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American Attitudes About Science

July 10th, 2009

The New York Times is reporting the results of a new Pew Poll released Thursday: Survey Shows Gap Between Scientists and Public.  Well, ok.  I expect any extremely specialized group will have gaps with the public.  I bet surveys show gaps between police and the public, rabbis and the public, lawyers and the public.  So, duh.

So here’s one big gap:

On the whole, scientists believe American research leads the world. But only 17 percent of the public agrees, and the proportion who name scientific advances as among the United States’ most important achievements has fallen to 27 percent from nearly 50 percent in 1999, the survey found.

I blame the Republicans being in power and casting science in a bad light, restricting U.S. funding for some science topics (e.g. stem cells).  I blame awareness of the aging of American projects like Hubble (which Bush et al. were initially not going to refurbish following the Columbia explosion) coupled with awareness of highly visible European projects like the Large Hadron Collider.  I blame cutbacks in science journalism, with worse reporting than in past years, and coverage putting anti-science topics (global warming denial, creationism) on equal footing with scientists.

And while almost all of the scientists surveyed accept that human beings evolved by natural processes and that human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming, general public is far less sure.

Almost a third of ordinary Americans say human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time, a view held by only 2 percent of the scientists. Only about half of the public agrees that people are behind climate change, and 11 percent does not believe there is any warming at all.

According to the survey, about a third of Americans think there is lively scientific debate on both topics; in fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution and there is little doubt that human activity is altering the chemistry of the atmosphere in ways that threaten global climate.

I blame journalists again, as well as religion, business, and political leaders who have something to lose in light of science.  Americans have an inflated opinion of their own knowledge and tend to be arrogant about that “knowledge” even on topics they know little about.  To let the journalists off the hook a little, there are pundits (Rush Limbaugh comes to mind) who push ridiculous, biased positions, positions that are intellectually empty, and millions who swallow them whole and think they’ve learned something.

It’s also a strange wording to me, about the “ordinary” Americans.  Does that make scientists “extraordinary?”  Can we be superheroes like the X-men?

Well, apparently not.  The article concludes with:

In a telephone news conference announcing the survey, Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the science association, said scientists must find new ways to engage with the public.

“One cannot just exhort ‘we all agree you should agree with us,’ ” Mr. Leshner said. “It’s a much more interactive process that’s involved. It’s time consuming and can be tedious. But it’s very important.”

What is wrong with ‘we all agree you should agree with us’?  I mean, we blame scientists for doing the work, which does make it into textbooks and is available in science classes at all levels.  People know what scientists think about evolution, global warming, vaccines, and still choose to reject it.

I mean, scientists here are getting blamed for public ignorance, when it really isn’t ignorance as much as rejection.  It’s a misunderstanding so fundamental that any half-way competent middle school science teacher ought to be able to correct the problem.  Cutting edge research scientists are not required for the kind of problem exposed by this poll.

I mean, lawyers and police are not called out for the public being ignorant of laws or their understanding of the law.  Politicians are not called out for the public being ignorant of their civil rights.  Doctors are not called out for the public not understanding their health.

The PUBLIC gets called out and admonished to be responsible for knowing about these things.  People should be primarily responsbile for their own education.

I don’t want to sound like an arrogant asshole scientist.  Lord knows I try hard — very hard — to educate the public about astronomy (Diamonds in the Sky, Launch Pad, this blog, the courses I teach non-majors in Wyoming, for starters).  I am not the only one.  We have visible folks like Neil de Grasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Richard Dawkins, and others, making TV shows and writing books.  We’ve had news organizations cutting back on specialized science reporters and science getting a tiny fraction of the time Paris Hilton alone has received in the media.  We have had a government until recently hostile to science in many ways (see Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science).

Mooney has a new book out, Unscientific America, and apparently he goes after the scientists, too.

Man.

What is with this?  Scientists do all kinds of outreach other fields don’t do.  I mean, a lot of scientists are supported in academia and teach in addition to research.  We make press releases all the time when we have interesting results.  We talk at schools, to amateur astronomers, to science fiction fans.  We write books.  Our research grants often require public outreach, and we can and do get additional educational supplents to NASA grants.

