Why don't people trust science?
Brian Koberlein never dreamed he could get into trouble by saying the Earth goes around the sun. Then the cyber-stalking began.
Koberlein, who teaches physics at Rochester Institute of Technology, posted on a blog in early January that the Earth had reached its perihelion, the point where it comes closest to the sun in a year.
It attracted furious comments from a woman he had never heard of, promoting a theory he’d never heard of: the “concave Earth.”
This says the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside of it, facing the centre where the sun, moon and planets are. Stars are an illusion.
The theory can be disproved a hundred different ways, but the woman’s anger was not so easily dismissed.
“She just started ranting about how it’s all a lie,” Koberlein recalls. He blocked her comments, but she tracked him through his personal website, his YouTube work, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.
As Western nations spend billions of dollars a year on science, they face a paradox: Many of their citizens don’t believe the information that all this money is buying for them.
The question is, why?
Part of the issue is that science and the language it uses are becoming more complicated all the time. To read a piece of modern research requires several years of specialized university education. Even with a PhD and years of experience, a biologist and a physicist generally can’t read each other’s work.
That means the public hasn’t a hope of reading research on climate change, or on genetically modified foods. They must trust experts to understand, and to tell the truth.
And many people don’t trust in either of these. Consider:
* Twenty-eight per cent of Canadians in an Angus Reid poll this month said they either moderately or strongly distrust the measles vaccine;
* In the same survey, 98 per cent of scientists and 65 per cent of the public believe humans have evolved over time. Similar divides were found on the topics of vaccines, pesticides and medical research.
* A survey of scientists and the public in the United States last month found that 88 per cent of scientists, but only 37 per cent of the public, trust genetically modified foods;
Alan Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which commissioned the U.S. poll, told reporters that “science is being trumped” by lack of understanding, views on economics or politics, and religious belief.
And scientists say that groups contradicting modern scientific thought are becoming more vocal.
As well, they can reach anyone online, building communities of people with like beliefs.
“I think we all build up our own world views and when somebody digs into that world view it tends to be self-reinforcing,” Koberlein says.
“On the Internet, if you have some opinion, you are likely to find other people with the similar opinion. You can be very insular on the Internet.”
But it’s more than a scientific position. It becomes very personal, and resistant even to overwhelming evidence.
“The way we construct our view of the world is also part of our identity,” he says.
“A friend of mine was asking why people are so upset about evolution. And I said you have to understand that when you say ‘Evolution is true and a 6,000-year-old Earth is not,’ what they are hearing is ‘Your daughter is ugly and not very intelligent.’ They immediately see it as this sort of personal attack.”
“If you simply contradict their world view, it doesn’t work. It reinforces their misconception. … If the first words out of my mouth are ‘You’re wrong, let me explain why you’re wrong,’ you immediately start building walls. And you are going to double down because nobody wants to be wrong.”
At Western University’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Charles Weijer sees opposition to science often, and says it’s not new, just more widespread.
“This skepticism finds root in a broader, actually long-standing, ambivalence that we have about science and technological progress,” says Weijer, a bioethics expert who holds a Canada Research Chair.
On one hand, science brings hope. But the side-effects? We’re not so sure.
Science has also made itself vulnerable to “fanatic skepticism,” he believes. Science rests on trust, on the belief that earlier scientists have laid a foundation for new work, but “there have been a lot of real events that breed mistrust in the reports of scientists.”
Mad-cow disease, where the British government played down risks until people became sick. Stem cells studies with faked data. Advertisers with an influence over research journals. Drug companies hiding results of trials that go badly. And even governments muzzling their scientists.
“None of this is made up. These are all actual things, and these give people reason to ask themselves: Can I believe in what I am being told by scientists?” says Weijer.
“To me, that illustrates the foundational nature of trust to the practice of science. And mistrust is a door through which conspiracy theories step.”
Once that trust is lost and has been replaced by a conspiratorial story, it’s difficult to persuade a person otherwise, he says.
