Donald Trump's most fervent supporters consisted of elements of the Republican coalition as it has developed over the last several years. These elements are characterized by the form of their beliefs. They confidently hold beliefs without regard to the full set of relevant arguments and evidence.
Some of their beliefs are admittedly based on "faith", which means that they are held confidently despite the absence of reasons that would matter to others who do not share their faith. These include both moral and factual beliefs: homosexuality is sinful; humans did not evolve from other animals; abortion is equivalent to murder.
Other beliefs are accepted uncritically, without considering arguments on the other side, or, worse, attributing those arguments to a conspiracy. The belief that global warming is not caused by human activity is a prime example. Conspiracy theories about collusion by scientists guarantee that all arguments on the other side can be ignored. Thus, the holders of these beliefs have no way to discover that they might be incorrect, since all counter-arguments seem to come from a diabolical conspiracy. People hold these questionable beliefs with high confidence and are thus willing to impose them on others, through their political action.
These beliefs have been supported by talk radio and Fox news. In turn, these sources are supported and encouraged by more traditional Republicans. We saw this influence earlier in the "Tea Party" movement, which feeds back into the content of these sources.
More generally, these beliefs are the result of a pattern of thinking. People who hold them are lacking in what I have called actively open-minded thinking (AOT). AOT involves self-critical reflection. In order to be confident of a belief, we must look actively for reasons why it should be rejected, modified, or held with less confidence. If beliefs go unchallenged by this sort of reflection, we have no reason to know that they deserve high confidence. We have no way to distinguish those that would survive critical reflection from those that would not.
Note that AOT is not equivalent to reflection in general. Some reflection is nothing more than bolstering, looking for reasons why we were right all along, finding ways to make everything fit with our preferred conclusion. AOT concerns the direction of reflection, not just its amount. The ultimate aim is to be fair to counter-arguments.
Nor does AOT require that we never hold beliefs with high confidence. Often, an active search can find little to say for the other side, or can lead to a modified form of the original belief that is designed to deal with problems.
AOT is built in to the scientific method. Science as an institution works to look for holes in current theories. Scientists get credit for finding such holes, and ways to plug them by modifying or discarding the theory in question. For these reasons, we should have more confidence in the conclusions of science than we have in the conclusions of ways of thinking that do not involve such self-criticism. More generally, our confidence in experts should depend on how much their expertise comes from AOT.
AOT is apparently affected by cultural support. Higher education tends to support it (imperfectly, to be sure). I have been using a short questionnaire (based on a longer version devised by Keith Stanovich and his collaborators) that measures people's support for AOT. It has questions such as: "Allowing oneself to be convinced by an opposing argument is a sign of good character"; "Changing your mind is a sign of weakness" (reversed); "People should search actively for reasons why their beliefs might be wrong"; and "It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought to bear against them" (reversed).
I and my collaborators have found that people who score low on this scale (opposing AOT) tend to score high on Jared Piazza's measure of belief in "divine command theory", the idea that God's laws are beyond the capacity of humans to fully understand and thus must be obeyed without question. Such a view is consistent with the sort of faith that leads people to advance moral views through politics even when they cannot argue for those views in terms that make sense to those who do not share their particular faith.
Dan Kahan has collected data with our AOT questionnaire for a representative sample of the U.S. adult population. People low in AOT tend to rate themselves as more politically conservative and more strongly Republican. (The result is described at the end of this paper) This result is unusual because the same data set finds no correlation at all between conservatism and another measure of cognitive style, the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of tricky arithmetic problems that is supposed to measure the tendency to reflect on initial conclusions. But I think the CRT is heavily influenced by mathematical knowledge, and it also tends to assess willingness to spend time on a problem rather than a self-questioning attitude as such. It does not specifically assess the willingness to look for reasons why a pet belief might be wrong. In sum, the results for the AOT show that, in current U.S. politics, conservatives really do think differently, in ways that help us understand their attachments to weakly supported conclusions about facts and morality.
"Conservatives" in the U.S. tend not to think that AOT is a good thing. Many think it is OK to defend their beliefs as if they were possessions. Kahan did not look at Trump supporters in particular. (The data were collected a few years ago.) But it seems likely that this negative attitude toward AOT is more common in this group than in Republicans in general. Many people who identify themselves as conservative Republicans are very clear about their acceptance of AOT, although they tend to emphasize different issues when they discuss details. And, likewise, some liberals or progressives have the same negative attitude, although not as many of them, at the moment.
On the optimistic side, my student Emlen Metz has found remarkably high levels of respect and capacity for AOT in 8th grade students across the U.S. from a variety of schools. It seems that the ideology of AOT has become widespread in the culture of schools. This is good news for the future. We need to take a page from our youth, to look to their desire to learn from each other and their hope in the future. We need to try to get everyone, journalists, teachers, and ourselves, to understand AOT more deeply.
Even those who already favor AOT can benefit from understanding how it helps with communication, by giving us a better understanding of our discussion partners.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Global warming: understanding, and acceptance of expert authority
David Leonhardt, in a recent column in the New York Times (on-line Nov. 9, 2016), argues that the most important response to the Republican takeover of the U.S. is to convince Republicans that global warming is real and serious. Failure to address this problem now has very long lasting effects.
