More on Irrational Disbelief

Last time we looked at "manufactured doubt," manipulative advertising campaigns designed to make people skeptical of the findings of science. They are often mounted to protect the interests of industries whose products or practices are threats to people's health or safety, such as the campaigns run for the tobacco, asbestos and coal industries. This is one reason it is often difficult to secure popular consensus when scientific consensus is more or less settled.

But other reasons lie within the minds of the target public itself. One main reason is denial. There is a tendency not to want to believe bad news, particularly if it means one needs to change one's behavior to address the problem. "Temporal relativism" is another. This relates to personal perspective and the slowness with which things may seem to change to the anecdotal observer. A gradual decline may not seem so noticeable within the time frame a person is paying attention to something. For instance, there were an estimated 450,000 lions in the wild in Africa in 1950. There are fewer than 30,000 now. Someone who has been going to Africa only in the past 10 years may not see the extent of the problem.

Anti-intellectualism is another reason. America seems particularly cursed among advanced nations in the high percentage of its populace who are extremely skeptical of the scientific method and quantitative analysis. The society is really rather schizophrenic in this regard. On the one hand we led the space, computer and genetic revolutions and on the other we have a higher percentage than other advanced nations of people who feel the earth is only 6,000 years old. This goes back to an early nineteenth century anti-aristocratic bent captured by Andrew Jackson. After him for the next few decades you had better have been born in a log cabin and display the "common touch" if you wanted to get elected president. It largely explains the appeal of counterfactual and even defiantly illogical figures like Sarah Palin today. An aura of authentic simplicity equates to credibility with this group.

America's "culture wars" have generalized the divide. Without a tradition of familiarity with classical education any more, figures like St. Thomas Aquinas, who sough to bridge faith and reason, are largely unknown in this country. Instead, science and adherence to its findings are often dismissed as threats to religion among traditional culturists. It need not be so. The Roman Catholic Church, since an encyclical by Pope John Paul II in 1996, is now tacitly in agreement with the idea of human evolution, for example.

Finally, there is the phenomenon George Lakoff identified as "frames." Click on the link to see a five-minute discussion from Lakoff himself. The writer of the incisive books "Don't Think of an Elephant" and "Moral Politics" posits a conservative frame of reference that cannot, for example, conceive of societal factors for behavior, such as a link between poverty and crime, but must ascribe all behaviors to individual choices, and thus cannot accept the efficacy of "social programs," no matter what statistical data is attached to them. These causes are also important factors in explaining why fact, science , data and even self-interest are frequently rejected in favor of irrational disbelief.