The press will, despite some new data on why people so warp scientific conclusions to fit their preferences, continue to focus on how such preconceptions and knee-jerk reactions sort out according to political party affiliation. After all, political parties are winners and losers according to how much their platforms and rhetorical gymnastics sway people to vote for them. Political parties really matter. Their differences drive much of the news cycle.
Still, reporters should take a look at a study just out that seeks to explain, with polling data from Americans going back many years, what sort of personal characteristics lead some people, say, to vociferously oppose human embryonic stem cell research and its conclusions as anchors for public policy, that lead others to embrace it, and that leave others not caring or pondering. And it's not so much political party as a set of other personal qualities which, while somewhat co-variant with party, best explain the fault lines. That's what I just read at any rate.
The great attractors in the complex of reasons people can be stubborn about science, it says here, place them in buckets thusly: 1) Scientific Optimists, about one third of the public, 2) Scientific Pessimists, about a quarter, 3) Conflicted, another quarter, and 4) the Disengaged, around 15 percent.
Read all about it in some writings in circulation all by the same two men:
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The Conversation (
UK-Australia-based,journalism-centricpolicy site CORECTED*) – Matthew Nisbet, Ezra Markowitz: Opinions about scientific advances blur party-political lines ; - The Scientist Magazine (Canada-based general mag. and journal) – Nisbet, Markowitz: Beyond Partisanship in Biopolitics / Concerns abut the relationshihps etween science and society transcend traditional political differences ;
These two are reasonably plain-English summaries by the authors of what they are driving at. For the more rigorous minded:
- PLOS/ONE – Nisbet, Markowitz: Understanding Public Opinion in debates over Biomedical Research: Looking beyong Political Partisanship to Focus on Beliefs about Science and Society ;
Markowitz is a post-doc at the Columbia University Earth Institute with an affiliation with Princeton University's Inst. for Int'l and Regional Studies. Nisbet is familiar to many tracker readers – an associate professor of communication at American University. Media theory is one of his specialties. Several years ago he and another familiar, Chris Mooney, hit the lecture circuit together to discuss the general topics of science, public opinion, and the role in public perception that is played by "framing," or the general set of talking points media and other organizations serve the public. So, while Mooney did a bang-up job,in his book "The Republical Brain" of seeking to explain why members of the two parties tend to be from different planets when discussing, say, global warming, his old comrade Nisbet is now suggesting that the true best-defined lineaments are a bit orthogonal to political party.
I don't know if they disagree so much. Could be they'd agree in general, but that Mooney knows which sort of breakdown will sell more books: Dems v. GOP and let the blood flow, or scientific optimists v. pessimists, with the conflicted and disengaged milling around in circles.
I dunno quite what to make of the journal article up there, at PLOS/ONE. One chart (Table 4), that experts would digest easily, breaks the nature of the public into Republicans, Independents, and a bunch of other things, but not Democrats. Turns out that Republicans are meant to be taken as the opposite side of the coin from Dems or something like that. Beats me.
Again, the lesson here is that however compelling is the raw political party dynamic as story, when reporters write pieces that they know will divide much of their readership they ought to know that simple party labels are not the best light to shine on the question.
You'll need to read at least the commentaries and better yet the paper to appreciate the full message and how much detailed work went into it. The labels scientific optimists and scientific pessimists lead me to wonder how certain reporters would sort out in accord with them. It is my hunch that reporters who call themselves science writers, and many of whom work hard to dispel accusations that they are mere cheer leaders for science, and that other reporters who call themselve environmental journalists who similarly are at pains to explain they are not opposed to ALL corporations, developments of open land, chemicals, or genetically modified thingies, divide along this optimist-pessimist rubric
* Thank you for correction, Graham Coghill, debunker and nonsense buster from down under.
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