Science Communication Breakdown

right from the get go. So Robert, I got a pop quiz for you. Don't look at the numbers. If you had to guess how many Americans do you think accept the scientific consensus on global warming? Oh, well, of course that's a big one, because of course, when you when you go to answer that question, you think about your your immediate you know, sphere of influence and the people you know, or perhaps you think of media representations

on the question. So it depends on on on on the reporting, on the on the panels of experts you're presented with. I would I would tend to just off the top of my head, and I'd want to rate it of people except the scientific consensus, you're not too far off, but that's optimistic. Uh so. Gallup has been tracking Americans beliefs about global warming for over a decade now, and some of the questions they tend to ask people are more subjective. It's things like do you worry a

great deal about global warming? And uh, intent of people said yes. That's up from thirty seven percent in sixteen, and up from thirty two percent in But technically, I mean, it's worth pointing out that there's no objective fact about whether you should be worried or not. Maybe you don't care. Oh yeah, it comes down to worry and what what? What? To what extent? Are you worrying a great deal about something? Right? Like, you can you can realize something is a vital threat

to the human race. You can just not care anyway. Right, you can say, well, if it happens, it happens, or you know or what or well that's a problem for the next generation to figure out. There are various ways of calculating that question in your head. Right. It also hinges on the word worry, like maybe you do care about fighting climate change, but you wouldn't characterize your feeling as worried. You're invigorated by the idea of trying to

do something about it. Right, Are you worried about it versus do you think this is this is a problem that government should work together too to address. Right. That Some of the other questions have straightforwardly right or wrong answers. For example, in seventy one percent of Americans said they agree that most scientists believe global warming is occurring. Right, So the question is, do you think most scientists believe

global warming is occurring? Se said yes. That's up from sixty in sixteen and sixty, so there's there's a climb in that number. More people are saying yes, I think most scientists believe that the Earth is warming. There is just an objective fact to the matter about whether most scientists or most climate scientists believe the planet is warming.

They do. There's no debate about that. Now, what has been reasonably debated is the exact figure of the agreement, because it's not necessarily easy to calculate exactly what numbers of scientists agree with a certain proposition. Right, Yeah, I mean, if you if you just give yourself this assignment and start hitting Wikipedia. Yeah, you're gonna find lists of scientists

who or either opponents or proponents. But then when you start trying to peal back and figure out who these people are and what their field of expertise are, it just gets increasingly complicated. Right, But there are studies that look into this. They try to impose a methodology and say, Okay,

what do scientists think or what has the published literature said. Now, one study like this was published in two thousand nine in EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Uh good good professional publication title there, and it's called Examining the

Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. And so what they did is they sent invitations out to more than ten thousand Earth scientists, basically all of the geoscientists they could find at universities and public research institutions, with two survey questions. And these were the two questions. First question, when compared with pre eighteen hundreds levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

And then the second question, do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? So of the people they pinned with this survey, three thousand, one forty six geoscientists responded. They said, that's about a standard survey response rate over all of the earth sciences. Nine of participants answered risen to the first question. Now, that's geoscientists. That's people who study the Earth in anyway,

so geologist, ocean hydrologists, meteorologists, economic geologists. Um, what about people who study the climate specifically? Well, Of the subset of respondents who were experts in climate science and had published more than half of their recent papers weighing in on the subject of climate change, ninety six point two percent or seventy six of seventy nine answered risen to the first question. That's a high that's a high percentage

right there, right yeah. And there have been multiple other studies that use different methodologies to ask slightly different questions, but all of them have found overwhelming agreement among scientists in general, and especially among climate scientists in particular, that the planet is rapidly warming. So those seventy one percent of Americans who say that most scientists believe global warming is happening, they are factually correct. Those who disagreed are incorrect.

Though it is worth saying that a large share of the people who didn't agree with that said they were unsure. So if you're unsure, you're unsure. But if you if you didn't agree with that, you are incorrect. But then, of course, there you get into questions in the global warming debate that are not quite as cut and dry as whether the majority of scientists agree that the Earth

is warming. For example, what's causing the warming? Is global warming caused by human activity primarily greenhouse gas emissions, or by natural causes? Well, it shouldn't be surprising that there have been plenty of attempts to study the opinion of scientists on this question as well. So, for example, in that same survey from two thousand nine we just mentioned a d two percent of all Earth scientists said yes that humans are a major contributing factor, and nine seven

point four percent of active climate researchers said yes. Again, these are high percentages. If these were the experts telling me that I should cut something out of my diet or maybe, you know, make other some sort of major change in my life, I would be seriously inclined to listen to them. Okay, sure, but maybe maybe you say, well, that's just one study, but has anybody else studied this?

