The Motivated Rejection of Science

Layzej writes "New research (PDF) to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science has found that those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences. The researchers, led by UWA School of Psychology Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, found that free-market ideology was an overwhelmingly strong determinant of the rejection of climate science. It also predicted the rejection of the link between tobacco and lung cancer and between HIV and AIDS. Conspiratorial thinking was a lesser but still significant determinant of the rejection of all scientific propositions examined, from climate to lung cancer. Curiously, public response to the paper has provided a perfect real-life illustration of the very cognitive processes at the center of the research."

Comments

Suprising how?

[jmorris42]

Lefty professors ask a loaded question rigged to produce the result they wanted, anyone suprised? Good way to prove our point that science has been politicised to the point a lot of us take a default position of "BS!" on any pronouncement from the white labcoat set that has the slightest whiff of politics.

We notice that all of the mentioned 'science' issues are tied to public policy positions of the left and that the 'scientists' are working outside their areas of expertise when they push policy solutions to the problems they 'find.'

We doubt AGW because we have been given very solid fact based reasons to. We see hacks like Mann protected from the consequences of his fraud with the 'Hockey Stick" and nay, even rewarded for it. Cleared from all wrongdoing by the same corrupt institution that turned a blind eye to Sandusky and covered his crimes until they exploded into the newspapers. And both for the exact same reason, they were stars who brought in the sweet sweet cash money.

The whole HIV/AIDS thing got wierd because it is a complex and murky thing and yet anyone with an eye willing to open it could see that it was totally politicized. It was the only disease in human history to get a bizarre sort of 'rights' attached to it. Whole lines of research were simply forbidden as career ending. Consipracy theories almost always pop up in vacumns of fact, especially when it is pretty obvious that facts are suspected but being supressed.