Love the Science, Hate the Scientists: Conservative Identity Protects Belief in Science and Undermines Trust in Scientists

Love the Science, Hate the Scientists: Conservative Identity Protects Belief in Science and Undermines Trust in Scientists. Marcus Mann, Cyrus Schleifer. Social Forces, soz156, December 23 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz156

Abstract: The decline in trust in the scientific community in the United States among political conservatives has been well established. But this observation is complicated by remarkably positive and stable attitudes toward scientific research itself. What explains the persistence of positive belief in science in the midst of such dramatic change? By leveraging research on the performativity of conservative identity, we argue that conservative scientific institutions have manufactured a scientific cultural repertoire that enables participation in this highly valued epistemological space while undermining scientific authority perceived as politically biased. We test our hypothesized link between conservative identity and scientific perceptions using panel data from the General Social Survey. We find that those with stable conservative identities hold more positive attitudes toward scientific research while simultaneously holding more negative attitudes towards the scientific community compared to those who switch to and from conservative political identities. These findings support a theory of a conservative scientific repertoire that is learned over time and that helps orient political conservatives in scientific debates that have political repercussions. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers interested in the cultural differentiation of scientific authority and for stakeholders in scientific communication and its public policy.


Discussion and Conclusion

Confidence in the scientific community has declined among political conservatives in recent years but attitudes toward scientific research as a benefit to society have remained stable. Meanwhile, conservative social movements have established their own conservatively oriented scientific institutions (e.g., see Dunlap, Riley and McCright 2016; Dunlap and Jacques, 2013; Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman, 2008; McCright & Dunlap, 2000, 2003, 2010; Gross et al., 2011) and the dawn of the Internet and social media has made it easier than ever for conservative audiences to access conservative knowledge. The preceding analysis aimed to show how these developments intersect by demonstrating that stable conservative partisans are more likely than their switching counterparts to distrust the scientific community and to believe that scientific research is a benefit to society. These findings support arguments that conservative efforts to communicate alternative scientific knowledge have been successful insofar as stable conservatives maintain trust in science while rejecting the authority of mainstream scientists. The implications of these developments are numerous.

First, this study replicates the findings of Gauchat (2012) and helps confirm one of the most dramatic trends in scientific perceptions in the last fifty years. Second, we build on previous work (O’Brien and Noy 2015; Roos 2017) that shows how rejections of mainstream scientific knowledge often signal specific cultural perceptions as opposed to deficits in scientific knowledge itself (although see Allum, Sturgis, Tabourazi, & Brunton-smith, 2008; Sturgis & Allum, 2004). We contribute to this work by studying political identity and scientific attitudes and finding that rejections of scientists need not be driven by a broader rejection of scientific research itself. This is further evidence that cultural communities viewed as being anti-science maintain a complex arrangement of scientific perceptions that can include high levels of scientific knowledge and positive views of scientific research. Furthermore, consistent identification in such a community can be indicative of positive scientific attitudes.

We are not the first to examine how membership in a cultural community affects perceptions of science. Moscivici (1961/2008) coined the concept of “social representations” by studying how the advent of psychoanalysis was received and communicated among three different moral communities in France—urban-liberals, Catholics, and Communists—and observing how new scientific ideas were refracted through the organizational and cultural lenses of these social milieus. This study extends this long line of research on cultural membership and scientific perceptions by examining the issue of consistency in political identity and attitudes toward scientists and scientific research, as opposed to interpretations of a distinct scientific discipline or the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes.

More specifically, this research applies Perrin et al.’s (2014) performative theory of conservative identity and extends their work by examining it in the context of identity stability. Identity stability is important for a performative theory of political identity because it reflects enduring familiarity with and acceptance of elite characterizations of political identity. In other words, if conservatives learn to be conservative (or if any partisan learns to be partisan), identity stability is a direct reflection of a period in which this learning can occur and the resilience of this identity through national political change. We find that consistent identification predicts having learned that it is scientists, and not science itself, that produce findings counter to conservative political goals. Furthermore, learning implies teaching and we have also argued that the pattern of attitudes shown here is indicative of successful social movement efforts to establish alternative and conservatively oriented institutions of knowledge (Gross et al. 2011). In this respect, we join other scholars in identifying the construction of politically partisan knowledge institutions as an important social movement outcome that has been under-studied among social movement scholars (Frickel and Gross 2005; Gross et al. 2011) and especially by those interested in framing processes (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986).

Several limitations to our empirical analysis warrant discussion. Most importantly, these data were not ideal for examining the mechanisms of engagement with conservative science explicitly. Computational researchers are well positioned to more accurately measure exposure to, and consumption of, conservative scientific information online. This type of work is well underway in the context of political news media (Barberá et al. 2015; Conover, Ratkiewicz, and Francisco 2011; Etling, Roberts, and Faris 2014; Faris et al. 2017; Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler 2018), but very little explores the impact of conservative scientific institutions. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Discovery Institute, while unique in their missions and ideologies, offer politically conservative and religiously fundamentalist scientific resources to their audiences respectively, while partisan content creators like “Prager University” provide conservative information to subscribers with the veneer of an academic approach. But the effect of increased exposure to these kinds of partisan scientific resources—whose main point of public contact is through the Internet and social media—remains unclear.

