Speaking of Psychology - The psychology of science denial, doubt and disbelief, with Gale Sinatra, PhD, and Barbara Hofer, PhD

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

On hot-button topics such as climate change, vaccines and genetically modified foods, science denial is rampant – and it crosses party and ideological lines. What are the psychological forces that lead people to disbelieve scientific consensus?  Is science denial worse than it’s ever been? How have the internet and social media changed the landscape of science skepticism? Psychologists Barbara Hofer of Middlebury College and Gale Sinatra of the University of Southern California, authors of the book “Science Denial: Why it Happens and What to Do About it,” discuss these and other questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation has often seemed to spread as fast as a virus itself. Millions of people have disregarded scientists' advice on vaccines and masks and tried unproven and potentially unsafe treatments. It's the latest, but far from the only example of science denial and of how public doubt and disbelief of science can harm people's health and the health of the planet. Science has become polarized and politicized, but science denial crosses party lines. On hot-button topics such as vaccines, climate change, and genetically modified foods, people across the political spectrum are susceptible to the psychological forces that lead them to disbelieve what scientists are telling them and to seek out information that confirms

rather than challenges their biases. So what are these psychological forces? Why do people doubt and deny scientific findings? Is science denial worse now than it's ever been? Does the American public trust scientists or look upon them with suspicion? How have the Internet and social media magnified science skepticism. And what can scientists, science communicators, and science educators do to help people gain a more accurate understanding of how science works. Welcome to speaking of psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. We have two guests today who are co-authors of a new book called Science Denial, Why It Happens and What to Do About It, Published

in July by Oxford University Press. First is Dr. Gail Sinatra, a professor of psychology and education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. Dr. Sinatra's recent research focuses on understanding the role that motivation and emotion play in teaching and learning about controversial science topics such as evolution and climate change. She's a fellow of APA's Division of Educational Psychology and is chair of the association's current task force on climate change. We're also joined by Dr. Barbara Hofer, a professor emerita of psychology at Middlebury College in Vermont. Dr. Hofer studies psychological aspects of the public understanding of science, including what's called epistemic cognition, or how people develop their beliefs about

knowledge and knowing, as well as psychological explanations for science denial, doubt, and resistance. She's also an APA fellow. Thank you both for joining us today to talk about this timely topic. Thank you. Thank you for having us. So let's start with the question I posed in my introduction. Is science denial worse now than it's ever been? You point out in the book that it has a long history going back at least to Galileo, and you've both been studying this topic for many years. Does science denial seem more prevalent to you now than when you started doing this research? Yeah, I think it's fascinating for us to think about when we began the book and what has happened since then. And I think a couple things stand out to us. One is that science denial is so amplifying. by social media. And that's new. Certainly, that wasn't the case for many of the other periods of science denial that we know about. But it's so amplified in the way that social media sends it out and it travels around the world so rapidly that the disinformation problem is enormous. But the other thing for us is that it is now deadly. There is no other time in history that we can think about

science denial causing so many deaths. I mean, the people who are dead. I mean, the people who are denying to the grave right now. We have so many examples of people who are on ventilators and who are still resisting the fact that it could possibly be COVID because they believe it's a hoax. That's deeply, deeply troubling. And it has impeded our progress in dealing with a pandemic as well as with climate change. We really worry about the way that this has stopped us from getting the solutions we need to both of those problems as well as many others. Dr. Sanatra, do you agree? Is it worse today because of social media? Well, there's no doubt that we are in our information bubbles. And if you are getting disinformation

in your information bubble due to the algorithms that the social media platforms use, then it's possible that you are being inundated with dis and misinformation. And that is what has amplified this. Back before we had the internet, you would probably talk to you. your neighbors. You'd probably talk to your community or church members or school board members, and you might all have different points of view and you might hear all these different points of you. But now we live in like-minded communities and we're in like-minded social media and online news media bubbles. And you're not hearing different points of view that much. And so people aren't getting the pushback against the dis and misinformation that perhaps they used to get

