In the examples given in the paper, there is an alternative way to describe what is happening; it may or may not be informative, and it may or may not hold up if a larger range of examples is used; in particular, the authors’ own political positions may have influenced their choices of examples.
With those caveats out of the way: in each example in the paper, what happens is that both more science knowledge and more science curiosity tend to make people more like the liberal Democrats rather than conservative Republicans, except that science knowledge pushes conservative Republicans in the other direction.
Obviously this way of describing things is going to be more congenial to progressives than to conservatives. It would be interesting to see whether it remains a good description over a wide range of questions (in which case it might indicate that “reality has a liberal bias”, or that a progressive conspiracy has taken over the scientific establishment, or something), or whether there’s a broad range of questions where it goes the opposite way—more science knowledge and curiosity push you rightwards, except that knowledge alone pushes lefties further left. (Possible places to look for such questions: areas where technocratic and environmentalist tendencies diverge, like support for nuclear power and genetically modified foods; areas where there’s at least a case to be made that scientific research produces “politically incorrect” conclusions, like the alleged relationship between race and IQ. Any more?)
(If it turns out that the latter is what happens, an obvious guess is that the authors happen to be towards the left/progressive/liberal end of the scale, and picked examples of politically charged scientific questions that were salient to them.)
In the examples given in the paper, there is an alternative way to describe what is happening; it may or may not be informative, and it may or may not hold up if a larger range of examples is used; in particular, the authors’ own political positions may have influenced their choices of examples.
With those caveats out of the way: in each example in the paper, what happens is that both more science knowledge and more science curiosity tend to make people more like the liberal Democrats rather than conservative Republicans, except that science knowledge pushes conservative Republicans in the other direction.
Obviously this way of describing things is going to be more congenial to progressives than to conservatives. It would be interesting to see whether it remains a good description over a wide range of questions (in which case it might indicate that “reality has a liberal bias”, or that a progressive conspiracy has taken over the scientific establishment, or something), or whether there’s a broad range of questions where it goes the opposite way—more science knowledge and curiosity push you rightwards, except that knowledge alone pushes lefties further left. (Possible places to look for such questions: areas where technocratic and environmentalist tendencies diverge, like support for nuclear power and genetically modified foods; areas where there’s at least a case to be made that scientific research produces “politically incorrect” conclusions, like the alleged relationship between race and IQ. Any more?)
(If it turns out that the latter is what happens, an obvious guess is that the authors happen to be towards the left/progressive/liberal end of the scale, and picked examples of politically charged scientific questions that were salient to them.)