In this article, we were not able to directly measure the consumption of conservative scientific information on the Internet, but we can offer some suggestive evidence that getting scientific information from the Internet makes a difference for stable and unstable conservative attitudes. Using a question that asks, “Where do you get most of your information about science and technology,” we can examine how using the Internet to consume scientific information affects differences between stable and unstable conservatives on our two dependent variables over time. Figure 2 shows these descriptive trends from 2006 to 2014 using fractional polynomial best fit trend lines with 95% confidence intervals. It is most important to note that stable conservatives that get their scientific information from the Internet are among the least likely to trust scientists over this timespan and the most likely, by a good margin, to see scientific research as a benefit. They are the group with the largest gap between their trust in scientists and belief in the benefits of scientific research.

[Figure 2. Descriptive trends in attitudes towards science among stable and unstable conservatives by science media outlet. Fractional polynomial best fit trend lines with 95% confidence interval in gray shading (Source: General Social Survey Panel, 2006–2014).


This aligns with our overall analyses—in that ostensibly greater access to partisan scientific authority exaggerates this gap for conservatives—but it remains a suggestive finding for future research to adjudicate more thoroughly. For instance, are these patterns really the result of better access to partisan science or is there something qualitatively different about online scientific content that exaggerates perceptions of scientists as over-stepping their authority (Evans 2018)? And in what ways are the populations getting their scientific information online different from others? Work in this vein could help answer important descriptive questions about conservative scientific sources, including how pervasive and heterogenous they are, and what associations exist between the sources themselves in terms of shared staff, audiences, and even content. A comprehensive study on public-facing scientific sources online could help map the cultural heterogeneity of scientific communication itself beyond the politically binary analysis provided here and provide a welcome point of comparison by suggesting other cultural scientific repertoires that are orienting and enabling of participation in scientific debates.

Future research should also include qualitative examinations of the conservative scientific repertoire. Differences and similarities in how stable liberals and conservatives, both groups that report high levels of belief in scientific research as a benefit to society, talk about and understand scientific issues is not well understood. Just as Swidler (2001) examined how people brought the universally valued concept of love to bear on their particular circumstances, future researchers can examine how political partisans selectively deploy “science” and its related concepts in their daily lives. This includes further examination into how attitudes toward scientists and scientific research are partitioned and how this disassociation is expressed or reconciled in the context of in-depth interviews. Scholars of religion and science (see e.g., Ecklund 2012; Ecklund and Scheitle 2017; Evans 2018) have been hard at work on questions like these and have set the stage for similar work on political partisans, including in non-US contexts.

These findings also raise questions about how cultural groups navigate moments of institutional trust and their relationships with other communities that may not support their worldview. The title of this article is a play on the (conservative) Christian saying, “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin,”—a call to separate the actor (the sinner who might accept God’s forgiveness) and the action (the sin, which is against God’s will) in terms of one’s attitude toward a social performance (the sinner committing the sin). For our case, the process is inverted, with the political conservative showing low approval for the actor (the scientist) while maintaining a high approval for the action/process (the method of science). In both cases, individuals have the cognitive ability to separate actor and action in their evaluations, an ostensibly counter-intuitive process, and so the need for a snappy turn of phrase. Testing when and under what conditions people make striking actor/action distinctions in their evaluations is beyond the scope of this article. However, we demonstrate the integral role of identity and cultural membership in these processes, suggesting future research that might examine variation in actor/action evaluations among different cultural groups.

For example, we show how attitudes toward individual elites (scientists) are hurt, while attitudes toward the institutional practice (scientific research) are protected for stable political conservatives. But how this distinction between actors and action extends to other cultural groups and institutions depends on a variety of factors. Parallels might be found in how stable political liberals view capitalist institutions, where economic elites might be viewed unfavorably while belief in capitalism itself as an overall benefit to society remains stable. Other movements distrust elites and seek the abolition of entire institutions (e.g., anti-religious atheists), while still others distrust institutions while preserving positive attitudes toward individuals within them, as when political reactionary movements like the Tea Party or the Democratic Socialists successfully place leaders in elected political roles. This line of thinking suggests that actor/action distinctions are not indicative of conservativism itself or any kind of specifically conservative mentality (Mannheim 1993). We argue that one mechanism guiding the organization of these attitudes is whether an institution is politically useful (i.e., whether scientific appeals might help conservatives make political arguments) but further comparative studies can elucidate how different contexts shape attitudes toward individual elites and the institutions of which they are a part.

Finally, these results carry implications for science communication policy experts and strategists. Those conservatives most skeptical of man-made climate change and the scientists promoting it are also the most likely to believe that scientific research is a general benefit to society. Therefore, promoting policy that promotes the idea of science as a valid epistemology in order to increase belief in anthropogenic climate change seems misguided. Rather, outreach efforts might be more effective if geared toward humanizing the scientific community and correcting misperceptions of scientists themselves. By improving public agreement on where legitimate and trustworthy science is being accomplished, future debates at the intersections of science and politics can begin to focus more on what problems to prioritize instead of what the problems are.