in the past. And that is what has amplified this phenomenon. And you can think about algorithms as just a basic organizing principle of digital life. And so when you like something, it's going to send you more of what you like. That's what happens on Facebook. And yet, most people are not even really aware of how that works. You know, algorithms are proprietary information owned by Google or or whoever it is, we don't know exactly how they're feeding us information. And many people think that other people are seeing exactly what they're seeing. They don't realize they're living in an echo chamber. They don't realize how the filter bubbles are sending them back an amplification of what they've already thought about and believed. So on the one hand, we have all this access to information,

so potentially we could be seeing a lot of good things. But all you have to do is click on one wacko thing and the next thing you know, you're getting more misinformation, more stuff that has really not been scientifically tested. That's what you're saying. Yes, we thought the internet would democratize information access and in some ways it has done that, but it's also democratized dis and misinformation and propaganda. And that is creating these information bubbles and people living within psychological states of confusion, doubt, denial, and science resistance. You know, some of the Pew Research that's gone on this has even advocated for algorithmic literacy. It's been so disturbing how few people really understand what's being fed back to them.

And I've done some studies where students have, I've had students search for various topics that we know are controversial. And I've had some of the students in my lab pretend, for example, to be an elementary school kid who wants to know if dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. A pretty basic question. And yet they were shocked to find out that seven out of the top 10 websites that came back to them confirmed that that was the case. Because there are a number of organizations like the Creation Museum that have given all the money to figure out how to get their results to come up really high.

And these students were saying to me, we always thought, and these are college students. We thought that the top 10 hits were somehow verified, reliable, trustworthy. Those are not factors that filter into Google at all. That is just not how it works. So people've learned how to game the system, even if they don't know exactly how the algorithms work, they know how to play the game in order to get you to see that. And then there are websites like procon.org that they thought were really reliable because it's an organizational site.

And yet when you go on there, they'll give you 10 reasons pro, 10 reasons con for any topic, whether that is climate change, for example. You can find 10 reasons why, yes, maybe it's human caused and 10 reasons why it might not. So it's not hard to understand why people are having a really hard time ferreting out what might be true, valid, reliable, et cetera. Dr. Sanatra, let me ask you this. In the book you write about some of the problems with the way that we teach science in K through 12, What are we doing wrong and what needs to change about the way we teach children science?

Well, that's a great question, Kim. Traditionally, science was taught as a collection of facts in your textbook. And that's been changing, but needs to change even more. The next generation science standards, which are the recommended standards for teaching science in K through 12, recommend teaching science as not a collection of facts, but as a process. So they talk about how scientists know and teaching students to ask and answer their own questions. These are scientific practices. And this is a much more productive way to teach science.

Unfortunately, only a handful of states have adopted the next generation science standards. As you know, education standards are locally adopted. there's not a national standard. So these standards are recommended, but not fully adopted by all states. But we would definitely say teaching science as a process, engaging students in that process, and having them ask and answer their own questions is a much better approach to teaching science. And I think the other thing we talk about in the book is that we really think that students ought to be more exposed to some of the underlying assumptions of science as well. So, for example, scientists talk about tentativeness.

We do that in psychology. You know, we don't say we prove something. We say we provided support for it, but more studies are needed. When the lay public hears that, if they are not scientifically literate, they have a really hard time. They expect certainty. And I think what we've seen with what is a novel coronavirus, which means we've never seen it before, is that scientists were learning as we went along. Remember when we were all wiping down our groceries and we were concerned about how the disease was spreading? Because scientists didn't know yet. And yet people think that's flip-flopping. They think, wait a minute, they wanted us to wipe down our groceries and now they think we need to wear mask, but they didn't think we needed to wear mask back at the beginning. And they think that this is a problem with science. And in fact, this is how science works. They chip away at the problem and they've done it very quickly in this case. And yet people have been impatient with how things have changed and they don't. don't understand it. There was a lovely piece in the New York Times last week about the American

public getting a crash course in scientific uncertainty and that this is a crisis of scientific literacy, that they don't understand the average person in this country how it is that scientists make these claims and what they mean when they say this is tentative and we're continuing to discover and explore. Do you have advice for scientists to help them communicate their work in a way that would help the public better understand the situation? I mean, when you talk about a theory, people think that means that it's not been decided yet. But that's not what a theory means in science, right? Oh, yeah, I want to jump in on that one because I've actually done research on this with students thinking about evolution. And so, and these were really bright