Actually yes. So a commonly cited figure is from a study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by John Cook at All that what they did is looked at abstracts

of published papers on the subject. They looked at about twelve thousand research papers published over the previous two decades, and uh they found quote, sixty six point four percent of abstracts expressed no position on anthropogenic global warming, meaning human cause global warming, thirty two point six percent endorsed it, and zero point seven percent rejected it, and zero point three percent were uncertain about the cause of global warming.

So this means that among papers that expressed a view on the cause of global warming, ninety seven point one percent endorsed the consensus. Now, I want to just cut in are real quick and say if it sounds like we're just hitting you over the head with a bunch of figures and numbers to drive home the fact that climate change is caused by hum an activity, the vast majority of this episode is dealing not with those facts,

but how we process those facts. Right, We just want to establish clearly what the scientific consensus is beyond any reasonable doubts. We will get to science, communication and public consumption of the information in a bit right. Uh. So you've got this Cook paper, and obviously there's a lot of people in the general public don't agree with climate change. So there's been plenty of criticisms of the cook papers methodology.

For example, in there was a Dutch born economist named Richard Toll who criticized the Cook study and tried to revise the estimates down. Uh. Toll is often cited as a critic of the consensus on global warming. But even when he revised the numbers down, he recrunched them and said, no, actually it's not as high as they said. He found

nine one percent agreement instead of agreement. And I should add that Cook also defended their original figure on in a response article that attributed tolls lower figure of to a math era one last study before we move on, Uh, andreg at all expert credibility and Climate Change Proceedings of

the National Academy of Sciences two thousand ten. They used a data set of one thousand, three seventy two climate researchers to determine that of climate scientists in general were convinced that human activity was the main cause of global warming and of climate scientists who were actively publishing in the field, between nine and percent of them agreed with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the i p c C, which concluded that the main reason

the climate is changing is human activity, primarily greenhouse gas emissions. So this is pretty unambiguous anyway you cut it. The large majority of scientists, especially those that study the climate directly and published in the field, agree that the Earth is warming and that human activity is the main cause.

But let's go back to those gallop results. Only of Americans agree with the objective fact that the majority of scientists believe the Earth is warming, and only sixty eight percent of Americans agree with the clear consensus that human

activity is a significant cause of this warming. And this gap between the expert consensus in public opinion is sometimes maddening to science and science communicators, Like if you are a dissenting climate researcher and you've got some reason of your own to disagree, sure, but why would non experts like you and me disagree with the overwhelming majority of people who know what they're talking about. And the ungenerous question that comes out of frustration with this situation is

why don't they believe in science? And is that really what's going on? So that's a question we wanted to ask today is the city. Is the situation really that they don't believe in science or is that there's something particular to this issue where their ability to judge science has been corrupted. Now, obviously you're listening to a science podcast, so I'm we're not gonna try and belabor the point

here too much. But of course science, science is the true path as a systematic exploration of the universe and the properties that government science. I mean, this has allowed humanity a path out of darkness, ignorance, and disease. It underlies all the marvels of modern technology and provides us with a chance for humanities a long term survival on

and potentially beyond Earth. I mean, if you listen to the podcast, you know I'm not saying that that science will answer all of life's questions, especially in teleological questions related to him like why do I exist? What's my purpose in life? Right? But if you're trying to answer facts about the material universe with reliable accuracy, uh, I mean we're science advocates around here, right, you have the

science you have the scientists, and here's the thing. For the most part, we trust it, or at the very least we claim to trust it. That's right. Is pointed out in an often cited uh Pew research study from two thousands sixteen. Americans in particular trust only the military

over scientists. So there's a whole ranking. Yeah. So they repeatedly do this study where they'll put up public institutions and they'll ask you how much trust you have in them, like great deal of trust, a significant amount of trust, not too much, exactly like that, And people will rank these different institutions, including things like the media. You can

guess where that goes. But how does the ranking work out? Well, based on this two thousand and sixteen ranking, it goes as follows military at the top, then medical scientists, scientists k through twelve principles, religious leaders, news, media, business, and finally elected officials. Yeah. Now, one of the main people we're gonna be talking about from this seventeen World Science Festival panel, Dan Kahan, is what he made this point

in the panel that I thought was great. He said, even religious people say on this survey that they generally trust science more than they trust religious leaders. And and percentages for trusting these groups a great deal, because, like you said, there are different levels of it and the questions. Uh So, the percentages for trusting these groups a great deal range from thirty three for the military and twenty four and twenty one for medical scientists and scientists, respectively,

down to a mere three percent for elected officials. Just to let you know what politicians, Yeah, I don't know why we don't trust them more. But but particularly noteworthy here is the fact that of the Americans poll, the participants expressed a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists and scientists. So, uh, that alone, I think it is is telling about our overall cultural trust in scientific expertise.

