Is There a Scientific Reason Many Conservatives Hate Science?

Last week, we went through a familiar ritual: Hand-wringing and alarm over Republican politicians denying scientific reality. This time around, the main focus was Rick Santorum, the anti-evolutionist and climate change denier who is one of the worst of the worst in this area (and who promptly obliged by making a new and fresh anti-science statement).

But hey, it's always something.

We've been repeating this pattern at least since the early George W. Bush years. A Republican makes a dubious scientific claim, a Republican officeholder or appointee suppresses a scientific report, a scientist in a Republican administration gets muzzled...the names change, but the story does not. I chronicled it all in a book that is now seven years old--The Republican War on Science--and I wasn't the first.

Nor will I be the last. The very fact that Jon Huntsman (who just nabbed third place in New Hampshire) has been able to successfully frame himself as the "pro-science" Republican candidate itself speaks to the misalignment of his competitors with reality.

Some of the conservative denial of science may well be cynical in nature. But there's no doubt from polls that large numbers of conservatives really believe this stuff--that global warming isn't real, nor is evolution. And indeed, the denial of reality extends well beyond science and into other fields likeeconomics and history.

When you have a phenomenon this recurrent, it seems to me that at some point, it is reasonable to stop and ponder deeper causes. And are there any?

Recently, I posted a list of seven recent scientific studies showing that liberals and conservatives differ in ways that go far beyond their philosophies or views on politics. We're talking about things like physiological responses when shown different kinds of words or images, and performance in neuroscience tests. Take just one recent example: Conservatives show stronger responses to negative and threatening stimuli (words like "vomit" and "disgust"). Could this also prompt more knee jerk reactions to scientific information that is perceived as threatening (or words like "evolution")?

The point is not necessarily that the answer is yes, but rather that it is reasonable to ask questions like these. The root causes of our political differences are now under intensive exploration by multiple different research groups, which are churning out quite a lot of published, peer reviewed science. And while this work is surely not complete (science never is), it is also unlikely to be just plain wrong. Indeed, after having spent the past year reading this research and interviewing the scientists producing it, I can confidently say that those seven studies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Here's the bottom line: An increasing body of science suggests that we disagree about politics not for intellectual or philosophical reasons, but because we have fundamentally different ways of responding to the basic information presented to us by the world. These are often ways of which we are not even aware--automatic, subconscious--but that color all of our perceptions, and that effectively drive us apart politically.

What's more, what is true for how we come to our opinions about politics is also, assuredly, true for how we approach "facts" that are perceived to have some bearing on the validity of our political opinions--whether those facts are scientific, economic, historical or even theological in nature.

Thus far--and not surprisingly--conservatives don't seem so fond of the emerging science of our politics. They seem to consider it demeaning--yet another slight aimed at them by "liberal" academia.