “decline” is an inference from the sad spectacle of political polarization on climate change. If so, then this would be a case where the uncritical acceptance of one assumption–that conflict over climate change reflects a decline in the authority of science– has bred uncritical acceptance of another–that the authority of science is declining.

I could sort of understand why someone might hypothesize that people who are skeptical about climate change don’t accept science’s way of knowing, but not why anyone would persist in this view after examining any reasonable amount of evidence.

The people who are skeptical about climate change, just like those who believe in it, believe by an overwhelming margin that “scientists contribute to the well-being of society.”  The reason that there is public division on climate change is not that one side rejects scientific consensus but that the two disagree about what the “consensus” on climate change is, a conclusion supported by numerous studies including the Pew Report.

A related mistake is to treat the partisan divide on climate as evidence that “Republicans” are “anti-science.”  Not only do the vast majority of such individuals who identify as Republican view science and its impact on society positively. They also, as the Pew Report notes, hold views on nuclear power more in keeping with those of scientists (who are themselves overwhelmingly Democratic) than the vast majority of ordinary members of the public who call themselves “Democrats.”

Another probable basis for the ill-supported premise that science’s authority is low or in decline etc. is the high proportion of the U.S. population—close to 50%–who say they believe in divine creation.  In fact, the vast majority of those who say they don’t believe in evolution also have highly positive views about the value of science.

I suppose one could treat the failure to “accept” evolution (or to “believe” in climate change)  as “rejection” of the authority of science by definition. But that would be a boring thing to do, and also invite error.

It would be boring because it would foreclose investigation of the extremely interesting question of how people who hold one position they know is rejected by science can nevertheless persist in an extremely positive view of science in general — and simply live in a manner that so pervasively assumes science’s way of knowing is the best one (I don’t know for sure but am pretty confident that people who believe in evolution are not likely to refuse to rely on a GPS system because its operation reflects Einstein’s theories on relativity, e.g.).

The error that’s invited by equating rejection of evolution or climate change with “rejection of the authority of science” is the conclusion that the rejection of the authority of science causes those two beliefs.  Definitions, of course, don’t cause anything. So if we make the awkward choice to analytically equate rejection of evolution or of climate change with rejection of the authority of science, we will have to keep reminding ourselves that “rejection of the authority of science” would then be a fallacious answer to the question what really does cause differences in public beliefs about evolution and about climate change?

4.  But then what are the “public attitude” measures measuring? The public attitude scholars, and in particular Gauchat, report lots of interesting data on the influences on attitudes toward science.  The amount of variance they find, moreover, seems too large to be understood as an account for the difference between the 85% of Americans who seem to think science is great and the 15% or so who seem to have a different view. The question thus becomes, what exactly are they measuring and what’s its relationship to peoples’ disposition to be guided by science’s way of knowing on matters of consequences to their decisionmaking?