And of course that's not been getting into the fact that if if you're talking about the military, aren't you also talking about military scientists. But that's that's kind of a separate question. Yeah, and so that's interesting. Generally, people say they put at least a fair amount of trust and scientists. A lot of people put a great deal of trust in scientists. People claim to believe in science, people claim to say that scientists are working with the

public's best interests at heart. But there are particular issues where for some reason, the public's understanding of the scientific consensus gets very out of whack. Yeah. Yeah, we have this polarizing effect, or seemingly polarized based on what we see and what we hear in the media. That how can we hold such high opinions of scientists and science in general and disagree on the clear scientific consensus regarding, for instance, human driven climate change? Why are so many

of us scared away by the prospect of Frankenstein food? Um? And then other other topics, of course are vaccine safety, uh for um, evolution and whether your kids should watch Dinosaur Train? What does Dinosaur train? Dinosaur Trains a lovely show by the Jim Hinson Company where dinosaurs travel in time on a train through a wormhole and your child memorizes all of these complex dinosaur names. That's wonderful. Yeah.

And then of course another big one, This is what I hadn't really thought about much, but I understand you've you've covered in the past for Harvard thinking. Yeah, is the deep geological isolation of nuclear waste. Yeah, so, high level radioactive waste. I mean, there's pretty clear scientific consensus that the best thing we need to do with it

is bury it deep underground. But when you pull the general public, even the educated public, people who say they're into science, you you do not get the high levels of agreement with the scientific consensus on this. And what some of these UH things should indicate is, I mean, it's no secret that the consensus on climate change has been particularly identified with one half of the political spectrum,

at least in the United States. But this is not to criticize conservatives, because there are plenty of these issues where where. Apparently if you pull people, liberals are more out of tune with the scientific consensus than conservatives are. Like last time I saw more liberals were out of tune with the scientific consensus on vaccine safety, namely that

they are safe uh than conservatives. Now we've already mentioned that the the World Science Festival panel that I attended UH and then you watched online, and then you too, listener, can watch online. I'll include either a link or embedded video of it on the landing page for this episode Stuff to Abow your Mind dot com. But the title

the discussion was Science in a Polarized World. It was moderated by author and journalist John don Van UH and the panelist included astrophysicist France Cordova, physicist and World Science Festival co founder Brian Greene, geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, and most notably that one of the individuals we are probably gonna spend the most time with here today, Ale law

professor and science communication expert Dan Kahan. He's the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School, and his primary research interests are risk perception, science communication, and the application of decision science to law and policy making. Yeah, so I was looking at some of his research in preparing for this episode, and it's

an interesting thing he's doing. Obviously he's not the only person doing it, but trying to apply, for example, psychology psychological science to laws. So he'd published things in the Harvard Law Review that are saying, hey, you know, judges should be aware that human brains tend to work like X, Y,

and Z like. For example, one thing that judges might really benefit from being aware of is that research shows that when you tell people to be rational and objective, they do not become more rational and objective to get more entrenched. Al Right. So in this discussion panel everybody. He had some great commentary on on polarization regarding a

scientific consensus. Um Sir Paul Nurse was wonderful. Uh, Brian Green, the physicist, it just was really fired up for this one and it was just you know, enjoy to watch and listen to. But one of the things that Brian Green was saying in the panel was, you know, so we've got this problem of polarization of public opinion on scientific issues. There were some issues where the public, as we talked about at the beginning of the episode, just

doesn't line up with what scientists are saying. Why is that? And I think Brian Green was coming at it from the point of view like, if we could just make them understand science better, if we could just teach, we could educate people better in the scientific process and what science is about, then they would agree with the scientific consensus. And Kahan had a really interesting response to this. I think his answer was was, don't get ahead of yourself.

That's not necessarily the case, right, because I mean, because Brian Green's question makes sense, right because you think, well, you want to say, what do you realize that that science is to quote Sir Paul Nurse, tentative knowledge that we're it's it's not a complete, prepackaged understanding the universe. It's a continued exploration. You want to say, don't you

understand the mistakes are part of it. This was definitely Brian Green's argument that if you want to talk about people who are skeptical of climate change, talk to the climate change scientists who have studied it, because science is about you. If you you have a hypothesis and you're studying it, you were skeptical about it every step of the way. Yeah, if you're not being skeptical about the theory you advocate, then you're not doing science right, right,

