Does Geoengineering Activate Liberal Anti-Scientific Biases? And Does It Matter?

(Image: visualization of geoengineering schemes)

For a long time, I’ve been interested in the subject of geoengineering. Basically, this is the idea that, since we can’t seem to find a more, uh, civilized way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions–and since global warming is getting so bad that we’re going to be grappling with a dramatically altered planet–it may be time to start further planetary modifications so as to offset rising temperatures. Among these, the most popular suggestion seems to be injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight and thus cool global temperatures–what has been called the Pinatubo option, because the strategy mimics a large volcanic eruption’s cooling effect on the climate system.

I personally think global warming is likely to prove so bad–and so politically unconquerable–that geoengineering options need to be on the table. So do many scientists. But I have also noticed–as have many scientists–that much of the opposition to geoengineering comes from the same people who are worried about global warming–e.g., political “greens” who in our more standard parlance would be called liberals or environmentalists. Take the ETC Group, arguably the leading organized geoengineering opponent, which says it “supports socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power.” Here ETC is signaling its clear liberal and progressive values–but it does not like this idea of a scientific techno-fix to global warming.

Geoengineering thus presents a potential opportunity to study a subject that is too little examined in general: Liberal, as opposed to conservative, biases against science and technology. And indeed, in a recent paper out from Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues, discussed in a piece I just did for DeSmogBlog, such a bias does seem to be captured. As I summarize the new research:

Studying 3,000 people—half of them from the U.S., half from the UK—the researchers asked their subjects to read a mock-scientific article from a journal called Nature Science (yuk, yuk), reporting that global warming is even worse than we thought and, indeed, spinning out of our control. But before reading the fake paper, some of the subjects first read news reports that framed that paper in different ways—either as supporting even stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions, or as supporting geoengineering.

We already know, based previous research, what framing climate science as supporting greenhouse gas cuts does. It makes conservatives—who hate forced restrictions on industry—even more dismissive of the science than they are already to begin with. And indeed, that’s what the new study showed.

But what’s fascinating is that the geoengineering framing—which, to my knowledge, has not been tried before in such a controlled study—had a very different effect. It made conservatives somewhat more accepting of the fake study’s findings, and made liberals somewhat more dismissive of them. And it did so in roughly equal amounts.

(from Kahan et al: liberal and conservative views of a global warming study's validity when presented in two different frames)

Just to show there is no disagreement about this, here’s how Kahan himself describes the result, accompanied by an image of the effect that he has posted:

…assignment to the geoengineering condition in the experiment affected the views of both egalitarian communitarians and hierarchical individualists. The latter viewed the study as more valid than their counterparts and the latter less than their counterparts in the emission-control condition. In other words, there was less polarization because both groups moved toward the mean — not because hierarchical individualists alone moderated their views.

I interpret this to mean that liberals and conservatives alike (or, egalitarian-communitarians and hierarchical-individualists alike) were susceptible to similar framing effects in this study. Or alternatively, you might say that both were able to be made more resistant to scientific findings that threatened their worldviews, and likely engaged in motivated reasoning to defend those worldviews. And I emphasized this evidence as a potential strike (albeit, I think, a relatively minor one) against the notion that conservatives are inherently more defensive than liberals in their reaction to identity-threatening information.

Kahan has responded and, ironically, seems to think I am being too hard on my own oft articulated thesis–that conservatives are probably inherently more biased than liberals (in other words, motivated bias is inherently “asymmetrical” rather than “symmetrical”), due to the basic state of who they are. To the contrary, I’d say I’m trying to find any instance of clear liberal bias that I can, so I know the counterargument in its strongest form. In any case, here is Kahan:

I don’t think that the study really is adds much weight to either side of the scale being used to evaluate the symmetry question.

As I explained, to test the asymmetry thesis, studies need to be carefully designed to reflect the various competing theories that give us reason to expect either symmetry or asymmetry in motivated reasoning. Those sorts of studies (if the studies are designed properly) will yield evidence that is unambiguously consistent with one inference (symmetry) or the other (asymmetry).

Our study wasn’t designed to do that; it was designed to test a theory that predicted that appropriately crafting the cultural meaning conveyed by sound science could mitigate cultural polarization over it. The study generated evidence in support of that theory. But because the design didn’t reflect competing predictions about how the effect of the experimental treatment would be distributed across the range of our culture measures, the way that the effect happened to be distributed (more or less uniformly) doesn’t rule out the possibility that there really is an important asymmetry in motivated reasoning.

I accept this point. I agree the new Kahan study was not explicitly designed to test whether motivated reasoning is asymmetrical or not. (A study explicitly designed, by Everett Young, to test this will be reported on in my forthcoming book.) However, many past studies have found more conservative than liberal bias; e.g., see here. And conservatives all around us today are observed to be denying various aspects of science, economics, history and so on. So in other words, the circumstantial evidence still matters–although we do have to recognize it as circumstantial.

Kahan continues:

I think the same is true, moreover, for the vast majority of studies on ideology and motivated reasoning (maybe all; but Mooney, who has done an exhaustive survey, no doubt knows better than I if this is so): their designs aren’t really geared to generating results that would unambiguously support only one inference in the asymmetry debate.

In the case of our (CCP) studies, at least, there’s a reason for this: we don’t really see “who is more biased” to be the point of studying these processes.

Rather, the point is to understand why democratic deliberations over policy-relevant science sometimes (not always!) generate cultural division and what can be done to mitigate this state of affairs, which is clearly inimical, in itself, to the interest of a democratic society in making the best use it can of the best available evidence on how to promote its citizens’ wellbeing.

See, I think “who is more biased” is a much bigger deal. I think it matters deeply, to all of us who have been for so long banging our heads against a wall trying to refute conservative misinformation, and finding that no matter what we do, “reason” does not seem to work. If nothing else, it would be nice to know just how pointless the endeavor is, no? (Grin.)

Moreover, while I dig this whole improving democratic-dialogue-about-science thing, I also think that if there is one group in society that is less open to such dialogue then that’s something we need to know. Political scientist Karen Stenner ends her disturbing book The Authoritarian Dynamic with the sentence, “some people will never live comfortably in a liberal democracy.” Stenner wasn’t talking about people inherently predisposed to deny facts, she was talking about people inherently predisposed to be intolerant of those not like them. But the two may well be connected; and both such predispositions are, in my view, potentially threatening to the kind of science-based democracy that I, for one, want to live in.

So does “asymmetry” matter? You bet it does. And that inevitably means that examining liberal biases, wherever we find them, also matters. Without examining them, we can’t get the “asymmetry” question right–and without getting that question right, we can’t ever know just how “rational” a society we can really hope to live in.

Comments on this article

By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge The Intersection Privacy Policy and agree to The Intersection Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.