Science Denial: Preserve Cherished Beliefs by Declaring Science Impotent

It's easy to find people who are in denial about some aspect of science: evolution, global warming, vaccines, HIV, etc. It's also pretty common for people who are in denial about one aspect of science to be in denial about another aspect as well -- there's a high correlation, for example, between people denying the efficacy of vaccines and people denying that HIV causes AIDS. One of the principle driving forces behind all this denial is a desire to get around the conclusions of science when they conflict with some preferred ideology -- political, economic, religious, whatever.

A key tactic of much science denial is what's now being called "science impotence," or the claim that science is inherently unable to tell us anything useful about some aspect of the world, human experience, etc. This attitude has become standard in religious circles and has even infected the thinking of some atheists, as for example the idea that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria." We need to better understand how and why people arrive at his bizarre conclusion in order to better counter it.

This approach also has a prominent place among those who disregard scientific information, ranging from the very narrow--people who argue that the climate is simply too complicated to understand--to the extremely broad, such as those among the creationist movement who argue that the only valid science takes place in the controlled environs of a lab, and thereby dismiss not only evolution, but geology, astronomy, etc.

To get at this issue, [Towson University's Geoffrey Munro] polled a set of college students about their feelings about homosexuality, and then exposed them to a series of generic scientific abstracts that presented evidence that it was or wasn't a mental illness (a control group read the same abstracts with nonsense terms in place of sexual identities). By chance, these either challenged or confirmed the students' preconceptions. The subjects were then given the chance to state whether they accepted the information in the abstracts and, if not, why not.

Regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted the students' existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened. As expected, a number of the subjects that had their beliefs challenged chose to indicate that the subject was beyond the ability of science to properly examine. This group then showed a weak tendency to extend that same logic to other areas, like scientific data on astrology and herbal remedies.

A second group went through the same initial abstract-reading process, but were then given an issue to research (the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime), and offered various sources of information on the issue. The group that chose to discount scientific information on the human behavior issue were more likely than their peers to evaluate nonscientific material when it came to making a decision about the death penalty.

Source: Ars Technica

Note first that there doesn't appear to be any differences based on what one's politics are: regardless of what the test subjects thought about homosexuality, they were more likely to dismiss science when it conflicted with those prior beliefs than when the science was compatible with those beliefs. And it's not just that they were especially skeptical of new science which contradicted larger bodies of evidence from previous science (which would be reasonable) because these same people went on to be less accepting of science in other contexts.

That's also the second important thing to notice here: once you start dismissing science as impotent in one area, it seems that a barrier is lowered which makes it easier to dismiss science as impotent in other areas as well. Thus the reason why a person dismisses scientific evidence in one issue might have nothing to do with that issue directly -- the "cause" might actually be a willingness to ignore science generally which was itself produced by a denial of science in some earlier, unconnected issue.

This raises serious questions about the likely efficacy of the most common responses offered by scientists for combatting people's denial of scientific evidence. If "scientific impotence" really plays as much of a role as this early data suggests, then tactics like "framing" or arguing for the compatibility of science and religion will be largely worthless. Improved overall scientific literacy might help more, but only if it constantly reinforces how the best science always conflicts with some traditional assumptions and beliefs of some group.

Ultimately, that's the problem we're hitting: people unwilling to let go of prior economic, ideological, religious, political, and even sometimes scientific beliefs. The only way to reduce people's denial of science when the science conflicts with their prior beliefs is to increase people's willingness to say "I was wrong and have to accept a new position because the scientific evidence clearly points in that direction." How do we achieve that?