COLUMBUS, Ohio – Liberal or conservative – we tend to distrust science that doesn’t agree with our political views.
That is the conclusion a couple of OSU researchers are drawing from their study of how people from both the left and right viewed science when they were presented with facts that challenged specific politicized issues.
They found that people on both sides of the political spectrum feel negative emotions when they read about science that challenges their views, like fracking for liberals and climate change for conservatives and both tended to resist facts that challenged their political beliefs, said Erik Nisbet, co-author of the study and associate professor of communication and political science at OSU.
While Nesbit says the reactions of conservatives was stronger, the results of his study challenge claims that conservatives alone have difficulty dealing with scientific fact.
“Liberals are also capable of processing scientific information in a biased manner. They aren’t inherently superior to conservatives,” he said.
Co-written with R. Kelly Garrett, also an associate professor of communication at Ohio State, and graduate student Kathryn Cooper, the study appears in the March 2015 issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
In the study, 1,518 people from across the country were asked true-false questions about science to see how they reacted to facts that challenged the views of conservatives and liberals, as well as non-controversial areas like geology and astronomy.
Nesbit says both liberals and conservatives felt more negative emotions when they read the scientific pages that challenged their views, though the reaction of conservatives was four times greater than that of liberals.
While both tended to resist facts that challenged their political beliefs, conservatives reacted more strongly than liberals, Nesbit said.
That could be because the issues that challenge conservatives are currently more polarizing in society and have received more media coverage, said Garrett, but the researchers found it disturbing that both sides lose some trust in science when it is applied to polarizing issues.