From the SOCIETY FOR PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
San Antonio, Texas – Psychological researchers are working to understand the cognitive processes, ideologies, cultural demands, and conspiracy beliefs that cause smart people to resist scientific messages. Using surveys, experiments, observational studies and meta-analyses, the researchers capture an emerging theoretical frontier with an eye to making science communication efforts smarter and more effective.
Protecting “Pet Beliefs”
One striking feature of people who hold science-skeptic views is that they are often just as educated, and just as interested in science, as the rest of us. The problem is not about whether they are exposed to information, but about whether the information is processed in a balanced way. It manifests itself in what Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland) describes as “thinking like a lawyer,” in that people cherry-pick which pieces of information to pay attention to “in order to reach conclusions that they want to be true.”
“We find that people will take a flight from facts to protect all kinds of belief including their religious belief, their political beliefs, and even simple personal beliefs such as whether they are good at choosing a web browser,” says Troy Campbell (University of Oregon).
Dan Kahan (Yale University) agrees, finding in their research that “the deposition is to construe evidence in identity-congruent rather than truth-congruent ways, a state of disorientation that is pretty symmetric across the political spectrum.”
Changing Minds
Merely talking about “evidence” or “data” does not typically change a skeptic’s mind about a particular topic, whether it is climate change, genetically modified organisms, or vaccines. People use science and fact to support their particular opinion and will downplay what they don’t agree with.
“Where there is conflict over societal risks – from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science,” says Kahan.
“In our research, we find that people treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions,” says Campbell. “When the facts are against their opinions, they don’t necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant.”
One approach to deal with science skepticism is to identify the underlying motivations or “attitude roots,” as Hornsey describes in his recent research (American Psychologist, in Press).
“Rather than taking on people’s surface attitudes directly, tailor the message so that it aligns with their motivation. So with climate skeptics, for example, you find out what they can agree on and then frame climate messages to align with these.”
Kahan’s recent research shows that a person’s level of scientific curiosity could help promote more open-minded engagement. They found that people who enjoyed surprising findings, even if it was counter to their political beefs, were more open to the new information. As Kahan and his colleagues note, their findings are preliminary and require more research.
Hornsey, Campbell, Kahan and Robbie Sutton (University of Kent) will present their research at the symposium, Rejection of Science: Fresh Perspectives on the Anti-Enlightenment Movement. The talks take place on Saturday, January 21, 2017, at the SPSP Annual Convention. More than 3000 scientists are in attendance at the conference in San Antonio from January 19-21.
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For a fuller understanding of the numerous barriers to finding the correct answers to complicated problems, see “German Misapprehensions Regarding OVERLORD: Understanding Failure in the Estimative Process,” a paper presented at the Conference on Intelligence and Military Operations, U.S. Army War College (April 1986).
See: http://www.tomcubbage.com/history/German-Normandy.pdf
So here’s the plan:
• Make sure “skeptics” do not get faculty appointments, cannot publish in peer reviewed journals, cannot get grants to do their work, cannot present at professional society meetings, will not get their students hired, are ignored by the press, are not consulted by government bodies, are called names by idiot journalists, etc., etc. etc.
• Having cleared the field of any possible competing ideas, declare “science” to be conquered territory, wholly occupied by right thinking believers.
• Move on to develop strategies to convince non-scientists that the orthodox, controlled, party-line “science” is the real deal.
Greg
Beautiful logic, thanks for the enjoyable reading experience.
Jus’ one ploblem wit “da plan”… whut happen when global coolin’ kick in? (Oop, nevah mind?)
Call it “Climate Change”?
If global cooling sets in we will deploy helicopters to de-ice windmill rotor blades.
This is how psych SHOULD be done – analyse the utterances of people who didn’t know they would be
researched.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00409/full
It’s interesting because they call sceptics ‘conspiracists’ and yet STILL the paper comes across as worse for the conventionalists than the contrarians. (as I prefer to call us sceptics)
Another such paper is http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00406/full
Between the 2 papers it is clear the contrarians are actually significantly more sane than the true believers of the Church of AGW.
My congratulations to anyone who can get through that first mind numbing essay.
Just Make sure a scientist knows his/her government research grant won’t be renewed unless the right message is put forth in manuscripts.Then you’ll get the GroupThink sought, when guy/gal’s livlihood is at stake.
Try this Fake Science on muslims for a change. This is pure propaganda, written by substandard students who simply are incapable.
Most people can generally pick out a liar, but in the case of watermelons, we know it the moment they start to speak. There’s no psychology to be researched. Modern humans resent & earlier humans killed, those who would deceive us for their own reasons. If members of early society did not pull their weight, they were likely to be the next meal. These researchers are too much up their own rectums to understand normal people.
What time is it? It’s lunch time Mr. Wolf!
What’s a climate skeptic? Is it someone who is skeptical about whether there is climate?
My congratulations to the “SOCIETY FOR PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY” for having discovered ‘confirmation bias’, known to the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC).