“We’re better off if we preserve trust. But once someone is far down the road of extreme skepticism, it’s pretty tough. Because according to their view, the scientists are in on it.”
That’s why the theory that NASA faked the moon landings won’t go away, even with modern photos of the landers still in plain sight.
As well, members of a group reinforce each other’s disbelief.
They think “each of them has some new piece of the puzzle and we can all work together” to solve the puzzle, says Weijer. “The Internet has acted as an accelerant.”
The so-called debate can be vicious.
In 2013, Popular Science shut down all comments on its online articles, saying the racism, sexism, personal attacks and misinformation were raging out of control. Commenting, it concluded, “can be bad for science.”
But even if the comments were rational, a true scientific debate, it’s unlikely to have much affect on those who don’t want to hear it, or are convinced they’re right.
It is a hallmark of anti-science movements that they are very self-confident.
An American named Steve Christopher posts extensively on the theory that we live inside a hollow Earth. He uses the name Lord Steven Christ.
The Citizen wrote to him and asked what keeps him going, even though he writes online that his beliefs have caused him to lose friends and have a lot of “heated arguments.”
He replied simply: “Desiring truth.”
But what’s the motivation for a person with no scientific training to reject what an army of trained scientists say they can prove?
“This is something that in psychology we call motivated cognition, where we don’t want to believe something that challenges our (pre-existing) beliefs in some way,” says Michael Wood, a Canadian psychologist at the University of Winchester in England.
“A lot of the time, for any of us — not just those who believe conspiracy theories or those who are ideologues — we’re motivated to ignore evidence that goes against what we believe,” he said.
“And we’re motivated to seek out evidence that confirms what we believe.”
We’re like fans of opposing sports teams arguing over what the replay proves.
(Anyone who watches a contentious environmental assessment will see this: Each side tends to dismiss the other’s expert studies as “junk science.”)
And Wood says it’s hard to persuade people once they form an opinion. “Those types of belief tend to be very resistant to dis-conformation. And it’s unclear why, exactly.”
The problem is much easier to define than the solution.
Feed people good information, the assumption has been, and they’ll learn and accept. It’s a field known as “science communication.”
“It’s hopeful that more and more scientists are recognizing the importance of clear communication of their results,” says Western’s Weijer. “That is something that the scientists I know take much more seriously now than even 10 years ago.
“I think as well we need a better dialog about science in Canada — rather than having polarized debates that change nobody’s mind.” He hopes for “a more engaged discourse about science and values.”
But at Yale University, psychologist Dan Kahan found that simply preaching the message of evidence doesn’t persuade people. The strongest opposition to climate change theory comes from people who have a good general understanding of science, but also a cultural antipathy to modern climate theory. And he found that the issue wasn’t knowledge, but culture.
If people belong to a group — such as a religious group whose members reject evolution — then members of the group will value that sense of belonging more highly than scientific evidence.
Kahan has decided that the key is to “disentangle” the science message from the cultural baggage, from their feeling of who and what they are as individuals.
In other words, finding neutral language is a key, and so is a neutral context. For instance, he did a lab experiment in which he framed talk of climate change within the context of geoengineering, or efforts to manipulate Earth’s climate. He felt climate skeptics would see this in a positive light. He puts it this way:
“This technology (i.e. geoengineering) resonates with the values of cultural groups whose members prize the use of human ingenuity to overcome environmental limits. By affirming rather than denigrating their cultural identities, the information on geoengineering dissolved the conflict those individuals experienced between crediting human-caused global warming and forming stances that express their defining commitments.”
In other words, instead of asking people to agree that climate change is a problem (with all the political baggage attached to it) it’s possible to say: Here’s a big engineering challenge. How can we use scientific knowledge to solve the “practical, everyday” problems of the region where you live?
And Kahan says that given this emotion-free approach, even political opponents can work constructively together.
Scientists have largely approved of his idea. But there’s still a reaction from those who feel it’s a trick. One critic noted that he uses “disentanglement” to get everyone talking constructively about evolution — but not about intelligent design, the creationist world-view.
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