Science
has Problems: stop treating science denial like a disease
The elevation of science to a
central theme in American politics is an extraordinary development in the
co-evolution of science and society. Three months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, 40,000
or so peopleturned out in the rain in Washington, DC
for the March for Science, with similar numbers in other cities. Given
Trump’s all-out attack on the role and size of government, his proposed 2018
budget slashes almost all programs other than national defence, there could just as
easily have been a March for Education or a March for Affordable Housing.
But the high profile of science in
national politics has been building since the turn of the millennium, fuelled
by controversies around embryonic stem cell research, and of course climate
change. Starting with the year 2000 presidential campaign between George W.
Bush and Al Gore, Democrats explicitly began positioning themselves as the
party of science. During the 2004 campaign, Democratic candidate John
Kerry pledged that “I will listen to the advice of our scientists, so I
can make the best decisions ...This is your future, and I will let science
guide us, not ideology.”
A year later, journalist Chris
Mooney published a book whose catchy title, The Republican War on Science,
later got picked up by the Democratic party, with a
statement on its 2008 campaign website that “We will end the Bush
administration’s war on science, restore scientific integrity, and return to
evidence-based decision-making.” Indeed, Barak Obama’s 2008 inauguration speech
included the memorable promise that he would “restore science to its rightful
place.”
So by the time of Trump’s election,
science was already a strong issue for Democrats. But everyone wants science on
their side, and even Donald Trump insisted, on the day of the science march,
that “Rigorous science is critical to my administration’s efforts to achieve
the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection.”
Having science on your side,
however, requires a strong voice for expertise in political discussions. And as
we all know, one of the more common diagnoses of political pathologies leading
to Trump, as well as to the Brexit vote in the
So the rhetorical stakes around
science and politics are pushed even further. “We live in an age that
denigrates knowledge, dislikes expertise and demonizes experts,” wrote
Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post last May.
Tom Nichols, who teaches at the US Naval War College, and wrote The Death
of Expertise, fleshes out the diagnosis: “Americans have reached a point where
ignorance—at least regarding what is generally considered established knowledge
in public policy—is seen as an actual virtue.”
What makes this so discomfiting is
that it cuts close to the bone of our identity as rational humans struggling to
make sense of a complex world. Everyone, even Trump,
says they want science on their side because being modern and rational is all
about basing decisions on reliable knowledge, all the more so in the face of
challenges such as climate change, pandemics and cyberwar,
to name just a few apocalyptic horsemen. So you can’t make any claim to
authority without implying that you have some rational, empirical basis for
preferring one course of action over another.
How, then, have we at the same time
come to live in a world of post-truth politics, fake news, alternative
facts, and counter-narrative?
Amidst the bruising debates over
issues like climate change, GM crops, stem cell research, vaccines, and so on,
a number of social and behavioural scientists have
begun to investigate the question of why people come to the beliefs they have
about science. The larger agenda here is to understand how our cognition limits
our capacity to act in the way that the Enlightenment model of rationality
tells us we should be acting. Particular attention is being focused on why
people don’t more readily accept the findings of scientific experts on politically
controversial issues with scientific elements.
For example, John Cook, a
cognitive scientist at
Efforts to pathologize
“science denial” link to a growing body of work about human cognitive limits
that can be traced, in part, to the wonderful set of studies carried out
by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, starting in the 1970s, on judgment under
uncertainty. These established that the heuristics most humans readily use to
make sense of the world on a daily basis also introduce significant biases into
our understanding of the world. Kahneman of
course eventually won a Nobel prize for this
line of research.
If people are naturally limited and
biased in their abilities to see and assess the probabilistic constitution of
many of the decisions that they face, it is only a short step to ask if they
are, as a matter of evolutionary cognitive development, similarly limited in
their more general capacity to think scientifically. And if people naturally
look at the world in systematically biased ways, and if certain classes of people,
say political conservatives, consistently reject the findings of science, then
one might begin to explore the question of whether these two observations could
be causally related.
And so, experts have begun studying
why experts don’t get more respect.Scienceblind and The Knowledge
Illusion are two such books by cognitive scientists published this year.
As the titles suggest, they take up the question of why people understand so
little about the world around them. The first of these, by Andrew Shtulman,
focuses on why we don’t intuit scientific truths about the world. It looks in
particular at how children’s misunderstanding of the world can help us see how
difficult it is even for adults to acquire correct understanding of how things
work.
Shtulman’s central premise is that
we need to leave our childish intuitions behind and accept the findings of
science in order to act effectively in the world. “Intuitive theories,” Scienceblind tells us, “are about coping with the
present circumstances, the here and the now. Scientific theories are about the
full causal story, from past to future, from the observable to the
unobservable, from the miniscule to the immense.” And the book concludes,
“While science denial is problematic from a sociological point of view, it’s
unavoidable from a psychological point of view. There is a fundamental disconnect between the cognitive abilities of individual
humans and the cognitive demands of modern society.”
