Are the people who refuse to accept climate change ill-informed?

Polls relating to publicly controversial scientific issues often trigger a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from science advocates. When large proportions of a population seem poorly informed about evolution, climate change, or genetically modified foods, the usual response is to bemoan the state of science literacy. It can seem obvious that many people don’t understand the science of evolution, for example—or the scientific method, generally—and that opinions would change if only we could educate them.

Research has shown, unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Ars has previously covered Yale Professor Dan Kahan’s research into what he calls “cultural cognition,” and the idea goes like this: public opinion on these topics is fundamentally tied to cultural identities rather than assessment of scientific evidence. In other words, rather than evaluate the science, people form opinions based on what they think people with a similar background believe.

That shouldn’t come as a shock, especially given the well-known political or religious divides apparent for climate change and evolution.

A key feature of Kahan’s work, though, comes when he measures general science literacy or propensity for analytical thinking. Rather than ameliorating differences on scientific issues, these properties exacerbate them. Those who should be best equipped to have a handle on the science are the most divided along party lines. It seems that people more familiar with science are better at coming up with explanations to defend whatever conclusions their cultural group has reached.

All this means that when people respond to surveys asking whether they think Earth’s climate has warmed, for example, their answers tell you more about their cultural identity than their factual knowledge. To put that another way, general science knowledge is a very poor predictor of whether people think the Earth has warmed, but political party affiliation is a pretty good one.

Of course, general science knowledge (like knowing that electrons are smaller than atoms or that antibiotics don’t kill viruses) is different from climate science knowledge. Kahan set out to design a set of test questions that would actually dig in to the knowledge people possess, rather than how they felt about the public debate.

There’s precedent for this work. Others have successfully added “According to the theory of evolution…” before questions to discover what people knew rather than what they personally believed. So Kahan prefaced questions about various aspects of climate change with “Climate scientists believe…” The questions asked about things like whether melting Arctic sea ice would raise sea level, which atmospheric gas is responsible for anthropogenic warming, as well as whether global warming would lead to increased risk of skin cancer. The goal was to provide as many tempting but wrong options for people on either side of the ideological divide.

Whereas questions about whether one believes anthropogenic climate change to be a real threat produced highly polarized responses, there was no significant difference on the rephrased questions. The average person who believes that humans are responsible for climate change answered half of the questions correctly—and so did the average person who believes humans have had no effect, or that the globe hasn’t even warmed.

There was a strong correlation, though, between scores on the general science literacy test and this climate science literacy test. That’s a good sign that it was a fair test of knowledge.

There was also an interesting tilt in the responses. People were generally much less likely to recognize false statements about things that are not risks—they tend to think the link between climate change and skin cancer is real. That suggests that many people were responding based on general ideas about climate scientists thinking climate change is bad rather than actual knowledge about each detail.

In addition, asking what scientists “believe” is different from asking what the evidence indicates—the latter would demonstrate real familiarity with the science. That’s a bar that few of us can meet on multiple subjects, though, and it isn’t how most people will get their information about climate change.

These issues, however, don’t change the fact that those who scored highest also scored highest on the general science literacy test. As you would predict, they must have known enough to be better at dodging this tilt trap.