TY - JOUR
T1 - The ideological basis of antiscientific attitudes
T2 - Effects of authoritarianism, conservatism, religiosity, social dominance, and system justification
AU - Azevedo, Flávio
AU - Jost, John T.
N1 - Funding Information:
This article was prepared for a special issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations on “A Group Processes Approach to Antiscience Beliefs and Endorsement of Alternative Facts” (guest edited by Bastiaan Rutjens, Sander van der Linden, and Romy van der Lee). Work on this project commenced when the first author was a Fulbright Fellow at NYU under the supervision of the second author. The authors would like to thank Sam Parsons for the much needed help with the multiverse analyses and comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Serious concerns about public distrust of scientific experts and the spread of misinformation are growing in the US and elsewhere. To gauge ideological and psychological variability in attitudes toward science, we conducted an extensive analysis of public opinion data based on a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,500) and a large replication sample (N = 2,119). We estimated the unique effects of partisanship, symbolic and operational forms of political ideology, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and general system justification (GSJ), after adjusting for demographic factors. Multiverse analyses revealed that (a) conservatism and SDO were significant predictors of distrust of climate science in > 99.9% of model specifications, with conservatism accounting for 80% of the total variance; (b) conservatism, RWA, religiosity, (male) sex, (low) education, (low) income, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of skepticism about science in general (vs. faith) in > 99.9% of model specifications; (c) conservatism, RWA, (low) education, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of trust in ordinary people (over scientific experts) > 99.9% of the time; and (d) GSJ was a significant predictor of trust in scientific experts (over ordinary people) 81% of the time, after adjusting for all other demographic and ideological factors. Implications for the role of science in democratic society are discussed.
AB - Serious concerns about public distrust of scientific experts and the spread of misinformation are growing in the US and elsewhere. To gauge ideological and psychological variability in attitudes toward science, we conducted an extensive analysis of public opinion data based on a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,500) and a large replication sample (N = 2,119). We estimated the unique effects of partisanship, symbolic and operational forms of political ideology, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and general system justification (GSJ), after adjusting for demographic factors. Multiverse analyses revealed that (a) conservatism and SDO were significant predictors of distrust of climate science in > 99.9% of model specifications, with conservatism accounting for 80% of the total variance; (b) conservatism, RWA, religiosity, (male) sex, (low) education, (low) income, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of skepticism about science in general (vs. faith) in > 99.9% of model specifications; (c) conservatism, RWA, (low) education, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of trust in ordinary people (over scientific experts) > 99.9% of the time; and (d) GSJ was a significant predictor of trust in scientific experts (over ordinary people) 81% of the time, after adjusting for all other demographic and ideological factors. Implications for the role of science in democratic society are discussed.
KW - authoritarianism
KW - political ideology
KW - scientific attitudes
KW - social dominance
KW - system justification
KW - trust in expertise
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U2 - 10.1177/1368430221990104
DO - 10.1177/1368430221990104
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85107293003
SN - 1368-4302
VL - 24
SP - 518
EP - 549
JO - Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
JF - Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
IS - 4
ER -