keefe
Active Member
I just found this interesting interview with Stephan Lewandowsky, for anyone with a spare 43 minutes.
Here's a few quotes from the transcript
Here's a few quotes from the transcript
When it comes to the drivers of belief or acceptance of scientific findings, in particular
climate change, then what we find is that one of the most important factors is a person’s
worldview or you can call it a political ideology, their belief in things such as the free market.
It turns out, in particular in the case of climate change, that people who are very enthusiastic
about free markets and who think that government should not interfere with free markets, that
they tend to reject the findings from climate change, climate science based on that ideology.
It’s a very strong effect. It’s a huge effect. In some of my data, it explains two-thirds
of the variance. Now what that means is that if I know somebody’s belief about the free
markets, I can reduce my uncertainty about what their climate change attitude is by two-thirds.
A sitting US senator has written a book that’s entitled “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global
Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” Now that’s pretty explicit. If you call
something a hoax and you talk about a conspiracy, well, then you probably think that there is
a conspiracy among scientists to invent this hoax called climate change, and that is precisely
what this person is saying in his book.
That’s not an isolated instance. If you look at the discourse on climate change blogs,
it is suffused with the attributes of conspiratorial thinking. This notion, this overriding suspicion
of scientists, that scientists are—they’re all cheats, and they’re all making this
up, and they’re all trying to scare you for, well, I don’t know why, but there is
this suspicion and fear and paranoia that people express when they are rejecting climate
science. That is a small, but I think in public life, significant driver as well.
I’ve performed a number of studies that looked at the association between acceptance
of science and people’s tendency to endorse conspiracy theories, and one of those involved
visitors to climate blogs, and the other one involved a representative sample of Americans,
a thousand US representative respondents. What I found in both studies is the same thing,
and that is that as people are more likely to endorse various conspiracy theories—for
example, that MI5 killed Princess Diana, or that the UN is trying to create a world government,
that sort of thing—the more people tend to endorse that, the less likely they are
to accept scientific propositions.
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