“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” (Isaac Asimov, 1980)
On the heels of a global pandemic, Americans have lost an estimated 5.5 million years of life, an average of 14 life years lost per death in 2020. Recently, the U.S. hit 600,000 deaths and 33,000,000 confirmed infections, the world’s highest death toll. The costs of COVID-19 to the economy in the U.S. amount to between $10 and $16 trillion when accounting for lost gross domestic product, premature deaths, and long-term health impairment. Yet, more than a year into the pandemic, conservative Republicans remain far less likely than liberal Democrats to view COVID-19 as a significant threat to public health; feel vulnerable to infection; comply with COVID-19 prevention guidelines; and be willing to vaccinate against the coronavirus. A poll conducted in late May 2021 found that 41% of conservative Republicans –as compared to 4% of liberal Democrats– would refuse COVID-19 shots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination map, as provided by the U.S. Center for Disease Control, bears an eerie resemblance to the 2020 election map, suggesting that political factors such as ideology and partisanship play a major role in what is effectively a life and death decision.
Hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines, use of masks, and social distancing are merely the most recent manifestations of a larger pattern of antiscientific views propagated by the political right. While Donald J. Trump made science denialism a linchpin of his policy agenda, he is hardly the first. The 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, for example, was suffused with anti-intellectualism, criticism of leading U.S. universities, and antiscientific sentiment. This trend has continued, more or less unabated, for over 50 years. Conservative hostility toward science encompasses defunding research on stem cells, barring federal funds for women’s reproductive rights, skepticism –if not downright rejection– of climate science, politicizing scientific research, and denying the detrimental effects of tobacco and sugar on public health (Mooney, 2007; Oreskes & Conway, 2011). It is not only that conservative elites are beholden to corporate interests or the religious right –these are only parts of the story– it is also that some conservatives view science as an obstacle to the free market and to unbridled political power. Historian Matthew Dallek wrote, “in some quarters on the far right, liberty and progress are enemies.” Distrust in science and scientists has become a staple of contemporary conservative politics. As these views seep into the public at large, social scientists are obliged to understand the social and psychological processes that foster antiscientific views.
Of course, some people are more prone to antiscientific thinking than others. Educational attainment and religiosity are predictably associated with distrust toward science. But from the perspective of political psychology, other factors such as one’s ideology and psychology also yield valuable insights. Several studies have found conservatives to be more receptive to conspiratorial ways of thinking and more susceptible to scientific misinformation as well as other epistemic vices (e.g., see Azevedo & Jost, 2021; van der Linden et al., 2021). There is also evidence that social dominance orientation (capturing preferences for group-based dominance and anti-egalitarianism), right-wing authoritarianism (obedience to authority, cultural traditionalism, and aggressiveness and punitiveness directed at deviants and dissenters), and system justification (motivation to defend, bolster, and justify the social, economic, and political systems on which we depend) help to explain left-right (or liberal-conservative) differences in views about science.
My curiosity about the role of political ideology in predicting attitudes about science grew during a Fulbright stay in Professor John Jost’s Social Justice Lab at NYU. While there, I became especially interested in the relative importance of various psychological predictors of antiscientific views, independent of demographic factors such as education and religion. To tackle this research question, we leveraged two large survey datasets, (a) an exploratory, quota-based survey of 1,500 adults that was nationally representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, education, income, and sex; and (b) a confirmatory (replication) convenience sample of 2,119 Americans from the same population. We collected the confirmatory sample to minimize the influence of false positives and to maximize the generalizability and robustness of our results. In both data sets we systematically investigated the effects of 15 different predictor variables on distrust of climate science, skepticism about science (vs. faith) in general, and trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts). We conducted a series of regularized regressions –a technique used in social science to avoid model overfitting–to identify a subset of predictors that exhibited the most reliable effects. We cross-validated these analyses using several other Machine Learning techniques to ensure that the results were not attributable to potentially idiosyncratic methodological choices. We also conducted multiverse analyses for each dependent variable and across samples so that we could assess how robust the conclusions were in relation to analytical choices and specifications.
Our results, which were recently published in a special issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, show that most of the 15 predictors – age, education, gender, religiosity, income, symbolic ideology, five measures of operational ideology, political partisanship, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification – were significantly associated with attitudes about science when looking at only two variables at a time. However, when all of the variables were entered into a simultaneous regression, we saw that distrust of climate science was predicted consistently by lower levels of education and higher levels of religiosity, as expected – and also by higher levels of social dominance orientation and political conservatism. Interestingly, partisanship, that is, identification with the Republican Party, did not ‘survive’ as a robust predictor of distrust of climate science. The most important predictor was political ideology – whether it was measured symbolically in terms of ideological self-placement or operationally in terms of policy preferences. The higher the conservatism scores across ideological measures, the higher the distrust in climate science.
Looking at the results of the multiverse analyses as illustrated in Figure 1 below, when accounting for all possible combinations of variables in the model (see panel A and B), ideology not only explains more variance, it clearly dominates partisanship in models that explain most variance. Conservatism predicted antiscientific attitudes significantly more than 99.99% of the time across all possible model specifications (see Panel C). Thus, ideology was a superior predictor of distrust in climate science compared to partisan identification because it explained more variance, was highly stable and robust across various operationalizations, and exhibited comparatively large effect-sizes – even in models including competing predictors.