Everything old, is new again. 🙂 Thanks for that history lesson.
Their comments do not describe the septics which they claim be describing, instead the are describing how the CAGW proponents behave.
Brooks
Yes, they are talking about themselves.
They wonder why I do not believe when the tell me something is beyond question. Everything has one question and that is will you prove it to a hardened but fair sceptic? This in turn give rise to a further question when so much data has been selected by the believers of “if you did the same exercise on the data rejected what is the answer then?”
Worse still so much information is pay walled but we are still expected to pay a huge 25% premium on an expensive part of our budget which is heating based on trust of a group that has only earned distrust for their arrogance and incompetence. In the one sphere of their work I really understand and am trained in far better than any of them and I do mean ANY of them, all I see a disgraceful sloppy disinterest in practical measurements critical to their entire case. Science has been so discredited by climate studies that all science is bound to end up tarred with the same brush.
I understand I was brought up in a different generation and like many old people I remember things I was taught years ago better than where I put my wallet but I still think of science as defined by theoretical predictions matching results without selecting or “adjusting” results.
Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg suggested in his 2014 book, ‘How not to be wrong’ that successful conspiracy theories are designed to withstand the mental winnowing processes that would ordinarily expose them as flawed. They do this by applying what he calls a “Bayesian coating” to prevent contradictory evidence from eroding belief in the basic theory, making it more consistent with a range of observations and thus more difficult to dislodge.
As a pertinent example: a trusted friend tells you that “global warming is a hoax designed so that the government can raise taxes.” Call it theory A. You might be inclined to believe them initially and apply a fairly high probability to it. However, as evidence to the contrary mounts (rising temperatures, rising sea levels, falling sea ice extent, shrinking glaciers, etc) your confidence in theory A would ordinarily begin to dwindle.
That’s why your friend isn’t going to just give you theory A; he’s going to give you theory B alongside it. Theory B states that climate scientists all over the world, national scientific academies, the UN and the mainstream media are all in on it, so they can form a ‘New World Order’, or some such. This is the ‘Bayesian coating’ that protects theory A from direct scrutiny. It invites a “well they would say that, wouldn’t they” response to any evidence that appears to contradict theory A.
As Ellenberg points out, the ingenious thing about successful conspiracy theories is that the more elaborate they are, the more likely they are to be believed – and the less likely they are to be true! For the combined theory A+B you have to believe two theories at once, so by definition A+B starts out with a lower probability of being true than theory A alone. Despite the decreased probability that A+B is true, it still has an insulating effect on A, protecting it from contradictory evidence that, without the protection of A+B, might otherwise destroy it.
As Ellenberg says of successful conspiracy theories “In a weird way you have to admire them.”
Neat. Here’s a counter: Nutrition scientists worldwide, and scientific societies and governments, were “all in on it” as regards fat-is-bad, sugar-is-OK, censorially dissing their opponents as cranks. There are more like this example: See Henry Bauer’s book, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine at https://www.amazon.com/Dogmatism-Science-Medicine-Dominant-Monopolize-ebook/dp/B008AHNIGS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485106866&sr=1-1&keywords=Dogmatism+in+Science+and+Medicine
Maurice Strong.
And the nature of Kleptocracy.
No conspiracy necessary.
Justification to tax air is the parasitic bureaus wetdream, a ever “better educated” public just might buy it.
About the same time civilization grinds to a stand still.
When productive behaviour is punished and parasitic habits rewarded, which behaviour stops?
The host can live without the freeloaders, not so sure the reverse applies.
What marks out a sceptic is something very simple: they are confident in their own ability to analyse the data and come to their own conclusion without needing OTHER EXPERTS for they are overwhelmingly experts in analysing data. Indeed often like Steve McIntyre their skill far exceeds that of academics having a whole career analysing data in real life, safety and cost critical applications.
In contrast, where sceptics lack skills is that they lack the huge social networks (of unskilled hangers on) that academics use to publicise and endorse their (political) views dressed up as “science”.
And overwhelmingly from my own observations, (outside a few politicised “scientists” those who accept the warming “meme” tend to be unable to process the data themselves and instead rely on the supposed status and group identity of “experts”. In other words, they will believe a liberal academic, even one with no scientific training, in preference to someone with scientific training, who has studied climate for decades but who is not part of the “academic club”.
Just a couple of extras. We’ve seen an increasing indifference to what the media calls experts. This I believe is because more and more people outside the traditional groups who the media drew on for their “experts” are now becoming experts in their own right. Often by focussing on a subject – they even become better “experts” than the academics and when they do, they’re not happy with the poor quality work they find in academia: For a more in depth discussion see: Death of the expert
The other issue is that academia have a natural instinct to attack any experts who dare to speak in public on “their subjects” who is not from academia. Lewandowsky is a classic example of someone who is obsessed with individuals outside academia daring to take a contrary view to academics. (Even though we discuss on climate and he is clueless about the subject). See “The Academic Ape: Instinctive aggression and boundary enforcing behaviour in academia”
+1. You make an excellent point very clearly.
