Study: Conservatives Lose Trust In Science?
American conservatives have lost trust in science over the last 40 years while moderates and liberals have remained constant in the stock they put in the scientific community, a new study finds. The most educated conservatives have slipped the most, according to the research set to appear in the April issue of the journal American Sociological Review.
Gordon Gaulet, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina, told the blog Live Science "There's been this need to cultivate conservative ideas in reaction to what is perceived as mainstream culture, which a lot of conservatives would suggest is biased toward secular liberalism."
Here’s more from Stephanie Pappas at Live Science (who highlighted a study associating conservatism with prejudice and low IQ a while back):
The trouble with assessing the public's opinion of science over time is that few public opinion polls asked questions about trust in science before the 1980s. One major survey, the General Social Survey, did ask Americans about their trust in the scientific community starting in 1974, however.
Gaulet used this survey, which was conducted annually until 1994 and every other year through 2010, to gauge changes in different groups' trust in science over time. He found that overall, trust in science is not especially high — fewer than half of Americans surveyed over the time frame reported a "great deal" of trust in the scientific community.
Liberals had the most trust in science as a whole over the survey period (1974 to 2010), with 47 percent reporting a "great deal" of trust on average, while moderates were the most consistently skeptical of science, with 42 percent trusting the scientific community a great deal. (The moderates in the survey tended to have the least understanding of science as any group, possibly explaining the finding, Gaulet said.) An average of 43 percent of conservatives said they trusted scientists a great deal over the study period.
But only conservatives showed a change over time. At the beginning of the survey, in the 1970s, conservatives trusted science more than anyone, with about 48 percent evincing a great deal of trust. By 2010, the last year survey data was available, only 35 percent of conservatives said the same.
What's changed?
Gaulet said that conservatism itself has changed, with a greater emphasis on conservative thought and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation that make a point of challenging the scientific community. The finding wasn't the result of conservatives being less educated than in the old days, he said. In fact, the decline in trust was most obvious among conservatives with a bachelor's degree or higher.
Meanwhile, science has changed, too. Research used to be done under the auspices of NASA and the Department of Defense, Gaulet said. Both of these agencies seemed far-removed from daily life. However, over the decades, science has become more intertwined with everyday policy. The Environmental Protection Agency is a "poster child" for science informing real-world regulation that some conservatives oppose, Gaulet said.
"It's almost a contradiction," he said. "We use science because it has this objective point of view or credibility to figure out which policy to use ... but by doing that it becomes politicized."
...Interestingly, public opinion on science in Europe and Japan skews differently than in the United States, Gaulet said. There, skepticism about the scientific community usually comes from the left. The reason may be that the issues on the scientific forefront in Europe (genetically modified food, nuclear power) tend to push liberals' buttons, while those in the United States (climate change, stem cell research) tend to bother conservatives more.
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Comments
I saw something about this the other day
Submitted by bkeyser on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 9:00pm.
Surely the results will be misread and portrayed by the liberal media and blogosphere as "Conservatives losing faith in Science" when -from what I've read- the survey actually indicates Conservatives are becoming less trusting of the scientific community, namely academia. We see "scientists" (as in, "most scientists agree that global warming is real and we're almost to the point when we'll not be able to reverse it") as pushing a desired political agenda and losing objectivity in their research. I suspect this is mostly in the environmental sciences, though I wouldn't be surprised if a small percentage of the drop was due to evolutionary science.
It is interesting to note that even liberals can't come up with majority support for the scientific community. With numbers like that, they shouldn't be re-elected.
➚ It's New Science
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 1:50am.
That's the problem, science by vote, some touchy-feely "kiss mother Gaia" religion.
I see Mt. Aetna is erupting. The last sacrifice must have been a slut.
Exactly
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 8:49am.
It's the scientific community that has injected 'political correctness' into science, thus corrupting it.
2+2 will always = 4, unless you put 'feelings' into the equation.
➚Science of statistics?
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 9:45pm.
Makes sense to me.
This study simply proves liberals really are intent on converting self-respecting human beings into dependent wards of the state.
Maybe we've simply suspected it up to this point, but on the basis of empirical evidence over 45 years, we can only observe the liberal experiment is a smashing success.
Sure, conservatives believe in science when it's backed with results, but don't expect us to faithfully follow the science of liberalism.
I remember when Red M&M's
Submitted by Dan Diego on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 9:41pm.
I remember when Red M&M's would kill off mankind and those that survived would freeze to death. What happened to that science?
I have seen more and more
Submitted by Dan The Man 2 on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 9:58pm.
I have seen more and more people rail against GMO foods claiming they are not as nutritious or safe as regular foodstuffs. So far I have seen no studies showing that GMO foods have any major problems.
It's the politicization of science that is distrusted.
Submitted by drsamherman on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 11:12pm.
Unfortunately, scientific research succumbed to the most subjective and pervasive of all forces in humanity: politics. Funding, the lifeblood of academic basic research, has designated the most politically expedient research to be of far more value than other areas of endeavor. In the case of medicine, the research must have some clinical relevance or it is essentially unusable at the clinic level. This is not such a bad thing, particularly when you review the research of some of the more outlandish basic science that produced nothing usable but providing employment for faculty and staff positions that otherwise would be passing out carts at a discount outlet. Example: the hype over stem cells and their ability to "cure" many serious long-term debilitating diseases. There are some very limited approved uses of cord-derived stem cells, but even then their labeling (e.g. Med-speak for clinical utility) is limited to last-ditch therapy for certain blood dyscrasias and immune system disorders. The FDA has gone out of its way to warn consumers about unwarranted stem cell claims and to warn companies dealing in stem cell research not to make outrageous claims of efficacy.
