Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus

Abstract

Scholars have maintained that public attitudes often diverge from expert consensus due to ideology-driven motivated reasoning. However, this is not a sufficient explanation on less salient and politically-charged questions. I argue that more attention needs to be given to anti-intellectualism – the generalized mistrust of intellectuals and experts. I make three main contributions using the General Social Survey and a survey of 3,600 Americans on Amazon Mechanical Turk. First, I provide evidence of a strong association between anti-intellectualism and opposition to scientific positions on climate change, nuclear power, GMOs, and water fluoridation, particularly for respondents with higher levels of political interest. Second, I conduct a survey experiment to show that anti-intellectualism moderates the acceptance expert consensus cues such that respondents with high levels of anti-intellectualism actually increase their opposition to these positions in response. Third, I connect anti-intellectualism to populism – a worldview that sees political conflict as primarily between ordinary citizens and a privileged societal elite. I show that exposure to randomly assigned populist rhetoric – even that which does not pertain to experts directly – primes anti-intellectual predispositions among respondents in the processing of expert consensus cues. These findings suggest that rising anti-elite rhetoric may make anti-intellectual sentiment more salient in information processing.

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