We Only Trust Experts If They Agree With Us
We only consider scientists to be experts when their argument is in line with our own previously held beliefs.
[…]
Researchers told study subjects about a scientific expert who accepted climate change as real. Subjects who thought that commerce can be environmentally damaging were ready to accept the scientist as an expert. But those who came into the study believing that economic activity could not hurt the environment were 70 percent less likely to accept that the scientist really was an expert.
[…]
Linked is a short podcast which summarizes research into acceptance of expertise by those outside a field.
You can listen to it here:
MP3 Audio
The GreenCarCongress website has more details:
Study Presents Evidence for Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. A new NSF-funded study by authors from Yale Law School, the University of Oklahoma and George Washington Law School presents correlational and experimental evidence showing that cultural cognition also shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus.
In a paper on the study published online in the Journal of Risk Research, Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith and Donald Braman discuss the implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making.
We know from previous research that people with individualistic values, who have a strong attachment to commerce and industry, tend to be skeptical of claimed environmental risks, while people with egalitarian values, who resent economic inequality, tend to believe that commerce and industry harms the environment.
—Dan Kahan
[…]
Understanding this, the researchers then could draw some conclusions about why scientific consensus seems to fail to settle public policy debates when the subject is relevant to cultural positions.
It is a mistake to think scientific consensus, of its own force, will dispel cultural polarization on issues that admit scientific investigation. The same psychological dynamics that incline people to form a particular position on climate change, nuclear power and gun control also shape their perceptions of what scientific consensus is.
—Dan Kahan
The NSF news release can be found here (though the GreenCarCongress article covers most of it).
Kahan covered more than climate change, as seen in the abstract:
Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The ‘cultural cognition of risk’ refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.
However, climate change is the issue currently the center of attention in the denial/acceptance struggle.