college students. I'm going to say at the institution, the average SAT was 1440. And yet when I, when I ask them about evolutionary theory, what does theory mean in light of evolutionary theory? they almost every person, I think only 7% could define theory in scientific ways. The rest of them thought it was more like a hunch or a hypothesis. They really imagined the way I'd say, well, I have a theory about how I lost my keys, colloquially, they would think that's what evolutionary theory means. And so as a result, when I then asked them things like, should we be teaching intelligent design in schools, they would say, well, sure,

if there's more than one theory, we should teach both theories. And let the students decide. I mean, that's just deeply troubling. But also, scientists are not really, scientists are not really well trained, generally speaking, in communicating to the public. Scientists are trained in their discipline of science and to communicate that science to other scientists. That's what they do. They write geology articles in a geology and geoscience journal. But what we need to do is help science. as psychologists who understand interpersonal relationships and communications as well as anyone, we as psychologists need to help scientists understand their audience, understand how to communicate

to their audience, and to appreciate words like uncertain and theory and what the general public thinks those mean. So when they present their findings, they need to be clear about those findings and use language that the public can understand, but also not be too tentative when the evidence is overwhelming. So we shouldn't be tentative about human contributions to climate change because the IPCC report that just came out a couple of weeks ago has overwhelming evidence from hundreds of scientists and thousands of studies that show our contributions. So we really need to not be tentative about that for the public to understand how close to certain we are about the causes of climate change. And to be fair, most scientists are not trained in communicating

with the public, and many don't have the time. We also depend on science communicators, and we have been dismayed to see how that number is decreasing. So many newspapers 10, 15 years ago, had science sections and far fewer do now. And far fewer people are getting trained in how to communicate this information. And so a lot of it has to do with preparing science communicators to handle this well, training more science communicators, the translators, the people who can get out in the public and talk about the science in a knowledgeable, intelligible way. And of course, we all know their problems with headline writers. Most people don't write their own headlines. And we know what clickbait is now. We know that headlines. We know that headlines.

get written in some way that grabs the public attention. Gail and I loved a piece that came out in Harvard Magazine a few weeks ago that was about, now I'm not going to remember the exact headline, but it was about eating chocolate early in the morning causes you to lose weight. I mean, this is so ludicrous. And yet when you read the actual study, there were only 19 people in the study and the authors, of course, said these are tentative conclusions and this will need to be replicated. And yet so often, people will read one study like that and grab onto it. But before you start spreading chocolate on your toast for breakfast, you really want a little more information. And I think that's hard for people to understand too. And then also they think scientists are

flip-flopping again. Oh, they said this, then they said that. But they need to understand that what we're really looking for is what Gail talked about with the IPCC report. We're looking for a preponderance of information. We're looking for multiple studies that support something, not just one. I think we could do a better job also communicating a strength of science and psychological science is change. We don't treat people clinically the same way we did 50 years ago. The strength of a science is that it does change. And what we saw with coronavirus this past year is, is we saw the messy process of scientific change happening in real time, not opening a textbook and seeing facts, but the messy process of discovery and change in our thinking based on evidence.

And that's something we need to help the public understand that that's a strength of science. We shouldn't be teaching the science of 50 years ago. Well, so getting back to the media, would you say that they're the biggest problem when it comes to stoking science denial, or should we be blaming big business, which, for example, has misled the public regarding climate change and cigarettes, you know, just to name a few examples? Yeah. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway talk about manufacturing doubt, which is an enormous issue. And most of the general public is not aware that the kind of doubt they've experienced about whether tobacco causes cancer or whether climate change is human cause was doubt