You're not being very good at your job. So all of the that, that entire argument makes sense, and it does lead one to think, all right, it's just it's scientific literacy or lack of reasoning that's being employed here. But yeah, Kahan is saying that you'll find plenty of people resisting sientific consensus who are highly literate in science and highly logical, and they just wind up applying their

cognitive resources to fit their beliefs in worldview. In fact, it gets crazier than this, because it's not just that people who are highly educated in science, who apparently, if you test them, they understand how science works. It's not just that they can disagree with the scientific consensus, but that people who have more rational capacity and who have greater cognitive resources in fact, tend to apply those more strongly on entrenching themselves against the scientific consensus when they

disagree with it. It's like people who are better educated in science are better at coming up with reasons to explain why they don't agree with scientists or why they don't agree. Not just don't agree with scientists, but don't agree about even objective facts like the fact that the majority of scientists to endorse the fact that the Earth is warming. Yeah, and it is worth noting here that when we're talking about these these dissenting individuals, like it's

generally it's not across the board. They're not they're not dissenting on all scientific consensus. It's about a particular topic, be that topic climate change, or be that topic, um, you know, vaccines or genetically modified organisms. Yeah, and it's it's also important Kahan points out that you also see this this sort of thing outside of science. You see you see the same process involved with say, abortion or military recruitment, any issue in which protests becomes a badge

of identity. And this place specifically into one paper that Khan refers to, which is this paper they saw a protest. Uh. So this comes up in the conversation where you you can show people video of a protest taking place, right, and you ask them just objective facts about what they see at the video. Did you see the protesters, uh, screaming in someone's face, did you see the protesters bocking someone's path? Did you see the protesters doing this and that?

All these sort of negative behaviors that would render the protest in a bad light. And it turns out people claim to see different things in the video depending on whether they think the politics of the protesters line up with their own. So if you show a person with certain politics a video and you say that it's people protesting outside an abortion clinic, they'll have a very different report of what they see in the video than if you tell them that it's protesters outside a military recruiting

center protesting. Don't ask, don't tell. And this is a specific example of motivated reasoning. Maybe we can talk about motivated reasoning more later on, but it's the fact that we we just do not process the facts of reality and the evidence of our senses with perfect objectivity. We in fact process them in a highly goal oriented way, and a lot of times that goal is I don't want people like me or the people in my group

to look bad. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna jump jump right back into Kahan's research. Than all right, we're back. So one of the things that people obviously do when they are motivated to arrive at a certain conclusion is that they cherry pick facts. Right that you can. You can always find stuff that makes your worldview look better or

stuff that makes the other person's worldview look better. And it is in fact, incredibly easy and causes almost no cognitive dissonance whatsoever for people to just say, Okay, this fact that supports what I already believe. That's a good fact that's legit and real and should be included. And a fact I encounter that doesn't support my point of view, well, that's that's a bunch of bunk. You know, why would anybody believe that? And it extends to experts as well,

so that the same thing. It's like, here's this, uh, this this expert, and I'm using expert in quotation marks because to what degree they're an expert also depends on your cherry picking this individual. Let's say this individual with some sort of scientific background. Uh, they're making a statement. I will consider them more of an expert based on how their opinion matches up with my preconceived beliefs and worldview. Yeah, and this is another point Kahan makes it it comes

straight out of that. So he says, it's not that people who don't, for example, except the consensus on climate change or on vaccine safety, don't believe in scientific expertise. They do. They do believe in scientific expertise generally statistically they do, but they don't think that people who disagree with them are legitimate experts. Now, Kahan wrote about this in a very recent paper like this month. Um, misconceptions, misinformation,

and logic of identity, protective cognition. When we're talking about your views as as a badge of identity, that's what we're getting to here. Um. This came out June for the Cultural Cognition Project. So in this paper, Kahn tackles what he refers to as the public irrationality thesis or pit. So this is something he's setting up to be an

opposition to. Right. This is the idea that we can touched on earlier, the idea that the general public largely quote display only modest familiarity with fundamental scientific findings and lack proficiency in the forms of critical reasoning essential to science comprehension unquote and uh, and they're therefore easily swayed by special interest groups who muddy the waters with non scientific information. Yeah, I think this is a is a common thesis people on both sides of a contentious issue

of fact in the public debate sphere. They just tend to think that, well, people on the other side are just ignorant, and they just they just don't understand and they're just being swayed by propaganda. Yeah, you listen to the wrong news channel, you listen to the wrong radical and now you have you have a faulty understanding of the facts. So Gahan argues that Pitt reflects a misconception

of science communication, like a basic misconception. Controversy over so called decision relevant science is increasingly tied to identity protective cognition. This is the quote tendency to selectively credit and discredit evidence in patterns that reflect people's commitments to competing cultural groups. And that's a concept, he says, it's rooted in the two thousand to two thousand sixteen work of D. K.

Sherman and G. L. Cohen. Right, so maybe we should try to go a little bit deeper into where this idea of of identity protective cognition comes from. So obviously there are a lot of ways to be wrong. Right. You can be mistaken due to pure error, right, But as we've already shown, you can also be mistaken for a reason. Our our brains are not so made as to perceive and judge the world objectively, like when you're reasoning, and perceptions are skewed by a desire, conscious or unconscious,

to reach particular conclusions. This is what we call motivated reasoning. And Kahan in an article he did for the Harvard Law Review in that he reproduced an exerpt from on his blog, he he said, quote motivated reasoning refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs. That unconscious part. It is very critical because because no, but we're not arguing that argument.

