What you "believe" about climate change doesn't reflect what you know; it expresses *who you are* - Cultural Cognition of Health

More or less the remarks I delivered yesterday at Earthday “Climate teach in/out” at Yale University:

I study risk perception and science communication.

I’m going to tell you what I regard as the single most consequential insight you can learn from empirical research in these fields if your goal is to promote constructive public engagement with climate science in American society.

What people “believe” about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are .

Accordingly, if you want to promote constructive public engagement with the best available evidence, you have to change the meaning of the climate change.

You have to disentangle positions on it from opposing cultural identities, so that people aren’t put to a choice between freely appraising the evidence and being loyal to their defining commitments.

I’ll elaborate, but for a second just forget climate change, and consider another culturally polarizing science issue: evolution.

About every two years, a major polling organization like Gallup issues a public opinion survey showing that approximately 50% of Americans “don’t believe in evolution.”

Pollsters issue these surveys at two-year intervals because apparently that’s how long it takes people to forget that they’ve already been told this dozens of times.  Or in any case, every time such a poll is released, the media and blogosphere is filled with expressions of shock, incomprehension, and dismay .

“What the hell is wrong with our society’s science education system?,” the hand-wringing, hair-pulling commentators ask.

But if you think the proportion of survey respondents who say they “believe in evolution” is an indicator of the quality of the science education that people are receiving in the U.S., you are misinformed.

Do you know what the correlation is between saying “I believe in evolution” and possessing even a basic understanding of “natural selection,” “random mutation,” and “genetic variance”—the core elements of the modern synthesis in evolutionary science?

Those who say they “do believe” are no more likely to be able to give a high-school biology-exam-quality account of how evolution works than those who say they “don’t.”

In a controversial decision in 2010, the National Science Foundation in fact proposed removing from its standard science-literacy test the true-false question “human beings developed from an earlier species of animals.”

The reason is that giving the correct answer to that question doesn’t cohere with giving the right answer to the other questions in NSF’s science-literacy inventory.

What that tells you, if you understand test-question validity, is that the evolution item isn’t measuring the same thing as the other science-literacy items.

Answers to those other questions do cohere with one another, which is how one can be confident they are all validly and reliably measuring how much science knowledge that person has acquired.

But what the NSF “evolution” item is measuring, researchers have concluded, is test takers’ cultural identities, and in particular the significance of religiosity in their lives.

What’s more, the impact of science literacy on the likelihood that people will say they “believe in evolution” is in fact highly conditional on their identity : as their level of science comprehension increases, individuals with a highly secular identity become more likely to say “they believe” in evolution; but as those with a highly religious identity become more science literate, in contrast, they become even more likely to say they don’t .

What you “believe” about evolution, in sum, does not reflect what you know about science—in general, or in regard to the natural history of human beings.