Most of the effort to convince skeptics takes the form "95% of climate scientists agree ...". This sort of argument from authority is useful only if two conditions are met. First, people have to understand that the authorities in question derive their status from a superior method, namely, actively open-minded thinking. Science is inherently actively open-minded because scientists are constantly looking for reasons why conclusions might be wrong. Scientists (and many other scholars) get credit for poking holes in conclusions, even tentative conclusions of their own. As J.S. Mill and others have pointed out, such active openness to criticism is the only way to have confidence in any conclusions. Without the search for counter-arguments, you don't know if they exist.
Second, even with this understanding (which is not widespread), people may distrust a consensus view. Science works slowly. It took quite a while for people to accept Copernicus's alternative to Ptolemy's theory of the planets. Other false views have been the "conventional wisdom" in science for decades. People may suspect that the 95% of scientists are just engaging in herd behavior, not listening sufficiently to the 5% who disagree (if, indeed, they really exist).
Here I think we need to point out to skeptics that the argument from authority is not the only one. In particular, the existence of the (somewhat misnamed) greenhouse effect has been well known for over 100 years. It follows from a couple of basic principles of physics (or physical chemistry). Thus, in addition to acceptance of authority, there is also a role for understanding.
The two principles are roughly these: First, carbon dioxide (and other "greenhouse gases") absorb heat from infrared radiation, while the more basic components of the atmosphere (oxygen and nitrogen) do not. This fact can be demonstrated in table-top experiments, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ. Second, the earth's surface itself emits infrared radiation when it is warmed by the sun, which, in turn, warms the atmosphere, which then emits radiation as well, thus increasing the overall temperature of both air and land.
Some understanding of these principles leads to the conclusion that global temperature will increase as the amount of carbon dioxide increases, other things being equal. This fact was well understood by the end of the 19th century. Thus, if we understand these principles, we can see that the burden of proof now shifts to those who want to say that warming will not occur. Other things being equal, it must occur.
The extensive efforts of climate scientists have thus been mainly about determining whether these other factors are in fact equal, or whether some of them might reduce -- or increase -- global warming. It turns out that some reduce it and some increase it, leading to uncertainty about how large the effect will be, quantitatively. (This uncertainty poses risks of its own, as the effect could be larger than expected as well as smaller.) The 5% and the 95% may disagree about the relative importance of these other factors, without denying the basic facts.
My conclusion is that, if people understood the basic science, they would have some additional reason to trust the expert consensus. It might help even if they just knew that it existed. Some attempt to explain the basic science should be part of the public argument. It should not be limited to high-school science courses.
Likewise, actively open-minded thinking itself should be understood, not just accepted on the basis of authority.
Most of the effort to convince skeptics takes the form "95% of climate scientists agree ...". This sort of argument from authority is useful only if two conditions are met. First, people have to understand that the authorities in question derive their status from a superior method, namely, actively open-minded thinking. Science is inherently actively open-minded because scientists are constantly looking for reasons why conclusions might be wrong. Scientists (and many other scholars) get credit for poking holes in conclusions, even tentative conclusions of their own. As J.S. Mill and others have pointed out, such active openness to criticism is the only way to have confidence in any conclusions. Without the search for counter-arguments, you don't know if they exist.
Second, even with this understanding (which is not widespread), people may distrust a consensus view. Science works slowly. It took quite a while for people to accept Copernicus's alternative to Ptolemy's theory of the planets. Other false views have been the "conventional wisdom" in science for decades. People may suspect that the 95% of scientists are just engaging in herd behavior, not listening sufficiently to the 5% who disagree (if, indeed, they really exist).
Here I think we need to point out to skeptics that the argument from authority is not the only one. In particular, the existence of the (somewhat misnamed) greenhouse effect has been well known for over 100 years. It follows from a couple of basic principles of physics (or physical chemistry). Thus, in addition to acceptance of authority, there is also a role for understanding.
The two principles are roughly these: First, carbon dioxide (and other "greenhouse gases") absorb heat from infrared radiation, while the more basic components of the atmosphere (oxygen and nitrogen) do not. This fact can be demonstrated in table-top experiments, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ. Second, the earth's surface itself emits infrared radiation when it is warmed by the sun, which, in turn, warms the atmosphere, which then emits radiation as well, thus increasing the overall temperature of both air and land.
Some understanding of these principles leads to the conclusion that global temperature will increase as the amount of carbon dioxide increases, other things being equal. This fact was well understood by the end of the 19th century. Thus, if we understand these principles, we can see that the burden of proof now shifts to those who want to say that warming will not occur. Other things being equal, it must occur.
The extensive efforts of climate scientists have thus been mainly about determining whether these other factors are in fact equal, or whether some of them might reduce -- or increase -- global warming. It turns out that some reduce it and some increase it, leading to uncertainty about how large the effect will be, quantitatively. (This uncertainty poses risks of its own, as the effect could be larger than expected as well as smaller.) The 5% and the 95% may disagree about the relative importance of these other factors, without denying the basic facts.
My conclusion is that, if people understood the basic science, they would have some additional reason to trust the expert consensus. It might help even if they just knew that it existed. Some attempt to explain the basic science should be part of the public argument. It should not be limited to high-school science courses.
Likewise, actively open-minded thinking itself should be understood, not just accepted on the basis of authority.
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