Here is not that someone is saying, well, I don't I don't like this climate change. This is the expert for me. This is it, or or vice versa, theyd someone saying, Oh, I'm I don't really like the idea of these GMO foods. I'm gonna listen to this expert right here. This is taking place, uh in the unconscious. Yeah. You you don't even and realize when it's going on.

And so there there is a classic, highly cited paper in the history of psychology that he goes back to to talk about early examples of motivated reasoning, and this is a precedent, I guess for his They Saw a protest paper. The original one was this paper called They Saw a Game a case study, and it goes to stuff that has nothing to do with politics, absolutely nothing. You can take the politics and you can take the science completely out and you still get the exact same effects.

And what this is is there was a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in ninette that had some highly controversial behavior, leading injuries for a few players. Players were hurting each other in the Researchers in this study recruited Dartmouth and Princeton students to review footage of what happened and answer questions about what they saw, and it turns out what they saw depended on their school allegiance. Dartmouth

students claimed to see things favorable to Dartmouth's reputation. Princeton students claim to see things favorable to Princeton's reputation. They didn't just have different opinions about the game, they apparently perceived a different reality based on institutional allegiance. They were not reasoning impartially but in a motivated way, and lots of studies over the years have reflected other versions of

these findings. It's totally clear when people have a goal, when they consciously or unconsciously want things to be a certain way, they're usually not capable of reasoning and perceiving reality impartially. And to get back to the main example of this that we we came in with is the

idea of identity protective cognition. We want to affirm our membership in reference groups because we're social creatures, right, I mean, one of one of the main things that's been hypothesized that our brains evolved to do is to manage social relationships. We were just talking about the social brain hypothesis another episode. Uh yeah on one of the main things we appear to be optimized for is for group membership and group

solidarity and understanding group dynamics. Yeah, I mean, survival has a almost has a different definition when you're talking about an individual versus a a larger especially a global culture. We didn't evolve to save the planet from the human caused climate change or or meteorites. Uh. We evolve to survive um social dynamics, to to adapt our thinking to fit in with the group that has access to the fire, that has access to the uh to to the food

and the shelter that is necessary for survival. Yeah. And so we deeply, deeply want we're highly motivated to affirm our membership in reference groups and the character and the reputation of those groups. When those things are at stake, we are highly motivated to defend them. So the idea here's the culture comes before fact. Perception of what acts

even are are shaped by values. So many of these individual members of the public simply have a quote bigger personal stake in fitting in with important affinity groups than informing correct perceptions of scientific evidence. Yet again, this is not necessarily done consciously. In fact, it's almost never done consciously. You don't think I'm sacrificing knowing the truth for fitting in with my group. That's just what your brain does and doesn't really let you in on the fact that

that's what it's doing. Yeah, and the members of the public that are most polarized over a topic are the ones that have the highest degree of scientific comprehension. Where I discussed that this is the nature of the dissenting expert. The problem, then, Kahan points out, is not a gullible public,

not this pit scenario, but quote, a polluted science communication environment. Now, he referred to a two thousand eleven study that that he himself worked on with Jenkins, Smith and Brahmin, in which a scientist headshot and credentials were presented along with attributed quotes about climate change, and whether he this individual was a true expert in the eyes of the subject

depended entirely on their particulars and their views. So people are simply quote, using the consistency of new evidence with their group's positions to determine whether the evidence should be given any weight at all. And this is how deniers of scientific consensus become stuck in their opinions. Right, So, if somebody presents you an alternative opinion, the scientist comes on TV or writes a book or something like that and says, look, here's what the science says. It's pretty clear.

This is why scientists agree. This is where the consensus comes from, and here's why the public should agree with it too. If you are part of a group that is culturally polarized against that scientific position, you don't think I'm being anti science. You just think this person isn't a real expert. Why should I trust what they say? Indeed, and I also want to point out that the con touches on on disinformation. He says that disinformation doesn't seem

to have as much impact as you might think. And the embar in mind that there are several flavors of misinformation. There's self misinformation, there's motivated consumption of misinformation. They're straight up fake news. Uh. Kahan states that while such misinformation certainly does have an impact on the world, UH, the reality is is a little bit different. He says what these individuals do with misinformation in most circumstances will not differ from what they would have done without it. So

I find this whole scenario very, very illuminating. Uh, you know, it's it's help It's a helpful model not only in understanding or trying to understand individuals who have a differing opinion in your own on scientific consensus, but also to to self reflect and and try and think, well, how do I think about scientific consensus? Yeah. Well, one of the things that you should really take away from this, and we should emphasize this very strongly, is that this

applies to you too. It applies to me and to you. Um, it's not so much surprising that motivated reasoning happens, or that identity protective cognition happens, but it's surprising that it applies to you because it doesn't feel like it does. Yeah. Yeah, when it just feels like I'm being objective, I'm trying to figure out what's true, it's those other people who are reasoning from their cultural point of view, right, Yeah, I mean that that is how how it how it feels.

