Does "climate science literacy trump ideology" in Australia? Not as far as I can tell! Guy et al., Effects of knowledge & ideology part 1 - Cultural Cognition of Health

It was so darn much fun to report my impressions on Stocklmayer, S. M., & Bryant, C. Science and the Public—What should people know?, International Journal of Science Education , Part B, 2(1), 81-101 (2012), that I thought I’d tell you all about another cool article I read recently:

Guy, S., Kashima, Y., Walker, I. & O’Neill, S. Investigating the effects of knowledge and ideology on climate change beliefs. European Journal of Social Psychology 44 , 421-429 (2014).

GKW&O report the results of an observational study (a survey, essentially!) on the respective contributions that cultural cogntion worldviews and “climate science literacy” make to belief in human-caused global warming and to understanding of the risks it poses.

Performing various univariate and multivariate analyses, they conclude that both cultural worldviews and climate science literacy (let’s call it) have an effect.

Might not sound particularly surprising.

But it is critical to understand that the GKW&O study is a contribution to an ongoing scholarly conversation.

It is a response, in fact, to Cultural Cognition Project (CCP) researchers and others who’ve conducted studies showing that greater “science literacy,” and higher proficiency in related forms of scientific reasoning ( such as numeracy and critical reflection ), magnify cultural polarization on climate change risks and related facts.

The results of these other studies are thought to offer support for the “cultural cognition thesis” (CCT), which states, in effect, that “culture is prior to fact.”

Individuals’ defining group commitments, according to CCT, orient the faculties they use to make sense of evidence about the dangers they face and hwo to abate them.

As a result, individuals can be expected to comprehend and give appropriate effect to scientific evidence only when engaging that information is compatible with their cultural identities.  If the information is entangled in social meanings that threaten the status of their group or their standing within it, they will use their reasoning powers to resist crediting that information.

Of course, “information” can make a difference!  But for that to happen, the entanglement of positions in antagonistic cultural meanings must first be dissolved, so that individuals will be relieved of the psychic incentives to construe information in an identity-protective way.

GKW&O meant to take issue with CCT.

The more general forms of science comprehension that figured in the CCP and other studies, GKW&O maintain, are only “proxy measures” for climate science comprehension.  Because GKW&O measure the latter directly, they believe their findings supply stronger, more reliable insights into the relative impact of “knowledge” and “ideology” (or culture) on climate change beliefs.

Based on their results, GKW&O conclude that it would be a mistake to conclude that “ideology trumps scientific literacy.”

“The findings of our the findings of our study indicate that knowledge can play a useful role in reducing the impact of ideologies on climate change opinion.”

There are many things to like about this paper!

I counted 487 such things in total & obviously I don’t have time to identify all of them. I work for a living, after all.

But one includes the successful use of the cultural cognition worldview scales in a study of the risk perceptions of Australians !

Oh—did I not say the GKW&O collected their data from Australian respondents?  I should have!

I’ve discussed elsewhere some “cross-cultural cultural cognition” item development I had helped work on.  Some of that work involved consulation with a team of researchers adapting the cultural cognition scales for use with Australian samples .