Great! Thanks. Kahan’s papers are very useful. In one paper he and his colleagues ask not whether some policy-relevant claim X (such as whether climate change is caused by human activities) is true, but rather whether expert scientists generally agree that X is true, or generally agree that X is false, or are divided. The latter is much easier to establish (conveniently, the US National Academy of Sciences publishes ‘expert consensus reports’ from which Kahan’s examples are taken). As expected, people’s beliefs match their political opinions in a suspicious manner: “hierarchical individualists” (roughly conservatives) tend to believe that there is no expert consensus on climate change being caused by humans even though there is, whereas very few “egalitarian communitarians” believe that there is an expert consensus on geological isolation of nuclear waste being safe, even though there is.
Great! Thanks. Kahan’s papers are very useful. In one paper he and his colleagues ask not whether some policy-relevant claim X (such as whether climate change is caused by human activities) is true, but rather whether expert scientists generally agree that X is true, or generally agree that X is false, or are divided. The latter is much easier to establish (conveniently, the US National Academy of Sciences publishes ‘expert consensus reports’ from which Kahan’s examples are taken). As expected, people’s beliefs match their political opinions in a suspicious manner: “hierarchical individualists” (roughly conservatives) tend to believe that there is no expert consensus on climate change being caused by humans even though there is, whereas very few “egalitarian communitarians” believe that there is an expert consensus on geological isolation of nuclear waste being safe, even though there is.