The fact is, it’s easy for anyone who has the desire to become scientifically literate.  The journalists don’t make it easy, but there are some good science venues.  And on the big issues, evolution, global warming, vaccines, majorities or significant minorities know what most scientists say, or don’t because they listen to unreliable pundits, and ignore the facts and do not seek out reliable information.

Personal biases, and vultures that feed on them, are the real problem.  That means religious leaders.  Big business with something to lose (tobacco, oil, etc.).  Unscrupulous politicians.

People need to be taught that they need to accept solid science in all its forms, and can’t cherry pick the bits and pieces they don’t like for biased reasons.  That’s a lesson to hit them with in grade school.

Science isn’t right all the time, but it is usually, and it’s more reliable than any other method, and self-correcting over time.  Vigorously advocating this point of view is a good thing and not at all arrogant.  Being correct and confident is not arrogance.  Sugarcoating the facts won’t change them, and it won’t change anyone’s minds.

Sigh.  I’m open to a wide range of methods, including sugarcoating and cajoling and humility, but only because the problem is important.  But attacking scientists as a group for the public’s ignorance isn’t cool.  There are millions of people to blame first, and if blaming them doesn’t work, I don’t think long, complex interactions with individuals is going to work either.

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5 Responses to “American Attitudes About Science”

  1. SMD Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 12:03 am

    Average Americans don’t want to do the work required to have an educated opinion on anything. They’d rather entrust their minds to people that tell them “this is how it is,” even if said people are giving them biased or incorrect information. It’s part of what drives consumer culture. It’s an unwillingness to learn for oneself, because the way we’ve created the learning experience for kids has largely been to debase it to a chore. Kids don’t go to school because they want to, or because they want to learn, but because they have to. This is, to put it bluntly, the fault of parents everywhere who have had children, but are wholly incapable of raising them.

    I’m not sure these things can be fixed without forcing accountability in everything we do, watch, or listen to. But Americans largely want other people to do the work for them, because taking ten minutes out of their day to educate themselves about the reality of something like, say, evolution (and the imaginary debate surrounding it) is asking too much.

  2. Craig Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 2:07 am

    On the whole, scientists believe American research leads the world.

    I suspect that sentence would be more accurate if you added another “American” before “scientists”.

  3. Mike Brotherton Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 7:26 am

    I think that’s right, Craig, from looking at who responded to the poll. But I suspect there would be a similar result polling scientists everywhere. The United States still has the best research universities in the world, the most resources, and the biggest international draw of any country in the world when it comes to science. There are fields where that’s less true (not astronomy), especially if you make the United States compete against all of Europe as a single entity, but in many cases the United States is still objectively better by most measures.

  4. Sharon E. Dreyer Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 8:40 am

    Perhaps we should look at the education system in the USA to understand why science is not priority in the classroom. The teachers are forced to teach on such a biased and stilted basis that true science isn’t taught in most schools. The answer is to begin teaching math and science in the elementary grades and through to college. If Americans have some science understanding, then the gap may be closed. NASA would better serve the nation if it were not run by polical assignees instead of the techno-geeks who put men on the moon or designed the space shuttle.

  5. Jake Says:
    July 19th, 2009 at 8:33 pm

    SMD said:

    Average Americans don’t want to do the work required to have an educated opinion on anything. They’d rather entrust their minds to people that tell them “this is how it is,” even if said people are giving them biased or incorrect information.

    This argument doesn’t really work, does it? “People want to trust other people to tell them how things are, which is why they don’t trust other other people to tell them how things are.” (E.g., the first group of other people is the global-warming deniers, and the second is the IPCC.) You don’t have a problem with them trusting people’s opinions, you just don’t like whom they trust.

    Either that, or you believe that if they simply read the right opinions, they’d agree with them — which isn’t even how science works, much less how public opinion works.

    If you take a group of 100 laypeople who support your favored positions on climate change, vaccines, and darwinian evolution, I’d say they’re no better educated on the nuances than those who reject them. They just trust that the IPCC or CDC or whomever represents a scientific consensus, and go with that.

    Anecdotally, I’d say that, on average, those who reject the scientific consensus seem to have done more reading on the subject than those who accept it. When they’re told that they should press the “I Believe” button, they reject it and go on a reading spree to justify their rejection; those who press the “I Believe” button are under less pressure to research what’s going on. An editorial in the New York Times or a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth gives them enough to feel comfortable in their belief.

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