The Partisan Brain

Abstract

There has been deepening concern about political polarization in public attitudes toward the scientific community. The “intrinsic thesis” attributes this polarization to psychological deficiencies among conservatives as compared to liberals. The “contextual thesis” makes no such claims about inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, but rather points to interacting institutional and psychological factors as the forces driving polarization. We evaluate the evidence for both theses in the context of developing and testing a theoretical model of audience response to dissonant science communication. Conducting a national online experiment ( N = 1,500), we examined audience reactions to both conservative-dissonant and liberal-dissonant science messages and consequences for trust in the scientific community. Our results suggest liberals and conservatives alike react negatively to dissonant science communication, resulting in diminished trust of the scientific community. We discuss how our findings link to the larger debate about political polarization of science and implications for science communicators.

Finding the traces of behavioral and cognitive processes in big data and naturally occurring datasets

“…Because conflicts among scientists erode public trust in science in the United States (Nisbet, Cooper, & Garrett, 2015; this may not hold for other countries, though: cf. Andersson, 2015), recent concerns over reproducibility in psychology (e.g., Open Science Collaboration, 2015) and other scientific fields (e.g., Gezelter, 2015; Peng, 2015) are making transparency and openness increasingly important.…”

Responding to Climate Change Skepticism and the Ideological Divide

“…As an illustration, conservative respondents report a lower likelihood of purchasing an energy efficient product if it is framed as reducing carbon emissions (Dietz, Leshko, and McCright, 2013). Similarly, distrust of science and scientists may be due, in part, to conservatives interpreting scientific findings as being contradictory to their ideology; research has found that liberals react similarly to dissonant scientific messaging (Nisbet, Cooper, and Garrett 2015). The distrust is aimed at "impact scientists," who assess environmental and public impacts of economic production, while "production scientists," who research new technology and advancements that support economic production, are more trusted .…”

“Maybe Yes, Maybe No?”: Testing the Indirect Relationship of News Use through Ambivalence and Strength of Policy Position on Public Engagement with Climate Change

“…For instance, research has shown that hearing information that supports scientific consensus surrounding climate change (i.e., coverage on network news and liberal outlets) increases trust in scientists, beliefs that climate change is happening, and support for climate change mitigation policies (Feldman, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Leiserowitz, 2012;Hmielowski, Feldman, Myers, Leiserowitz, & Maibach, 2014;Nisbet, Cooper, & Garrett, 2015). By contrast, media that question the validity of climate scientists (i.e., coverage on conservative outlets such as Fox News) tend to decrease levels of all of these variables Hmielowski et al, 2014).…”