Denialists: What, Me Worry? (Part 1 of 2)

Here are three reasons why facts alone aren’t enough. 

We can look at science all day, but many folks – a LOT of folks, especially Americans, continue to deny climate science.  We might look at the disproportionate way in which big American money is funding the climate denial movement, much the way the tobacco industry resisted health warnings on cigarette boxes, and sought to raise doubt about health risks. 

The politics of denial is a topic for another time.  Right now, we’re just looking at the individual as part of a group, and the psychology, sociology and biology of it if you will.  So in the next two posts we’ll look at three contributing factors to denialism. 

1.      Equality Bias

I once worked with someone who was (still is) the nicest guy in the world.  He really is.  Brilliant too.  The problem was that whenever we leaders sat around our table solving the problems of the universe (or of the organization, at least), he’d always take a middle ground position, no matter how hair-brained someone on one side of the issue was being.  He is a gentle man and probably did this to protect feelings.  It seems reasonable.  It appears fair.  Even when someone is a crackpot. 

Chris Mooney, in his Washington Post column, The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal, details this very phenomenon.  Apparently it is a thing, it has a name, and it’s called equality bias.

 [Psychologists have] shown that people have an “equality bias” when it comes to competence or expertise, such that even when it’s very clear that one person in a group is more skilled, expert, or competent (and the other less), they are nonetheless inclined to seek out a middle ground in determining how correct different viewpoints are.

Chris Mooney

The study is recent, multi-national, and shows similar results across cultures.  You can read the study here.

Mooney describes in accessible terms how the study was conducted.  The bottom line is this:

[H]uman groups (especially in the United States) err much more in the direction of giving everybody a say than in the direction of deferring too much to experts. And that’s quite obviously harmful on any number of issues, especially in science, where what experts know really matters and lives or the world depend on it — like vaccinations or climate change. 

It’s only “fair,” right?  We see it in interviews, where one climate change believer (often Bill Nye the Science Guy), is juxtaposed with a single denier, when the reality is that 97% of scientists agree human-caused climate change is real and an immediate threat.  John Oliver illustrated this humourously in a video I featured last time. 

Next time: The other two reasons why facts are not enough: 2) our wiring and 3) our tribe