Instant Genius - Science denial, with Lee McIntyre

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

Lee tells us about why science denial is on the rise, from flat-Earthers to anti-vaxxers, and where conspiracy theories come from in the first place. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic, Specialist Focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. And in this episode, I'm joined by Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Lee's new book, How to Talk to a Science supplier, takes a close look at the rise in misinformation

and how it's come to affect so many different parts of the national conversation, from the climate crisis to vaccination to politics. Okay, so first off, I suppose the kind of first, most obvious, almost very basic question in a way is why why should we study science denial instead of just, you know, ignore it and try and move on? The problem with ignoring science denial is that it gets worse. And it doesn't just get worse in the sense that it deepens about the things where people are already deniers, but it sort of metastasizes to other topics by creating a denialist culture. for many years we've ignored science denial on a number of topics and it really hasn't gone away and so one of the i suppose most famous examples of that is probably uh the sort of the flat earth

conspiracy theory which uh by all regards seems to have grown in in the last few decades is that is that is that the case it is flat earth has been around for a long time i mean uh famous many thousands of years. But modern flat earth had its heyday in the 19th century, early 20th century, and then, but we didn't hear much of it. But in recent decades, it has exploded. There are, an insignificant portion of the population in Brazil. I think it's something like 7 or 8 percent believe that the earth is flat. I don't know statistics in any other countries, but I mean, I went to a flat earth conference in Denver, Colorado, in November 2018, there were 650 people there. And I mean, that was just a smattering of the number of people worldwide. And so my feeling is,

if there are that many people who will, you know, fly to a conference for flat earth, that's just the tip of the iceberg, not only in that topic, but in other types of denial as well. So that was really for me the point where I thought we have got to take this seriously. You know, has it really come to this? I mean, climate change, anti-vax, flat earth, has it really come to this? Okay, now it's time to really see what we can do. And so you went to that conference, I think it was in 2019. and so just before obviously everything shut down.

And you, in the book you sort of lay out that you sort of, you went with the attention to try and convince, not necessarily go and just shout at them until they believed otherwise, but to see if you could convince anyone or start a dialogue with anyone that might change their minds. How did that experience go and did it go the way you expected? Yeah, it was actually November 2018. I was a bit of an early adopter on this. And I didn't go just to convince someone, though that would have been terrific. I mean, that would have made a good story in the book. But I understood even going in, that was a very tough thing to do. There's some work in social psychology which shows that beliefs are reinforced by our peers and that when you're in a community of your peers, you're especially unlikely to change your mind if they all believe the same thing.

So I told myself that the real purpose of the visit was to learn. I wanted to learn how they reasoned because my theory going in is that all science denial was the same, that they all used the same reasoning strategy, and that if I could learn how to talk to flat earthers and get them to listen to me, then I could talk to other science scenarios who are much more dangerous on topics like climate change. And what I discovered is that I could get them to listen, but I had to listen first.

I couldn't shout at them. I couldn't share any facts that were going to change their mind. But what I could do is be patient, calm, show respect, listen. And then they were actually curious to hear what I had to say about their beliefs. And a little bit flustered because what I wanted to talk about was not the quote unquote evidence for flat earth, which they had in abundance, you know, which what they thought counted for evidence. Instead, I wanted to talk about how they were reasoning on the basis of the evidence, why they were inconsistent in their standards, wasn't some of the evidence cherry-picked,

who was behind this vast conspiracy theory. So, you know, I was going at it like a philosopher. I'm a philosopher, not a physicist. So I wasn't arguing physics with them. I was arguing logic. And it stopped them. It upset them. You could see that they have their talking points ready to go.

And what they were not prepared for is for somebody to say, well, okay, but if this is about evidence, then what evidence would prove you would. wrong. They didn't like that question because they couldn't answer it. And so I thought, aha, this is my entree. This is my point. And they were very willing to listen and to talk. I had a two-hour dinner with one of the main speakers and numerous, numerous conversations. They were very social, very interested in talking about flat earth. What did you come away thinking? Did you come away thinking that it is actually better to

and that you can sort of counter people's science denial, or that there is a school of thought that actually if you try and argue against someone who's a denies science or a conspiracy theorist, that actually you can make it worse? It's always better to engage, always. Because most basically, science denial is about alienation and distrust. and identity. So by engaging with them, you're creating a new community. You're showing that, you know, there is room for them on a different team than the one that they've been polarized

