so important! Elaine Walker this is also deeply related to the culture wars around the nature of knowledge, evidence, and how we think about uncertainty... Matthew Remski Daniel Schmachtenberger Rene Tschannen Dearbhla Kelly Frank Jude Boccio Amber Luckycosmos He’s also written a series of papers dealing with how people process information, either rejecting or accepting science. When I asked about the relationship, Lewandowsky replied,”The underlying ‘theme’ — if there is one — is how people respond to uncertainty or ambiguity. What the uncertainty papers analyze is how people should respond to uncertainty if they were mathematically-optimal. What my rejection-and-acceptance work shows is how people actually respond to things they perceive to be uncertain. So the two streams of research are opposing sides of the coin — what reality actually means and how people interpret it.” There’s also quite a bit more controversy surrounding this work — some of it intellectual, some anti-intellectual. In a 2012 paper, “The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science,” Lewandowsky and his co-authors reported on two studies. The first showed that acceptance of several scientific propositions — including the acceptance of HIV causing AIDS, smoking causing lung cancer, and human CO2 emissions causing global warming — were all manifestations of a common factor, which in turn is correlated with a factor reflecting perceived scientific consensus. In short, the more that people perceived scientific consensus, the more they accepted scientific findings. The second study demonstrated a causal relationship, showing that acceptance of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW) increases when the scientific consensus is highlighted. Subjects were divided into two groups, the “control” group subjects “greatly underestimated the AGW consensus” at 67 percent, while the second group, exposed to a graph and text highlighting the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists, still underestimated the consensus, but by much less — placing it at 88 percent. Not only did acceptance of global warming increase, the most dramatic finding was the neutralization of the effect of worldview, which otherwise had a significant impact. While there were significant differences due to worldview in the control group, the differences were “effectively nonexistent” for those exposed to consensus information, even though that information was only partially absorbed.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 19:21:11 +0000
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