I mean, that's the that's one of the tricky parts about this is you. You can't simply hold up the mirror uh so much and say look, look, look how you're thinking. Look at look at the way you're processing your information. Yeah. And so this actually leads to problems,

and Cohn writes about this in uh. In that piece in the Harvard Law Review, he points out how this leads to really bad cultural situations, where so you've got your group and another group who are both motivated to perceive facts differently for reasons having nothing to do with forming accurate beliefs. You know, you're both using motivated reasoning. Each group correctly perceives that the other group is used motivated reasoning, but each group incorrectly believes that it is

just looking at the plane obvious objective truth. And of course, when you feel like, well, I'm just looking at the plane obvious objective truth and this other group is deluding themselves, that can lead to feelings of disgust and polarization. You're like, why won't they accept reality? Why are they being so dishonest? Yeah, And in this the divide deepens even more, right, Yeah, And of course leads to these uh, these partisanship situations.

And of course this makes the problem even worse because once you get entrenched partisanship on an issue in the public conversation, this provides even more incentive to group a line right, and so it re reinforces the motivated reasoning that caused you to divide in the first place. Now, there are some things that you might think you could

do to solve the problem. For one thing, you could say, hey, what if we just tell people, no, don't don't think with your culture, I don't think with your identity, be rational and be objective. Does that solve the problem? Well, Khan says, research says no. When people use motivated reasoning, they tend to believe they're already being objective. They think, yes, I am being objective. And this is due to what

he calls naive realism. This is just the belief that, well, what I'm looking at is is a clear and and accurate perception of reality. So we're we're all correctly perceiving that other people are reasoning with motivation. We're buying into naive realism about our own points of view, saying well, I'm just looking at the facts. And this leads to that horrible state of affairs of of cultural cognition, where

where partisanship rules. Uh, these certain issues that have been infected with the toxic sludge of culture bleeding into questions of fact. I always end up coming back to Dr Seuss when thinking about these these issues, and not only the sneeches, the starbellied sneeches, who who are so caught up in in the the identity of their groups that

they're only cured of it due to just catastrophe. And then there's a shorter story in that same book where we have the North going Zacks in the South going Zacks. These two individuals that need in the desert going in a straight line, and they neither one budgets. They can't move through each other, but neither one is going to go around. Uh. And it just over time like a city is built around them while they're just frozen in their their their their their unshakable ability to either compromise

or to understand each other. Yeah. Well, so this situation can really induce feelings of despair. I mean, there are multiple problems here, one of which is that some issues are becoming infected with this with this motivated reasoning, this cultural cognition. A toxin is how Kahan referred to it as a pollutant. Yeah, it's a pollutant that just infects certain issues and then makes it impossible to have a clear discussion on them because you get people retrenched in

their positions and don't budge. But then the retrenchment leads to the general worsening of the situation. It's a it's a self reinforcing cycle that just gets worse and worse. It's like everybody's identity and their politics has all just drained out into this, into this body of water. How do you unpollute that enough that you can have the unpolluted discussion again? Now, maybe that's what we should turn

to next. If you're hearing this and you're you're following along with us, like, if you agree that these are valid ways of examining what's going on in in these public conversations, uh, you might be feeling to spare right, How do we ever get out of this? If we all use motivated reasoning and there are these horrible situations where issues of fact and scientific questions are just polluted by cultural partisanship, how do we get out of it? We'll take a quick break and when we come back,

we can discuss why it's not necessarily always time to despair. Alright, we're back. Okay, So we were saying, it can feel like it's time to despair once you look at the situation of partisanship, partisan reasoning, cultural cognition. But it's not necessarily time to despair. First of all, if you're just thinking about motivated reasoning and you accept the fact that you use it too, it's not just those other people, it's me, it's you. We all use it. How can

we ever know anything is true? Well, i'd say two things to that. First of all, not every question is settled through motivated reasoning, right, There are plenty of questions where we actually do have the primary motivation of just getting an accurate answer people. People do show identity splitting on whether climate change is dangerous, but they don't show identity based splitting on issues like whether X rays are

harmful to the human body. If you pull people based on their ideology and political affiliation, all the other stuff you'd be looking for their you know, liberals and conservatives, or these other groups that are oft inside, like the