Basic science funding in other disciplines is also subject to tremendous pressure by academics to obtain to advance their careers, resulting in some poor research that would never make it through a medical-level review. We all see the need for this type of research, but when it becomes a political football (like the various claims made about certain nutrients and organic compounds by non-clinically trained scientists), it becomes a joke. You also have the problem of cooked books (especially in some areas of climate research where models are substituted for reality) or pre-drawn conclusions with methodology designed post-hoc to make sure the researcher's biases and political viewpoints are supported (a huge problem in social sciences). In medical science, we have the same problems, but poor methodology or fuzzy endpoints exacerbate the situation.
I have not lost my faith in science to produce excellent results, but I remain extremely skeptical about the integrity of most academicians and their willingness to whore science for their own personal and professional gain.
➚Yeah! What he said!
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 11:32pm.
Picking winners & losers is all the rage today. Barry Umbama is a master of blending the lines of Religion, Science, and economic necessity - worship the Earth, renewable energy at any cost, and we cannot afford not to. (never mind that the last two are mutually exclusive)
Do conservatives not trust science or the reporting of science?
Submitted by CO2Maker on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 12:33am.
The textbook example is the apocalyptic outcome of global warming, or so they say, and the lock-step followers of the hockey-stick theories with their quasi-religious fervor who loathe fossil fuels and quake in their boots at the thought of building a nuclear reactor.
The general public exhibits practically no ability to properly judge risk factors, or that ability has been stultified so much by the shallow reporting of the media, whose primary concerns are getting the sexiest and scariest scoops rather than describing actual probabilities of danger.
Nuclear catastrophes? TMI was nothing. Chernobyl? Everything is now pretty much back to normal. Fukushima? Nothing definitive yet. How about the most damaging nuclear disasters evah—you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? They are thriving cities. Long-lasting environmental damage from petroleum? Anchorage Harbor, now clean. The Gulf of Mexico? Apparently not as damaged as initially reported by reporters in the throes of petro-eroticism.
How about the threshold chemical of all ecological nightmares, namely DDT? Absolved of any causative effects at trial in the early 70s, but the doomsday scare wound up killing millions of black children in Africa (thank you, Rachel Carson, Joni Mitchell, and all the other compassionate, anti-racist liberals who only want to save Mother Gaia, regardless of who pays the price for their feelings).
It's not science that conservatives distrust, it's the hawkers and manipulators of the science "narratives" and public policy decisions that result from scientific scare-mongering.
When "science" comes out with crazy theories
Submitted by c5then on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 7:55am.
Like Man-made global warming, particles that can move faster than the speed of light and the ethical stance that babies are not people until they can talk....it is only natural to expect that conservative, thinking people will lose their respect and the regard they used to hold for science and scientists.
Then when a small group of these so-called scientists begn to say that people who disagree with them and hold contrary opinions need to be silenced and treated as mentaly unstable, conservative thinking people begin to distrust science and scientists.
Liberals on the other hand seem to hold out science and scientists as demi-gods and think that they can not be wrong, until another demi-god comes out with a different theory that fits their opinions better. So they are continually running from theory to theory as if it were fact. They trust scinetists implicitly and therefore ae easily manipulated by the less then ethical.
Take the issue of genetically modified food. We have been told for generations that modification to the genes of a living organism is dangerous and unpredictable. When it happens slowly over thousands or millions of years, there is time to weed out the dangerous changes and leave only the beneficial changes. But now we are expected to believe that when we do it in a lab over the periond of a few years, we are so smart that there is no danger and that there can be no possibility of unintended results or consequences.
Madison and Jefferson and Franklin built a Republic - Roberts killed it!
What's changed? Science has, that's what
Submitted by Dave. on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 2:58pm.
Much of the scientific community has been infiltrated by members of the communist left - and that goes triple for what passes as the field of "climate science."
If the scientific community wishes to regain its credibility, it has to run the tyrannical lefty kooks off, and keep them away.
-Dave
Vote for the American in November
It seems to me...
Submitted by HelenS on Tue, 04/03/2012 - 9:05am.
It seems to me that whenever you tie government funding or grants to compliance to an agenda, you get "scientists" who will whore their "results" for more funding and grants.
I'm surprised they aren't ashamed to call themselves scientists, what with the gap between what they produce and actual scientific information.
Me - "The libs/dems of today are the Quislings of former years - the cowards who would vote a fraud into office in exchange for handouts from the devil."
Muddling of terms
Submitted by Eric the Fred on Tue, 04/03/2012 - 6:00pm.
The terms 'science' and 'scientific community' get bandied around this study as if they're the same thing. They're not.
Science is not something a person can lose 'trust' in no more than I can lose trust in history or, say, the French language. People, on the other hand, - i.e. scientists - one can lose trust in. That's the issue here.
But will the media point this out or will it just go ahead and say conservatives are 'against' or 'anti' science? Hmm, let's make an educated guess...