The influence of political ideology on trust in science

By Aaron M. McCright, Katherine Dentzman, Meghan Charters, Thomas Dietz. Environmental Research Letters, 2013

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, some scholars, journalists, and science advocates have promoted broad claims that ‘conservatives distrust science’ or ‘conservatives oppose science’. We argue that such claims may oversimplify in ways that lead to empirical inaccuracies. The Anti-Reflexivity Thesis suggests a more nuanced examination of how political ideology influences views about science. The Anti-Reflexivity Thesis hypothesizes that some sectors of society mobilize to defend the industrial capitalist order from the claims of environmentalists and some environmental scientists that the current economic system causes serious ecological and public health problems. The Anti-Reflexivity Thesis expects that conservatives will report significantly less trust in, and support for, science that identifies environmental and public health impacts of economic production (i.e., impact science) than liberals. It also expects that conservatives will report a similar or greater level of trust in, and support for, science that provides new inventions or innovations for economic production (i.e., production science) than liberals. Analyzing data from a recent survey experiment with 798 adults recruited from the US general public, our results confirm the expectations of the Anti-Reflexivity Thesis. Conservatives report less trust in impact scientists but greater trust in production scientists than their liberal counterparts. We argue that further work that increases the accuracy and depth of our understanding of the relationship between political ideology and views about science is likely crucial for addressing the politicized science-based issues of our age.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e8c381b8b81cb286bc461843e06a88ef28f7909

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Jayson L. Lusk
2. B. McFadden

In Sociology and Political Science

1. S. Yu
2. Jieun Lee
3. Jayson L. Lusk
4. B. McFadden
5. Ali Abdallah Alalwan

Citations in the corpus

• Cognitive Biases in the Assimilation of Scientific Information on Global Warming and Genetically Modified Food (2015, background): “Complicating the issue, the Anti-Reflexivity Thesis (McCright et al., 2013) posits that conservatives will trust science that provides innovations for economic production (i.e., GM crops) and distrust science that identifies negative impacts of economic production (i.e., GW), and liberals will behav”
• The Effects of Consumers’ Perceived Values on Intention to Purchase Upcycled Products (2019, background): “In recent years, M Turk has emerged as a practical way for recruiting a large number of respondents for online experiments from a reasonably wide cross‐section of the general public, considerably more diverse than the traditional recruitment pool of university undergraduates [65].”