The second book, The Knowledge
Illusion, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, looks not only at how little we know, but also at
how we know a lot less than we think we do. “Because we confuse the knowledge
in our heads with the knowledge we have access to, we are largely unaware of
how little we understand.” While the authors recognise
that teaching people more facts about science might not change their beliefs
about the world, they also believe that if people realised
how little they actually do know, they would moderate their positions on key
issues, and be open to a wider range of possibilities. “Getting people to think
beyond their own interests and experiences may be necessary for reducing their
hubris and thereby reducing polarization.” The book attributes “antiscientific
thinking” to false causal models that individuals hold in their heads, often in
common with their social groups.
Both of these books share the
perspective that we’re all dumb but it’s not our fault; we’re born that way.
The first step is to recognise how little we each
understand of the world, rather like accepting original sin.
It’s hard not to sympathise
with this perspective: a little more humility in a lot more people could be
good for the world. But we didn’t need cognitive science to tell us that. After
recognising our ignorance, the second step must
therefore be an acceptance of what scientific experts tell us. Otherwise, what
would be the point of accepting our ignorance?
I find this emerging intellectual programme around science denial problematic on so many
levels that it’s hard to know where to start. Certainly one part of the problem
with the idea of an innate cognitive stance toward science, and with
discussions about science in the political world more generally, is the
undisciplined way in which the word “science” gets used, as if particle
physics, climate modelling, epidemiology and cultural
anthropology have so much in common that they are substitutable for “science”
in any sentence. Which science does “science denial” pertain to?
Moreover, the entire programme fetishizes individual cognition
and understanding by positioning the innate ignorance of the individual as the
bottleneck at the intersection of knowledge, uncertainty, expertise, and
political disagreement. The idea that these books implicitly endorse is that
progress in tackling the complex problems of modernity is being blocked by
individuals who do not accept new causal knowledge generated by science.
The effort to provide a behavioural explanation for why people might not accept the
opinions of experts strikes me as not entirely dissimilar in its implications
from the early ambitions for eugenics, in that it seeks in the biology of the
individual an explanation for complex social phenomena. It makes one wonder
what the appropriate treatment for science denial might actually be?
Meanwhile, the situation in the
science enterprise itself is hardly reassuring. There is a reasonable case to
be made, and I have tried elsewhere to make it, that much of science
is on the verge of a crisis that threatens its viability, integrity, legitimacy
and utility. This crisis stems from a growing awareness that much of the
science being produced today is, by the norms of science itself, of poor
quality; that significant areas of research are driven by self-reinforcing fads
and opportunities to game the funding system, or to advance particular agendas;
that publication rates continue to grow exponentially with little evidence that
much of what is published actually gets read; and that the promises of social
benefit made on behalf of many avenues of science are looking increasingly
implausible, if not ridiculous.
Maybe a little science denial is
actually in order these days? The emergence of science denial as a pathology
designed to explain why science is not leading to improved political decision-making
seems, if nothing else, completely overwhelmed by the precisely opposite
condition.
The vast scale of the
knowledge-production enterprise, combined with the likelihood that much of
what’s produced is not much good, makes it possible for anyone to get whatever
science they need to support whatever beliefs they might have about how best to
address any problem they are concerned about – with little, if any, capacity to
assess the quality of the science being deployed.
Twenty-five years ago, Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz developed their concept of “post-normal
science” to help understand the role of knowledge and expertise when facts
are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent.
Under such conditions, which are common to many of today’s societal problems, Funtowicz and Ravetz describe how
the “traditional distinction between ‘hard’, objective scientific facts and
‘soft’, subjective value-judgements is now inverted.”
That is to say, facts become soft, and values hard.
Under such conditions, our
expectations for Enlightenment ideals of applied rationality are themselves
irrational. We are asking science to do the impossible: to arrive at
scientifically coherent and politically unifying understandings of problems
that are inherently open, indeterminate and contested – to provide, asScienceblind promises us, “the full causal story.”
Meanwhile, the reliability of the
very types of science that underlie books like Scienceblind and The
Knowledge Illusion are increasingly called into question as evidence of
irreproducibility continues to mount, including across many fields of
research that make strong generalisations about human
behaviour.
Our biggest problem is not science
denial; it’s post-normal science denial.
Daniel Sarewitz is
co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and
professor of science and society in the School for the Future of Innovation in
Society at
Daniel Sarewitz
Monday 21st August, 2017