that was manufactured by corporations that hired public relations firms to try to increase the doubt so that people wouldn't think, oh, I shouldn't smoke anymore, or I probably should buy an electric car or whatever. I should keep putting fuel in my tank because nobody knows for sure yet. So the kind of doubt that has been brewing in a lot of these fields was done by PR firms. And some of the same PR firms worked for RJ Reynolds and then for Exxon. And we need to be deeply suspicious of those sorts of things. I mean, we talk about denial, doubt, and resistance in our book, but we want people to stay skeptical. Skepticism is a healthy thing and that's something that's embedded in the scientific process. We should be very skeptical when we find out who

funded those kind of endeavors that keep us doubtful. So what are some of the psychological factors that lead to science denial? I mean, I think that what we're talking about is people are picking and choosing the things that they want to hear or believe in? So one of the things we've looked at are the cognitive biases that people have. And many listeners here will be familiar with confirmation bias, for example. So this is an implicit bias that leads us to attend to, remember, recall, those things that already align with the things that we believe. And it's very easy for all of us to think that we do that, to know that we do that.

So one of the things we try to do in the book is not make this an us and them kind of argument that, you know, we, none of us deny science, but everybody else does. The issue is that we all have these cognitive biases. So you can think about the next time that you're searching for something that you want to know. And if you already have an idea about what you'd like to find and what you believe, and you stop searching once you find confirmation of what you believe, that's confirmation bias. And what Daniel Connaman talks about, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks about System 1 and System 2, you know, that when we do System 1 thinking, we're being quick and impulsive. And when we do System 2 thinking, we're slower, more rational, more analytical, more thoughtful. And we need to know when to employ System 2 thinking. We need to know when to slow down. If you're searching for where to get Thai food tomorrow, big deal. That might not matter. System 1 would be fine. But System 2, when you're trying to decide whether to inject dewormer to cure your COVID case, you might want to dig a little deeper.

So that's one of many that we talk about. Another psychological process our listeners will be familiar with is motivated reasoning. So in motivated reasoning, are you reasoning towards accuracy conclusions, conclusions that are accurate, or are you reasoning towards a desired conclusion? And this is where you can help yourself by evoking system two processes. So you can stop and you can think, well, I want it to be true that eating chocolate for breakfast will make me lose weight. So am I evaluating the evidence in this study fairly and objectively to get an accurate

conclusion or am I all in on putting some Nutella on my toes? Another factor which will not surprise anyone is social identity. That has become just deeply pronounced in recent months in light of COVID, as we all know. But the ways in which we are all tribal creatures, we all are thinking about what our group believes, and we tend to align with people who have similar values and beliefs. And social identity drives a lot of what's going on right now, rather than going deeply into System 2 and thinking about, well, should I actually believe what others believe?

It's a kind of impulsive reaction to think this is what my tribe thinks, this is what I think, and I'm not going to go against that. And so we've seen people recently, there was a story in Missouri that people were wearing disguises in order to go get vaccinated. And I see that that cropped up again in Italy this week. That was in the news, that it's even happening there, that people don't want other people to know they're getting vaccinated because their tribe is not getting vaccinated and is opposed. And our social psychologist listeners will know about persuasion and how in-group members are more persuasive. So this is something you can turn around. So in our book, we don't just talk about the challenges. We talk about potential ways to address these challenges. So you can turn the social identity around by trying to have trusted in-group members of a community talk about vaccinations and

Arbor and I have shared that we've seen church leaders, pastors, talk about vaccination, and then have a vaccination tent outside the church after services so that you can get your vaccine right there from people in your community that you trust. So you can also leverage these identity values and identity persuasion techniques we know as social psychologists to communicate more effectively about. about the science. And I think that connects to some of the ideas we talk about in terms of epistemic cognition. If you think about epistemic authorities, we all have more than one epistemic authority in our lives. It's not just that we listen to one particular radio commentator

who might be giving us ideas or one TV broadcaster, but we do have pastors and doctors and other sorts of people who we trust. And so one of my family members who didn't want to get vaccinated, I was unable to fully persuade because he kept saying, but I have all these underlying conditions. And I'm just afraid to get the vaccine. I think it'll make it worse. And I said, okay, why don't you talk to your doctor? The next day, he talked to his doctor and his doctor said,

oh, it's because you have these underlying conditions that you need to get vaccinated. So he immediately did it. But we have to figure out when we converse with other people about these things, who else is it that they trust? Who can we refer them to? And the people who are those epistemic authorities need to. step up and recognize the role that they can play in a community. Another one of the really interesting terms that you use in the book is cafeteria denial.

