Post-truth, anti-truth, and ***can’t-handle-the-truth***: How responses to science are shaped by concerns about its impact

Sutton, Robbie & Petterson, Aino & T. Rutjens, Bastiaan. (2018). Post-truth, anti-truth, and can’t-handle-the-truth: how responses to science are shaped by concerns about its impact. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327837926

Abstract: Science is valued for its basic and applied functions: producing knowledge and contributing to the common good. Much of the time, these are perceived to work in harmony. However, science is sometimes seen as capable of subverting the common good, by facilitating dangerous technologies (e.g., weapons of mass destruction) or exerting a malign influence on public policy, opinion, and behaviour. Employing the social functionalist framework of Tetlock (2002), we propose that efforts to censor and suppress scientific findings are motivated by concerns about their societal impact. We begin by covering recent political shifts towards more censorial and punitive responses to scientific research in the U.S. and elsewhere. We go on to propose that beyond traditional explanations of how people evaluate scientific findings, such as cognitive consistency motivations, people’s evaluations are shaped by perceptions of the potential societal impact of scientific data. Our recent studies have shown that independently of the extent to which scientific findings contradict people’s beliefs (as in the confirmation bias), people reject and oppose the publication, application, and funding of research to the extent that they judge its findings as threatening to the public interest. In the final part of the chapter, we outline avenues for further theory and research. Here, we particularly emphasize the importance of establishing whether concerns about impact are themselves rationalizations of opposition to research that are motivated by other moral concerns, such as perceived purity violations (Graham et al., 2009). Finally, we underline that it is crucial that further research examines perceptions of science as a dangerous force that must be neutralized, and the potential of these perceptions to obstruct not only the public understanding of scientific research, but ultimately, the research itself.