hierarchical individualist versus the egalitarian communitarian. These groups are in agreement X rays are equally harmful to the human bodies say they yeah, because, as Khan points out again, these these instances of polarization over scientific consensus, these are are pathological in the sense that they're harmful, but they're also rare. Yeah. So there, it's just these certain issues that we're reasoning this way about. Not everything suffers from this problem. Many

issues are uncontroversial. We generally approached them with no real motivation other than just knowing what's true. The problem is that even though you're not always using motivated reasoning, you're probably not going to know it when you are, uh, using motivated reasoning apparently feels similar to using actual objective reasoning. You can you can know this firsthand by the fact that you don't ever think you're using motivated reasoning. You

think you're just honestly judging things. But you also know you're not right about everything. You're some of those things you believe you're definitely wrong about, even though it feels like you're just clearly judging what's true. So is there any way to know what's true when issues are controversial

and when we're motivated to reason one way or another. Well, I'd say this is when we come back to our starting principle going with science, right, Science is exactly a way of getting around motivated reasoning and bias if you're doing it right. I mean, of course it's possible to be really bad at science, but if you're following the norms of science, what it is supposed to do is make it really hard to get away with motivated reasoning

for an extended period of time. You've got obstacles built into science that are specifically designed to kill motivated reasoning. So you've got rigorous empirical method using objective measurement criteria, trying to take your own subjective judgments out of things. You've got blinding and double blinding of experiments where you know, you get people who don't even know what's going on to perform the experiment. People in the experiment don't necessarily

know what's going on. You've got peer review by critical experts, you've got replication attempts, you've got professional competition. This is the thing that often doesn't get emphasized enough, is that there's professional and career based incentive in science to disprove

the consensus. Right. Yeah, and and again, like like we said, skepticism is built into the recipe, right, So if you're doing science in a motivated way, your science number one is not going to look very strong to begin with, and number two, you're not going to get away with it for very long. People are going to figure out what you're up to. And we've seen examples of this when people get caught doing scientific fraud. It seems to

be fairly rare, but they get caught. Maybe people can't replicate your results, people start noticing your regularities in your data. I mean, it's a system that is just not very forgiving to this kind of nonsense. Yeah, I mean, I don't. It depends in each case, like I guess whether it falls with fraud or bad science. But with artificial g vity or gravity repelling technology is one example where you do see studies that have come out where someone claims

to have developed a means of achieving this. Yeah, but they can't be replicated. It doesn't, it doesn't work. It doesn't it doesn't pass the tests that are built into the scientific process, right, And so this is why science is a good way of arriving at correct conclusions about the world. I mean, you're not if you go with the scientific consensus, you might not be right. Every time, But it's your best bet for being right the most

times of any other thing, you'd go with um. So the problem is, of course we can't all be scientists, and even scientists themselves can't use all the tools of science to solve every controversial question they encounter. Right, So, even if you're a scientist, there's tons of stuff in your life where you can't bring to bear all of that machinery of skepticism and empiricism and impartiality, where you've

just got to work like everybody else. You've got to decide on some issue of public substance what you think about it without having the most impartial method possible. So the question there, I guess is how can we avoid deluding ourselves on issues where identity protective cognition come into play,

where we can't use the scientific method. Yeah, Like, one of the points Gone brings up is like, how do you how do you avoid these scenarios in the future, Because there's one thing to figure out, how do we unpollute this pool of scientific communication? But then how do we how do we avoid polluting this one? How do we avoid polluting pools that don't really exist yet? As

a matter of like, public consideration. Yeah. In fact that he mentions in the panel that we should have quote a science of science communication um, meaning that science communicators should have some experiments they can draw on that show them how to predict when an issue it's some just innocuous question of fact, will become politicized where people suddenly take cultural positions on it. I mean, there are a

lot of variables involved here. It depends on you know, who's who's relaying the information there, Uh, that their identity is, what what ideals they're pushing on everybody, and how that ends up polluting the message. It also depends on a number of cultural problems. I mean there are certain polarizing issues that are issues here in the United States that are not so in Europe, such as such as climate change,

and then the reverses. You see stuff like genetically modified organisms being more of a of a hot topic in say England than it is in the States. Totally. Yeah, in the in the UK, there's way more controversy over GM crops than there is in the United States. Not to say there's not some controversy here, and so yeah,

how do you predict it? I mean, con mentions the possibility of well, maybe you can run simulations, if there's some sort of simulation system you could employ, which I love because they instantly get this sort of star trek Um hollow deck scenario where we're running simulations and and trying to catch these these polarization points, these confusions, these pollution points before they occur, and forget how do you

davocating how to communicate ahead of them? Yeah, and some things are going to be more predictable than others, Like there are some facts of science that, if true, tend to be unfriendly to the world view that certain people hold,

tend to be unfriendly to their values. A couple of examples Kahn gives is that if you're generally more of an individualist and an anti communitary and action person, this may make you inherently opposed to the idea of climate change, because really the only way that you can do anything