So where people pick and choose what science are going to believe and disbelieve, what is the psychological explanation behind that? And to cafeteria deniers even know that's what they're doing? Well, cafeteria denial is when you pick and choose which parts of science you want to believe, those people who go to the flat earth convention probably fly in probably are there tweeting about it on their cell phone. So they're certainly not denying all of technology and science in our advanced civilization, but they are choosing this one particular thing to deny. And I think some of the psychological explanations there are motivated reasoning. Of course, we just discussed, and identity.

which we just discussed. There's a new book out by Lee McIntyre who went to a flat earth convention and he wrote a book about how to talk to science deniers. And he found when he was there that it's really a social group for them. And it's people that they can relate to. So again, identity plays in heavily when we cafeteria deny. And this happens on every side. of the political spectrum, too. It's worth noting. So you can think about the mother's groups that

have not vaccinated their children because they believe in doing only things that are absolutely natural for their kids. These are women who had home births and then who breastfed and then talk to each other about why they should delay vaccinations or not do them at all. And yet, these are people who firmly believe in science in many other ways. But this is a choice they've made regarding their social identity again to deny the role of vaccinations. And we also know stories of people who have changed their minds in those groups. I think everybody knows somebody like that. But there was a yoga teacher in my community who made the decision not to vaccinate

her child because none of her mother in group friends were. And then when her child was nine, she met a mother who had an immunocompromised child who said, this is just not fair. My kid can't even go to school around your kids because they'll die if they get the measles. And the woman just thought about it and thought, I can't be so selfish. This is terrible I've been doing this. And went out and vaccinated her kid at nine the next day, went to the doctor and got the childhood vaccination. So people can be turned around in those things. It's not that we're permanently denying all the things like that. There are many ways to open ourselves up and to open each other up to new points of view.

So your book includes examples of organizations that promulgate unfounded information. say about vaccinations for children, as we were just discussing. And they look very much like evidence-based information from the scientific establishment. So what do you tell non-scientists who are trying to understand whether what they're looking at is good science or bad science? How do you know if you're a lay person? I think part of what we have to do is steer people to good sources. And one of the things that we do want to make clear is this isn't just an individual problem, there are bigger solutions out there. And so big tech is highly responsible for a lot of what happens that we were talking about with algorithms. But they're also responsible for solutions. And one of

the notable ones is that in 2019, pre-COVID, when the issue about vaccinations was childhood vaccinations and measles in particular, both Twitter and Pinterest made the decision that if you were to search for anti-vax information on either of their sites, you would be immediately directed to a list of authoritative places to go, the World Health Organization, the American Pediatric Association, the places that had reputable information. We could see way more of that. We really need for big tech to step up and figure out how to lead people to the sources that are valid and reliable. That is not that hard to do. And as you are searching, there are search strategies that you can use that are developed by psychologists and educators. My colleague,

Doug Lombardi, and I have an article in educational psychologist, which is an APA Division 15 journal, which talks about search strategies. What are the strategies you can employ? And we have many members in our psychological community that have worked on this problem. And it's things like lateral reading, opening up a new window, maybe using that incognito mode so they don't know what you've already searched for, and then seeing if you can find alternative or confirming evidence, there's lots of strategies you can use, and many of us have written about that. And Sam Weinberg at Stanford has done a lot of studies with kids in elementary, high school, and college level to look at what their search strategies are and how they go about

this. And they were shocked, and their findings that are really notable. and their claim was easily duped, was how they described most kids who do searches, that they do not have the kind of strategy scales talks about. And those are the things that they are creating curricula now to help students learn how to do. We need to really think hard about how schools all the way through college are helping teach these strategies repeatedly. It can't be a one-time thing. With every kind of research project, teachers have an opportunity to help kids learn better strategies. and to ferret out what the truth might be.