We were also interested in determining whether these patterns would generalize to attitudes toward science in general – e.g., skepticism about science (vs. faith) – and attitudes towards epistemic authorities, comparing trust in ordinary people with trust in scientific and other experts. We obtained similar results as above, even after adjusting for distrust of climate science in particular, except that right-wing authoritarianism (rather than social dominance) was associated with skepticism toward science in general. Trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts), our third dependent variable, was robustly predicted – in order of their relative importance – by political conservatism, distrust in climate science, right-wing authoritarianism, lower education attainment, Republican partisanship, and system justification. It may be worth noting that the explanatory power of these models was comparatively large, explaining approximately 60% of the variance when predicting distrust in climate science, 50% for skepticism about science (vs. faith), and 30% for trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts).
There are a few big-picture takeaways from this research program. Overall, we found that – contrary to the common assumption that ordinary citizens are ideologically “innocent” or “ignorant” (see Azevedo et al., 2019; Jost, 2006, 2021) – conservatism robustly predicts anti-scientific attitudes and does so much better than affiliation with the Republican Party per se. We also found little support for the mainstream view that the role of conservative ideology in shaping attitudes towards science is largely confined to skepticism about climate change – or support for the claim that science skepticism is a bipartisan issue. Indeed, our studies find conservatives tend to value faith and feelings over science while liberals put a premium on science over and above distrust in climate science.
In an op-ed for The Hill, Mellman writes about our research “by three-to-one conservatives agreed, ‘We believe too often in science, and not enough in faith and feelings.’ Liberals disagreed by nearly the same margin. By two-to-one, liberals would rather put their ‘trust in the opinions of experts and intellectuals,’ while by a slightly lesser margin, conservatives repose their trust in “the wisdom of ordinary people.” Another takeaway is that we see a robust connection between psychological dispositions (such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification) and social and political behavior, and psychological dispositions explain a great deal of unique variance even after adjusting for demographics, partisanship, and political ideology (see also Azevedo et al., 2017, 2019; Womick et al., 2019). Figure 2 below displays a cross-tabulation of attitudes towards science across ideological groups.
There are a few big-picture takeaways from this research program. Overall, we found that – contrary to the common assumption that ordinary citizens are ideologically “innocent” or “ignorant” (see Azevedo et al., 2019; Jost, 2006, 2021) – conservatism robustly predicts anti-scientific attitudes and does so much better than affiliation with the Republican Party per se. We also found little support for mainstream view that the role of conservative ideology in shaping attitudes towards science is largely confined to skepticism about climate change – or support for the claim that science skepticism is bipartisan issue. Indeed, our studies find conservatives tend to value faith and feelings over science while liberals put a premium on science over and above distrust in climate science. In an op-ed for The Hill, Mellman writes about our research “by three-to-one conservatives agreed, ‘We believe too often in science, and not enough in faith and feelings.’ Liberals disagreed by nearly the same margin. By two-to-one, liberals would rather put their ‘trust in the opinions of experts and intellectuals,’ while by a slightly lesser margin, conservatives repose their trust in “the wisdom of ordinary people.” Another takeaway is that we see a robust connection between psychological dispositions (such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification) and social and political behavior, and psychological dispositions explain a great deal of unique variance even after adjusting for demographics, partisanship, and political ideology (see also Azevedo et al., 2017, 2019; Womick et al., 2019). Figure 2 below displays a cross-tabulation of attitudes towards science across ideological groups.
Today, perhaps more than ever, we observe an exceptional wave of anti-intellectualism and, sometimes, rejection of science on the basis of ideological commitments. These beliefs, however, are not without adverse consequences. The unjustified denial of science –irrespective of whether it regards social distancing and preventive infection measures during a pandemic, hesitancy of vaccination, or supporting candidates impending climate change legislation – is profoundly detrimental to public health, the environment, and the economy. To conclude, the clarity, consistency, robustness, replicability, and generalizability of our results suggest that there are genuine liberal-conservative differences in attitudes toward the scientific community and, by extension, the scientific process. We also hope that research of this type can shed light on the question of which social and psychological processes lead citizens in a democracy to make reasonable, informed decisions about complex scientific questions such as those pertaining to climate change, childhood vaccination, and the handling of pandemic diseases. As the journalist George Pyle teaches us, “the key to having a free society — one that is both really free and truly a society — is for most of us to be pretty good at knowing when we should do as we are told and when we should not.” In our time, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the fate of our democracy is yoked to a socially shared capacity and willingness to understand and trust scientific evidence and expertise, not because they are infallible but because they are vastly superior to the propagandistic alternatives at hand.
This work was published open access in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. Please also check out our online repository hosting the reproducible reports of all analyses reported in the article (for both individual datasets and taken together, as well as the reproducible reports of the multiverse analyses).
This is the first draft on my published op-ed at Psychology Today, which unfortunately did not feature all figures or links (in addition to edits), hence I reproduce it in full as intended here.
Primary References
Asimov, I. (1980, January 21). A Cult of Ignorance. Newsweek. https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980
Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., & Rothmund, T. (2017). “Making America great again”: System justification in the US presidential election of 2016. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 3(3), 231. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000122
Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., Rothmund, T., & Sterling, J. (2019). Neoliberal ideology and the justification of inequality in capitalist societies: Why social and economic dimensions of ideology are intertwined. Journal of Social Issues, 75(1), 49-88. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12310
Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021). The ideological basis of antiscientific attitudes: Effects of authoritarianism, conservatism, religiosity, social dominance, and system justification. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(4), 518-549. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430221990104
Buckley, W. F. (1986). God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Regnery Publishing.
Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist, 61(7), 651.
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Womick, J., Rothmund, T., Azevedo, F., King, L. A., & Jost, J. T. (2019). Group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression predict support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(5), 643-652. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618778290