Key Insight
Kahan argues that shaming those who reject scientific consensus is not only ineffective as a science communication strategy but actively counterproductive.
The impulse to shame those who deny climate change, reject vaccine safety, or dispute evolution is understandable. When people hold beliefs that seem clearly contradicted by overwhelming evidence, the response of treating belief-holders with contempt feels proportionate to the stakes.
It is also, the evidence strongly suggests, a strategic disaster. Cultural cognition research predicts exactly why shaming fails — and why it backfires. When an individual's rejection of a scientific finding is maintained partly to signal group membership, a shaming attack from a cultural outsider will be experienced not as a correction but as an attack on that identity.
Shaming communicates that the shamer perceives the shamed as culturally deviant . For individuals whose rejection of scientific findings is partly identity-expressive, this confirmation of cultural distance reinforces rather than undermines the basis for their position.
The "dangerous seat of the pants" in the title refers to science communication that relies on intuition and moral satisfaction rather than empirical evidence about what works. The alternative to shaming is the patient, empirically guided work of finding communication strategies that allow culturally diverse audiences to engage with accurate scientific information without having to choose between that information and their cultural identities.