The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?
There are some clear differences. Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right—once you survey climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right, and stem-cell and biomedical matters.
I don't really believe the implicit claims of the author, namely that science denial is more prominent on the political right. While it certainly seems true that many population issues seem to baffle the right more than the left, I think I can claim that the left misunderstands much of the scientific evidence they claim to believe.
So, it does not seem like the lefties I meet understand science any better than the righties, even admitting that my anecdotal evidence is not scientific. If we take it to be true, though, perhaps it reflects an overwhelming role of "denialism" independent of whatever subject. In other words, it's not science that's at issue; it's the willingness of lefties to take another person at their word, regardless of whether that person is a scientist or not. I think it would be easy to build an argument that righties just don't trust other people as much as lefties do. I forget where I heard it; but I remember someone claiming that the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals was that conservatives believe people are basically bad or selfish and liberals believe that people are basically good and altruistic.
Another issue I can't help but conflate with this article is the alleged rise in narcissism (or at least entitlement) amongst college students, which I attribute to a rise in network/influence connectivity, which I think naturally leads to what the author calls "motivated reasoning" (selecting influences that fit your own biases).
But my question for y'all is more personal. I've always enjoyed arguing and the dialectic as an efficient tool for arriving at "truth". I've always found that if someone adopts a position, the most efficient thing for me to do is adopt it's opposite and refine the differences as much as possible. This usually leads to very specific questions that can be asked of, say, JStore or Science Direct ... or even ChemSpider.
A problem I find, though, is that almost nobody I have these discussions with cares enough to follow up. Never mind admitting when you're wrong or avoiding "I told you so." People, in general, won't even respond! I can't even count the number of times I've come home from the pub, spent a little time finding scientific evidence for or against my position in some silly argument and e-mailing it to the other participants only to have them completely ignore it all.
To me, this is way more relevant to why "we don't believe science" than self-selecting sources for our biases. I don't find that people engage in motivated reasoning so much. It's more like they just flat don't care enough to read through scientific literature, much less think about how/whether they could reproduce the results. These people will invest days in a video game or futzing with a router in order to get just the right decoration on some piece of trim ... but they won't take a few hours to dig deeply into any science. They'll invest immense effort into, say, optimizing their bicycle or assembling their next desktop; but they won't spend any time studying the journals of materials science.
Why is that?
You can't just say "they're lazy". There's something deeper. It's almost as if the byzantine morass of qualifiers and gray areas of science are somehow unsatisfying. It's like they have an urge to be right; but they only want to be right NOW. Perhaps it's unsatisfying to reserve judgment for later, after they've put in the time and effort it takes to discover whether or not they really are right. It's easier and more efficient to gloss over all the things you don't know and jump to some conclusion that allows you to act immediately, without any deep thought, reading, or understanding.
