Who distrusts whom about what in the climate science debate? - Cultural Cognition of Health

I had the privilege of being part of a panel discussion last Fri. at the great “Scienceonline Climate” conference in Wash. D.C. The other panel members were Tom Armstrong,  Director of National Coordination for the U.S. Global Change Research  in the  Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology & Director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State Universitly; Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001; organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003; and contributing scientist to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC. Pretty cool!

Topic was “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion.”  Moderator Liz Neely (who expended most of her energy skillfully moderating the length of my answers to questions) framed the discussion around the recent blogosphere conflagration ignited by Tamsin Edwards’ column in Guardian.

Edwards seemed to pin the blame for persistent public controversy over what’s known about climate change on climate scientist’s themselves, arguing that “advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science.”

Naturally, her comments provoked a barrage of counterarguments from climate scientists and others, many of whom argued that climate scientists are uniquely situated to guide public deliberations into alignment with the best available scientific evidence.

But I have a different take from those on both sides.

Indeed, the take is sufficiently removed from what both seem to assume about how scientists’ position-taking influences public beliefs about climate change and other issues that I really just want to put that whole debate aside.

Instead I’ll rehearse the points I tried to inject into the panel discussion (slides here).

If I can manage to get those points across, I think it won’t really be necessary, even, for me to say what I think about the contending claims about the role of “scientist advocacy” in the climate debate.  That’ll be clear enough.

1. Members of the public do trust scientists.

2. Members of culturally opposing groups distrust each other when they perceive their status is at risk in debates over public policy.

3. When facts become entangled in cultural status conflicts, members of opposing groups (all of whom do trust scientists) will form divergent perceptions of what scientists believe.

To make out these three points, I focused on two CCP studies, and an indisputable but tremendously important and easily ignored fact.

The first study examined “who believes what and why” about the HPV vaccine. In it we found that members of the cultural groups who are most polarized on the risks and benefits of the HPV vaccine both treat the positions of public health experts as the most decisive factor.

Members of both groups have predispositions—ones that both shape their existing beliefs and motivate them to credit and discredit evidence in selectively in patterns that amplify polarization when they are exposed to information.

But members of both groups trust public health experts to identify what sorts of treatments are best for their children. They will thus completely change their positions if a trusted public health expert is identified as the source of evidence contrary to their cultural predispositions.

Of course, members of the public tend to trust experts whose cultural values they share. Accordingly, if they are presented with multiple putative experts of opposing cultural values, then they will identify the one whom they (tacitly!) perceive has values closest to their own as the real experts—the one who really knows what he’s talking about and can be trusted—and do what he (we used only white males in the study to avoid any confounds relating to race and gender) says.

me! me! click me!!! There is only one circumstance in which these dynamics produce polarization: when members of the public form the perception that the position they are culturally predisposed to accept is being uniformly advanced by experts whose values they share and positions they are culturally predisposed to reject are being uniformly advanced by experts whose values they reject .

That was the one we got in the real world…

The second study examined “cultural cognition of scientific consensus.” In that one, we examined how individuals identify expert scientists on culturally charged issues—viz., climate change, gun control, and nuclear waste disposal.

We found that when shown a single scientist with credentials that conventionally denote expertise —a PhD from a recognized major university, a position on the faculty of such a university, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences—individuals readily identified that scientist as an “expert” on the issue in question.