Science and the doubting conservatives
1 April 2012 (Los Angeles Times) – With so many scientific issues becoming battlefields in the culture wars — from climate change to stem-cell research to evolution (see above) — we hardly needed a new study to tell us that scientists have become a favorite target of the right. Yet a paper written by University of North Carolina doctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat and published last week in the American Sociological Review also contains a highly counterintuitive finding. Common sense, as well as past research, suggests that distrust of science correlates with lack of education; the less education a person has, the more likely he or she will favor traditional beliefs or religious dogma over scientific evidence. There’s even an academic name for this theory: the “deficit model” of scientific literacy. When it comes to modern conservatives, however, the deficit model does not apply. Analyzing results from the General Social Survey, which has been conducted by the University of Chicago‘s National Opinion Research Center since 1972, Gauchat found that for conservatives with college degrees, trust in science declined more over time than it did for conservatives with only a high school degree. (This was not true for liberals or moderates, whose views on science have been relatively static for decades.) How did this happen? […]