So as you were writing the book, and as we're talking, it's clear that there are a lot of people who need the information that you're putting out there. But what audiences did you have in mind when you were working on this? I mean, were you trying to get to teachers or science journalists or policy makers or the scientists themselves or just everyday consumers of science? I mean, how could you decide who your audience was? It's so vast. Well, you just listed our audience, intended audience members. Kim, what we really wanted to do is share the psychological information, the research done by Barbara and myself, and so many people who are members of the APA who are doing research on misinformation and identity groups, motivated reasoning, cognitive biases.

There's so many people in psychology who are on the front lines of this endeavor in their own research. We wanted to bring that information to teachers in K through 12 in higher ed, science communicators, particularly scientists themselves. We mentioned earlier who don't always understand these issues because they haven't been trained in psychology, policymakers, journalists. So we definitely wanted to bring this information to a wide way of people that

may not have access to those APA journals we all read. Well, last question. I just want to know what people can do when they find themselves in a conversation, whether it's in person or online, with a friend or a loved one or even just an acquaintance,

who's espousing anti-scientist, views on some of these hot button topics. What's the best way to engage productively in these conversations? We would encourage them to listen, above and beyond anything else, listen really well, try to find out what it is that is the basis of concern. Where did they get that information? What did they think? What are the basic values behind it? And we have stories of success with this sort of thing. I gave a public talk a couple years ago right before COVID broke out. And there was a man in the audience who asked to meet with me afterwards. We had coffee. He said, I'm one of those people you've been talking about. I don't think climate change is human cause. Bob, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know,

he had a whole lot of things that he did not believe in. We talked for maybe an hour and a half. And there was a point at which I thought I really need to try to connect around common values. And this this is something we can all do. Figure out what you do have in common with this person rather than the ways in which you are divided. And we seem to be about the same age. I asked if he had grandchildren. We began to talk about our grandchildren, had a lovely conversation. And I said, you know, I'm really worried about the planet that we're leaving them. Does that concern you? And he softened and melted and said, yes, I am really worried. And suddenly I realized he wasn't wholly a climate denier. He was concerned about the economics and how we were going to solve the problem. He began to talk

about that. And now we were on safe ground and we could talk about those issues. But often there is a way to reach someone if you really listen, find where you connect. And there's so many examples of people who are doing this now. We talk about Catherine Cahoe, who's the climate scientist who's an evangelical Christian as well and the way she's reached out to the evangelical community to try to to communicate about climate science. And they trust her in a way that is impressive. So I think we need more and more people like that as well. Dr. Sinatra? And as psychologists, we know that people don't often change their mind if you come into the conversation and tell them what they think is crazy or silly or stupid, that's not really the best way to promote a change in thinking. So psychologists can employ

the strategies they know, empathy, understanding, connecting on a person. level, those are strategies that members of the general public can use to communicate with people who are not in full denial, but often just have questions. We talk about people in what we call them movable middle. Those are people who really are open. They're just perhaps confused. Science is very difficult to understand and very complex. They may have legitimate questions and concerns.

my niece was concerned when she heard that the COVID vaccine could make you infertile. That was going around the internet. And she just was concerned about that. That's a legitimate concern. So obviously she got that resolved and she got vaccinated. And then she helped a friend of hers on Facebook who'd shared that information to find out it wasn't true. And then the friend was vaccinated as well. So I think using our psychological tools of empathy and understanding our

important ways for us to reach people who are in that movable middle. And the media tends to emphasize the flat earther or the anti-vaxxer who is very extreme. And that's not the majority of people. And I think overall, what we're trying to do is promote a scientific attitude in the general public and in the people we talk to. We want to model that. We want to promote it. We want to show what it gets us. And a scientific attitude is basically the idea that you're open to evidence and you have a willingness to change your mind based on new evidence. And I think we'd like to see that at the heart of the scientific curriculum as well as the kinds of things that each of us can go about modeling in our daily conversations. Well, this is all excellent advice. I want our listeners to know

the name of the book is Science Denial, why it happens and what to do about it. Dr. Sinatra, Dr. Hofer, thank you for joining us today. This has been really interesting. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.combeatingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology

at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman, our sound editor. is Chris Kondyian. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.