“Rather than taking on people’s surface attitudes directly, tailor the message so that it aligns with their motivation.”
Well, mine is to get to the truth, but what about their motivation?
ugh. The whole movement relies on ignorance, core beliefs and mass hysteria. It’s a simple as that
and all preserved by limbic responses and base tribalism.
Simply manipulation of masses. They have no idea they are dancing to Soros’ tune
I suspect they might.
This is a cheap derivation of the shoddy work Lewandowsky already did.
My late, favorite neighbor used to sell appliances in the 50’s. He said, “If you were a Democrat, I was a Democrat, if you were a Republican, I was a Republican, and if you were a communist, I was a communist!” And he sold a lot of TVs, toasters and refrigerators that way. Some of them probably still work.
Now thanks to Mandate Economics and the Anthropocene Age Scientific Paradigm — two theories which apparently these academics are free to confirm with wild and reckless abandon — all of the politicians and scientists are appliance salesman. They are all hawking worthless wind turbines and electric vehicles and replacing everything with a host of very expensive and unwanted green wares. But now the practitioners have actually invented sales tactics to frame the science. “If you’re free market, I’m free market!” (This gives us Environmental Capitalism and Sustainable Development, in which scientists mandate what you can buy and command what you can create.)
These people stand in the place of Norman Borlaug, Willis Carrier and Edward Jenner. But I think the “underlying motivations” are quite different.
Several people have tried to explain the climate hysteria. Here is my own contribution:
http://www.davdata.nl/math/mentalclimate.html
Wow. Remarkable conclusion.
In fact, you might almost think the former to be a definition of the latter.
Ignores science as skeptical and treats science as belief. Perversion..
I think skepticism is a prerequiste for life. Or at least for a *long* life.
So they are laying the groundwork for a Soviet-style declaration that anyone who dares question ‘established scientific orthodoxy’ (see Lysenkoism) is mentally ill and needs to be ‘treated’ for their ‘illness’. Round them up and put them in ‘treatment’ centers for their own and societies ‘good’.
“The problem is not about whether they are exposed to information, but about whether the information is processed in a balanced way. ”
Idiots, that is not the problem. The problem is that I believe the basic fact that the science is incomplete. If you ask a subset of questions you get a subset of answers. The information itself is unbalanced, not me.
Any examples in modern science that my position is possible? You bet there is.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
Ask the right question and you won’t fall into a rabbit hole and never come out.
” It manifests itself in what Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland) describes as “thinking like a lawyer,” in that people cherry-pick which pieces of information to pay attention to “in order to reach conclusions that they want to be true.”
For an hypothesis to be true it must pass all tests. Cherry picking the tests it seems to fail is not a bad thing. Ignoring the cherry picked failed tests is a bad thing. Yes, this is much like a lawyer.
OJ simpson had a failed test, the gloves were too small. Nobody asked if the gloves themselves may have changed size which is what can happen when leather gets wet, then dries.
I wonder if any of the studies are being done on being blinded by authority rather than facts. Are they doing studies on how the data is being manipulated? And what kind of retraction can they provide when, not if, they are wrong ?
A disagreement on the cause of warming doesn’t make me a sick individual. The lack of debate does indicate that the proponents of AGW have agendas, which they have stated, are not in keeping with core human values. They are also controlling the actions through the solutions which are also not in keeping with core human values.
To me, this study is just another psychological warfare strategy aimed at skeptics. There have been many in the last 20 years. The shrill cry of denier is at least 20 years old now. None, not one of the predictions have come about. Who’s sick, continually believing in something without evidence or not ?
The AGW people like to point out that there is all this concensus on the cause of global warming. I don’t think there are as many as they make out. For example, about 10 years ago, I related a story about my friend who is a chemist. ” we are stuffing the air full of co2″. Really ? ” how much co2 do you think is in the atmosphere? ” … once he found out that there were less than 400 ppm, he’s been a skeptic ever since. AGW is committing the sin of half truths and leaving important information out to those that trust them.
Of course the leaked climate gate emails certainly prove there was no collusion… (sarc).
They have there heads in the sand or something, pretending that there hasnt been collusion or that they are these pure innocent scientists who are only reporting what the find ?. ..Who’s sick ? .. well yes I am, in a communist world. Who am I to doubt the dear leader ? Not so much in a free one.
So now you continue to decide who and what is a “worthy” skeptic.
Hey, it’s your site to run as you please.
Fortunately you are not the only game in town.
http://writerbeat.com/?search=schroeder&category=all&followers=all
“Where there is conflict over societal risks – from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science,”
I see the word “mantel” (“mantelpiece or shelf”) misused for its homonym, “mantle” (“leadership, power, or authority”).
NYAH, NYAH, as Nelson Muntz would say.
PS: A “mantle” is also a cloak, so the “mantle of science” = the “cloak of authority, power, leadership.”