about climate change is with organized communitary and action. Likewise, if you are a person whose values are sort of anti big business, that might predispose you to be against GMOs because you see them as like a tool that's being used by large agrib business to to get their profits and to drive other people out of business. And and you know, and whip the environment into the shape

they want it. And I mean, it'd be worth pointing out that like you could, for example, use GMOs if you're a big business in a way that would be very unethical, very damaging to the environment. I mean, the whole thing about the scientific consensus on GMOs is that there's nothing inherently dangerous about GMOs as a rule, But any individual genetically modified organism could be dangerous, just as any other organism could. Yeah, that the process is not

the problem. The potential problem is in the product that's created with it, which can be said of most processes. Yeah, it can be said just as equally of products that are created through traditional agriculture. It's not it's not the gene and the lab that makes the problem. But on the other hand, uh Kahn points out, you know, there there can be other things that are not nearly as

determined by our core values. It's not necessarily the conservative values or liberal values or whatever other kind of dichotomy you want to establish in the culture determine how how your opinion comes out on them. Some things are much

more accidental. It can just be that some prominent figure on one side of the political spectrum just sort of declares for one side of a factual disagreement, and because of group affiliation and identity, the groups just start lining up accordingly, even though it's not determined by anything inherent

to their values. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that that's a that's a good point because it's it's easier to see it coming together a polarization effect occurring when either the problem or the solution either disagree or line up with your worldview, such as well, the solution is for us all to come together as a as a nation that have some sort of top down governmental fix that's going to disagree with some people's world views.

If the if the solution is we're all going to eat you know, plants that grow naturally in harmony with mother Earth, that's going to fit another worldview more than another. But but when it occurs outside of those parameters, yeah, it becomes increasingly different. It's like, what is it a slow newsweek? Is it just is this just a topic that happened to be out there during particular politicians campaign and they just took it up and ran with it,

pressed to distract from something else. I mean, I think it looks very very possible that there can be issues where there is cultural cognition going on, where society divides on a question of scientific fact along cultural lines in a way that really just doesn't have very much to do with ideology or values at all. It's just one side picked one side arbitrarily, and then the other side, because they know they always disagree, picks the other side.

All right. So in terms of solutions here or possible solutions, I mean, on one hand, there I feel like there is validity in the idea that yes, we have to continue to trust science as a process and trust scientists

that are speaking on behalf of it. Yeah. I mean, if you're a person who if you're not yourself a scientist, if you're not yourself an expert, and you don't have a good reason based in expertise in the subject matter for disagreeing with the consensus, I'd say it's usually your best bet to go with what most of the people

who know what they're talking about are saying. Yeah. And and then beyond that, I agree with without Khan is saying that we do need a science of science communication, We need ability to to predict and maneuver around potential pollution points in our communication of science. Yeah, how can you? How can you preemptively defend contentious facts about reality from becoming politicized or becoming subject to cultural cognition? That would

be a really good thing. One thing that Kahan offers that I think is very interesting is that I get the impression that he subscribes to what he calls them the law of social proof, meaning that if you want to convince somebody to to agree on a point of fact that they are resistant to for cultural reasons, don't try to keep giving them more evidence that you're right and they're wrong, because that's just not what works on us.

I mean, that's what should work on On one hand, we feel like we should do that because that would be the logical thing to do, but psychologically that is not what changes people's positions. What would probably be more effective is if they simply see people who are culturally like them and part of their in group agreeing with this fact. But then that can also come back into science communication, like who who are the science communicators? Then that are that are reaching out to these groups that

have a certain amount of polarization present within them. Well, it makes me think that if if, what science communicators want to do is try to get everybody across different cultural groups on the same page. One thing that should really be encouraged is cultural diversity of science communication, is that there should be people from all different cultural groups within a society, all communicating like, hey, here's what the

science says. So at least when it's a question of science, you can be on the same page and not bring in these cultural issues because it's not just people from that other cultural group telling you what the science says. You're hearing about it from people like you, so they

have it. Hopefully we gave you some some new tools to illuminate not only the understanding of others, but growing understandings, and also to better understand how science communication is working and how these these blockages, the scientific communication breakdowns are occurring, and how we might even treat them. Yeah, I hope, I hope today maybe we said something of substance that will help people. Uh, I don't know, bridge the partisan divide and come to some agreement about the things we

should be able to agree on. Um. But yeah, it's tough, man, the partisan divide. It's the thing I often think about in in how we communicate stuff like this and it can get you down at times, but we shouldn't despair. We should try to find ways to get around it. Come together, have have one of those big happy Uh what were you talking about? Grow grow food together? Oh yes, yes, uh in a nice communal Kumbaya moment. Yeah, you might have just alienated something. Oh yeah, probably did so. Hey

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