Trakar
VIP Member
- Feb 28, 2011
- 1,699
- 74
- 83
David Horsey Cartoons and Commentary | Seattle's Pulitzer-winning cartoonist David Horsey's latest cartoons and commentary on politics and current events - seattlepi.com
"Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States" - ScienceDirect - Global Environmental Change : Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States
And this should not be viewed as a "one off" attempt at scurrilous politics sheathed in science, it is supported and boistered by a plethora of recent studies and similar considerations:
"Fixing the communications failure" - Access : Fixing the communications failure : Nature
And then we have leading Conservatives noting the same problems amongst their ranks.
"Epistemic Closure? Those Are Fighting Words - âEpistemic Closure?â Those Are Fighting Words for Conservatives - NYTimes.com
"Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States" - ScienceDirect - Global Environmental Change : Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States
Abstract
We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States...
And this should not be viewed as a "one off" attempt at scurrilous politics sheathed in science, it is supported and boistered by a plethora of recent studies and similar considerations:
"Fixing the communications failure" - Access : Fixing the communications failure : Nature
...Many experts attribute political controversy over risk issues to the complexity of the underlying science, or the imperfect dissemination of information. If that were the problem, we would expect beliefs about issues such as environmental risk, public health and crime control to be distributed randomly or according to levels of education, not by moral outlook. Various cognitive biases excessive attention to vivid dangers, for example, or self-reinforcing patterns of social interaction distort people's perception of risk, but they, too, do not explain why people who subscribe to competing moral outlooks react differently to scientific data...people find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it...Cultural cognition also causes people to interpret new evidence in a biased way that reinforces their predispositions. As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarized, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information...most people aren't in a position to evaluate technical data for themselves, they tend to follow the lead of credible experts. But cultural cognition operates here too: the experts whom laypersons see as credible, we have found, are ones whom they perceive to share their values...
(rest of paper at above link - looks like there's a pay wall, but if anyone is interested I will be happy to email them a copy of the article for review)
And then we have leading Conservatives noting the same problems amongst their ranks.
"Epistemic Closure? Those Are Fighting Words - âEpistemic Closure?â Those Are Fighting Words for Conservatives - NYTimes.com
It is hard to believe that a phrase as dry as epistemic closure could get anyone excited, but the term has sparked a heated argument among conservatives in recent weeks about their movements intellectual health.
The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatisms proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase epistemic closure has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.
Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck have become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately. (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished epistemic closure out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)
As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States or that the health care bill proposed establishing death panels.
Soon conservatives across the board jumped into the debate. Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, wrote that Mr. Levins best seller, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Threshold Editions) was awful, and called the section on global warming a case for willful ignorance, and an almost perfect example of epistemic closure. Megan McArdle, an editor at The Atlantic, conceded that conservatives are often voluntarily putting themselves in the same cocoon.
Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bushs administrations, wrote that in the last few years, epistemic closure had become much worse among the intelligentsia of the conservative movement. He later added that the cream of the conservative research institutes, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, had gone from presenting informed policy analyses to pumping out propaganda...
(rest at link)