into believing that they can trust other folks. And so I think it's always better to engage rather than to walk away. Now, there's some empirical evidence to back this up. There was a paper in the summer of 19 in nature, human behavior that provided the first empirical evidence to show that you could actually get science deniers to change their mind about their beliefs on the basis of both talking about the way that they were reasoning, which is called technique rebuttal, but also based on scientific facts sometimes, which is called content rebuttal. So that is possible. And the thing that you're referring to there at the end in your question is something called the backfire effect, which was based on a study in 2010 by Brendan Nyen and Jason Reefler,

in which they found that they took partisans who had a mistaken belief, and then they presented them with irrefutable correcting evidence to show that they were wrong. And their main finding was didn't matter. People, for the most part, were not going to change their mind. Now, one small part of their finding was that perversely, some of the most partisan folks, not only wouldn't change their mind, but would double down on their original belief, which is to say that the disconfirming evidence confirmed their belief, not just that it didn't disconfirm it, but that it confirmed their belief, which is ridiculous. Later researchers tried to replicate that finding and could not.

And Nied and Rieffler joined them later to say, yes, that was probably, I mean, it was statistically significant in their study, but it was, since it was unreproducible, it was a unicorn. It was this thing that, you know, flitted across, you know, did we see it or didn't we see it? Is it real? And so the good news there is that you can't make it worse by talking to a science denier. You cannot make it worse by engaging with them. Now, if you do it in the wrong way, you can burn your opportunity, you know, if you yell at them, if you call them stupid. That was a hard thing at the Flat Earth Convention because they would say, the first day I was incognito, they thought I was one of them.

I didn't speak very much. And they would talk about how painful it was for people to call them idiots or stupid. stupid or dismissive. And because they really thought that they knew the truth and they were trying to share it with the world and they were being attacked. And that's another important thing to remember about science denial. When you attack their beliefs, you're attacking them as a person because they're not holding their beliefs on the basis of evidence where they have the flexibility of mind to

just give it up if the evidence is sufficient. They hold it to their core. It's who they are. So when you attack that belief, you have to be very careful in how you approach it, because just even questioning their belief can be seen as a direct insult. So it sounds like it really does boil down to that sense of community, opening that door to say to someone that, you know, you don't have to belong to this or that community.

You're just as welcome in this one as you're on that one, because out there in the flat earth conventions, they have a very close-knit group, and they feel part of something, and people who attack it from the outside can be quite scary to them. Is that at the core of kind of what you think is most powerful when you're trying to confront science denial?

I think it is, and it's important to remember that science denial exists on a spectrum. Some people are hardcore deniers. Some people are just, they don't know what to think. They're raising questions. but they can be pushed. They can become radicalized. You know, they may start off with videos on YouTube and a few questions. By the time they get to a convention, they become radicalized. And that's something that the rest of us have to keep in mind. So if we have a relative who has been exposed to

disinformation about COVID vaccines or about vaccines in general, they've probably got a lot of fear. They've got a lot of confusion and misunderstanding, and they're looking for reliable information. And if they come to you, or they come to anyone who says to them, well, I'm surprised at you. How could you believe that? What an idiot. Don't you believe scientists? That's just going to alienate them. And then where are they going to go? They're going to go on Google and start looking for information and find all of these fancy websites and this plethora of people who are telling them, no, no, you're exactly right to be skeptical. You know, and by the way, you know, here are all of these other people who agree with you. Now, it takes a very strong person to then continue to be

skeptical of that new information. But, you know, so they might just get sucked in. It's called going down the rabbit hole. You watch one flat earth video and your YouTube feed gives you 20 more. And then you might wonder, well, there must be something to this. Look at all these people. What do you think have been the contributing factors to what to many of us seems like a growing or a rise in the amount of science denial in the last decade? The internet is one of the worst things that could happen because science denial has been around for a long, long time. It used to be that the folks who thought that we hadn't gone to the moon could stand out on a street corner and hand out a mimeograph sheet and maybe reach a few people. Now they have websites, now they have conventions.

And it's unfortunately, you know, if you read Daniel Conneman, you understand, thinking fast and slow, you understand that cognitive biases are built into the human brain. We are not naturally good at reasoning about empirical evidence, which is one reason that science is so wonderful, because it's this process by which we overcome our natural human tendencies to jump to all sorts of conclusions and believe what we want to believe, et cetera. But cognitive bias is built into all of us. And unfortunately, once the disinformation and propaganda is out there, a certain percentage of people are going to believe it. It's like the cognitive bias is the dry kindling, and the match is somewhere out there, and the Internet is the gasoline, which enables that disinformation to spread far and wide. and that is the horror, right? Because all of a sudden, the intentional lies are able to take root.

