"Politics & Science Webinar" Q&A;: vaccine- & GM food-risk perceptions - Cultural Cognition of Health

The “politics & science” webinar the other day was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to answer all the great questions that audience members had.

So here are some additional responses to some of the questions that were still in the queue:

Q1. How do you reconcile the fact that left-wing/educated individuals accept scientific evidence about climate change yet reject vaccinations?

Q2. Have you looked at GMOs or vaccines and seen similar results from the left that you’ve seen on the right?

I put these two together b/c my answer to the 1st is based on the 2d.

There’s no need to “reconcile the fact that left-wing/educated individuals accept scientific evidence about climate change yet reject vaccinations” b/c it’s not true !

Same for the claim that GM foods are somehow connected to a left-leaning political orientation –or a right-wing leaning one, for that matter.

The media & blogosophere grossly overstate the number of risk issues on which we see the sort of polarization that we do on climate change along with a number of other issues (e.g., fracking, nuclear power, HPV vaccine [at least at one time; not sure anymore]).

Consider these respones form a large, nationally represenative sample, surveyed last summer:

I call the survey item here the “ industrial strength risk perception measure” (ISRPM). There’s lots of research showing that responses to ISRPM will correlate super highly with respones that people give to more specific questions about the identified risk sources (e.g., “is the earth heating up?” or “are humans causing global temperatures to rise” in the case of the “Global warming” ISRPM) and even to behavior with respect to personal risk-taking (at least if the putative risk source is one they are familiar with). So it’s an economical way to look at variance.

You can see that climate change, fracking, and guns are pretty unusual in generating partisan divisions (click for higher res).

Well, here’s childhood vaccines and GM foods:

Definitely not in the class of issues— the small, weird ones, really —that polarize people.

First, to put the very tiny influence of political orientations on vaccine risks (and even smaller one on GM foods) in perspective, consider this (from a CCP report on vaccine risk perceptions):

Anyone who sees how tiny these correlations are and still wants to say that the there is an meaningful connection between partisanship and either vaccine- or GM food-risk perceptions is making a ridiculous assertion.

Indeed, in my view, they are just piling on in an ugly, ignorant, illiberal form of status competition that degrades public science discourse

Second, GM food’s ISRPM is higher than that of many other risk sources, it’s true.  But that’s consistent with noise : people are all over the map when they respond to the question, and so the average ends up around the middle.

In fact, there’s no meaningful public concern about GM food risks in the general population—for the simple reason that most people have no idea what GM foods are.  Serious public opinion surveys show this over & over.

Nonserious ones ignore this & pretend that we can draw inferences from the fact that when people who don’t know what GM foods are are asked if they are worried about them, they say, “oh yes!”  They also say ridiculous things like that that they carefully check for GM ingridients when they shop at the supermarket, even though in fact there aren’t any general GM food abeling requirements in the US.

Some 80% of the foods in US supermarkets have GM ingridients. People don’t fear GM foods; they eat them, in prodigious amounts.