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.

Re:Suprising how?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I love is that "conspiracy" is only ever assigned to those evil "right-wingers". Like.. not vaccinating your children, which is a position I see mostly embraced by Left-wing celebrities and organic-food eating liberals. Bush orchestrated 9-11? Yeah, only Romney voting Republicans believe that one!

Additionally, since basically everything that drivels out of Michael Moore's mouth is some form of conspiracy theory, does that mean Michael Moore is now the world's biggest Capitalist? He sure lives like a 1%er using the money he collects from pliable liberals at the movie theater, so maybe this study is true!

Oh wait.. I've figured it out: This "researcher" simply took all left-wing conspiracy theories and called them: THE TRUTH. Therefore, using this "logic" it is only physically possible for a right-wing nut job to believe in conspiracy theories and hate science, because whenever a left-winger does the *exact same thing* we just relabel their idiotic beliefs! You see how great a job these guys do spending your tax money?

Re:Suprising how?

[jmorris42]

Exactly. I am exactly as qualified to discuss the policy implications of AGW as Mann. Both of us are interested lay people who have studied the issue and can debate it as ordinary citizens as part of the political process. Except of course that isn't how it works, he is held up as an expert. He isn't. Al Gore on the other hand, IS a politician and is actually qualified to debate (I can disagree and experts on my team can take him on, it is politics) the policy side. Where he fails is in trying to go the other way and argue the science. He isn't a scientist any more than I am and it is silly when the media hold him up as an expert on the science, scientists were embarrassed by much of the science in _An Inconvenient Truth_ but because they agreed with his politics they kept their yap shut.

Re:Suprising how?

[jmorris42]

> notwithstanding Mann's dubious practices

But that is just it. Mann is the elephant in the room, you simply can not ignore him. He was so obviously a fraud, and stone cold busted, and not a single voice was raised against him by the warmers. That is called a clue. What more do you want, the hand of God to reach down to you with a graven stone tablet saying "AGW IS A FRAUD!" or something? They didn't care if the science was fake because they aren't interested in the least in science. They have a policy solution in mind and the science will be tortured until it confesses.

AGW may indeed be real. But it is literally impossible to say at this point. The raw data was destroyed and the 'adjusted' data we have left is unreliable. Not only that we would need a lot more data for a lot longer than reliable records have been kept to say with the reliability normally expected from science. We do know the Earth has been both a lot warmer and a lot colder than at any point in the last hundred years. We are making predictions on time horizons as long as our reliable data set of past history and covering that lack with a lot of proxy data of dubious reliability. Doesn't sound very scientific if ya ask me, but I'm just a lay person. But somehow I doubt anyone would build a multibillion dollar chip fab on a theory of such reliability yet we are supposed to entirely reorder our economy on this theory's predictions. And anyone who expresses a doubt is called an idiot, anti-science and worse.