And I think it's important to point out here that science denial is not a mistake, it's a lie. It's not that people just have a few questions or that they've thought up something that troubles them. It's that they are actively disinformed by people who have something. to gain by creating this army of disbelievers on whatever topic they want. Climate change, you can sort of understand, you know, what the special interests are there. COVID, a little harder to understand what the special interests are there, and especially the hypocrisy that some of the folks who are spreading the disinformation are people who have been vaccinated. Nonetheless, that is how it's done. The disinformation is created by, the disinformation is created

by people that have an economic or a political or an ideological interest. They spread it through the internet. And most people that we would call science scenarios are actually victims. They're just folks who were recruited cognitively without their knowledge to believe these falsehoods. And that brings me really nicely to this is a fascinating point in the book where you you sort of identify perhaps the birth of modern science denial, because you know, you touched number four, but I think it's been around for a long time. But could you just tell us about that idea that it perhaps has its roots of the 50s?

Yeah, this is a fascinating story that's really well told in Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's book, Merchants of Doubt. And they talk there about a group of tobacco executives in the mid-1950s who were just mortified that there was a scientific study about to be published, which drew an all-but-definitive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. And this would have been horrid for their business, and they wanted to know what to do about it. So they booked a spot at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, and they brought in a famous

a public relations expert and asked him, what should we do? And his advice was fight the science. Don't ever admit that this study is well done. Raise as much doubt about it as you can. Hire your own scientists to pooh-poo the study. Take out full-page ads in newspapers, which is how they did it before the internet. That campaign reached something like a sixth of the people in the United States and was responsible for creating doubt where there really wasn't any. And the scientists just sort of got blindsided. I mean, how do you fight back against that? Well, and remember, all the cigarette companies needed was enough doubt to continue to sell cigarettes for the next 50 years, which succeeded. They didn't need to show that cigarette smoking

didn't cause lung cancer. They needed to show that it hadn't been proven, which of course it hadn't, because science cannot prove anything. It's not deductive logic or Euclidean geometry. But was there overwhelming evidence that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer? Absolutely. But all they needed was to raise enough doubt that people doubt it, that people could doubt it. And think of it this way, especially if they were smokers, especially if that old confirmation bias was, or motivated reason it actually is in their brain. So they wanted to find a reason to think that it wasn't actually dangerous. And they found it. Some of the cigarette advertising at the time, if you look back, is just either laughable or horrifying depending on how you want to look at it,

talking about the health benefits of smoking or which cigarette was safer than the others. that had been the big debate amongst the tobacco companies in the 50s, whose cigarette was safer, which one was better? And they decided, no, no, now we need to circle the wagons because we're all under attack. And so they started a precursor to the American Tobacco Institute and hired industry scientists who just put out a plethora of, you know, a word I can't say on the BBC. to try to convince people that this good science was not true. And by the way, that was the blueprint for all subsequent science denial. In the next 60 years, they all followed what's called the tobacco strategy.

And listening to you talk about it, it does definitely reverberates, I think, with the current tone of politics today. it seems we are entering a sort of you hear this phrase but which sounds like a fancy way of describing lying but a post-truth world and particularly the word doubt do you see that do you see that those strategies being used by politicians to introduce just that little piece of doubt i not only think that's true i wrote a book called post-truth in which i argued that the sort of, I define post-truth as the political subordination of reality. And it didn't start with the Trump administration or what was going on with Brexit in your country, but they were the result of it, of this beginning to wonder whether you could raise enough doubt that you could provide this alternative narrative that would get people to believe it, even though it wasn't true.

And what I argued in my book Post-Truth was that the model for that was science denial. The model for that was, you know, suppose you had political operatives who said, how can we possibly get people to believe what we want them to believe? Wait a minute.

It's already been done. Look what they did with climate change. Look what they did with cigarettes. If we can get people to doubt that, let's get them to doubt anything we want. Then Donald Trump enters the picture in November 2016, or actually, you know, before then, this fog of lies. But even just consider the first couple of days of his presidency. His inauguration was bigger than Barack Obama, as he said, even though you could tell from

photographic evidence that it wasn't. He said that it didn't rain on his inauguration speech, although it did. That is textbook tobacco strategy. That is, he, He provided an alternative narrative and just bullied it through. And this is new. This is the little gloss that was added to it. That was in service of what I identified at the time and others did as an authoritarian agenda. Because it wasn't just about raising doubt. It was about creating an army of believers in your point of view, because if you could get them to believe what you told them,

it would be easier to be an autocrat and get away with what you wanted to do. And the people at the time may have laughed at that. I mean, Post-Truth came out pretty early. It was one of the first books with that title. My book was. But there had been an earlier book by a historian, Timothy Snyder, who had a wonderful quotation. He said, post-truth is pre-fascism. And as people were saying, oh,

how could you say this? Well, a few years later, what happened? Trump spread the lie. They now over here call it the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. There is zero evidence for this. But nonetheless, there is enough people are raising questions. People have doubts.

And then the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we've now got people in the U.S. Congress who are saying that these were just tourists. This was just a peaceful protest. Absolutely outrageously ridiculous. We have photographic evidence of what happened. It is the tobacco strategy. There are other routes to post-truth,

but I think the tap route, the main cause, was science denial. It was extremely successful. So then just lastly on this part, I'd love to know what you think about where this goes from here because the book is a great, There's a great summary of, you know, the different types of science denial that we're facing at the moment, whether it's climate change, flat earthers or anti-vaccination, and also the contributing factors to that. But where, you know, where do you see it heading and do you think we're able to find a way to curb the misinformation and to bring people back onside? This is the thing that worries me more than any other.

because today is the launch day for my new book, and it's about how to talk to science deniers face-to-face one-on-one. But even if we had an army of people doing that, which I think would do a world of good, it still would not be sufficient to overcome the problem. Because remember what I said earlier, the human brain is the kindling, all of this built-in cognitive bias. And so trying to go through and put out each individual fire as we find it is an exhausting task that we may succeed in, but it would also be good to understand, you know, to get rid of some of this accelerant, right, to push the analogy till it breaks, to, you know, to find some way to keep this disinformation from getting out there. because it is inevitable that when you present propaganda and disinformation, some people will believe it.

And then it's good news that you can go out and get some of them to overcome that. But wouldn't it be better if they had never gotten into this in the first place? And this is what I'm now thinking about, what I'm worrying about. Because what I was talking about earlier with this information makes one realize that it does not take that many people to create disinformation, to do a horrible amount of damage. They found recently that 65% of the anti-vax disinformation on Twitter was due to 12 people. So what can we do in a situation like that? I mean, can we, can't we do something about the disinformation problem? Isn't there anything that we can do? Looking at the horrible damage, I mean,

People are dying. You know, people are literally paying with their lives for believing these charlatans who are making up this disinformation. And so I've thought about how to put this that captures the idea. It's time to stop asking why do people believe such crazy things and start asking who wants them to believe it. And I think that will help us because with the tobacco companies, with climate change, it's easy to see who wants people to believe that cigarette smoking doesn't cause cancer or that climate change isn't real. You don't need to push too hard to figure out who they are. But who would want people not to believe in the COVID vaccine?

Who would want, you know, scads of people to die and all the discord that we're seeing? And the answer is that some of the anti-COVID propaganda has been coming out of foreign governments. Russian intelligence has been responsible for some of the disinformation on COVID, both to create chaos in American society, which they've done, but also because they've got a competing COVID vaccine and, you know, didn't want, you know, Pfizer and Moderna to run the world. And I published something about this recently and got an unbelievable volume of hate mail and ridicule from, you know, folks on the quote unquote other side.

He said, oh, the Russians, it's always the Russians. But if you do a little digging, you'll see that this is an open secret. the American intelligence agencies understand that Russia is running a disinformation campaign around scientific issues, as they have for decades. Russia was respond, and Iran and China were responsible for some of the scientific disinformation on climate change, on, you know, various things. Russia was responsible for quite a bit of the homegrown skepticism about genetically modified foods. Why do they do this? But I think that if you think about it for a minute, you understand

precisely why they do this. And this closes the circle with your earlier question on post-truth. It serves other people's interest to see the Americans at one another's throat across red and blue state America, no matter what the issue is. Is it over a stolen election, over whether the COVID vaccine is going to help or harm us over whether the food that we're eating is safe. If people can create distrust in Americans to American institutions, then our society, my society, is hobbled and can't spend as much time, you know, on foreign affairs. And some people have accused me of saying, well, oh, this is just another conspiracy theory. except there's some evidence for this from American intelligence.

And now you can say, oh, but why trust them? That's just post-truth. That's just the idea that there's, you know, you don't want to trust the truth tellers because they're telling you something that, you know, your side is telling you is not the case. That was Lee McIntyre there, talking about why misinformation is on the rise. If you'd like to hear Lee and I dig a little deeper into the world of science denial and hear about a physicist who's built a model in which flat-earthers can test their theories firsthand, check out Instant Genius Extra, a bonus podcast available via subscription on Apple's podcast app.

And of course, if you want to learn more about science denial, check out Lee's book, How to Talk to a Science Denier, which is on sale now and published by MIT Press. Thanks for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com. See you next time. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes. you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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