Rejection of Inconvenient Science

We don’t have to look hard to see the rejection of inconvenient evidence, not only among the uneducated but often among the hyper-educated. One of the remarkable things about the current culture—both academic and mainstream—is the ease with which scientific findings are dismissed when they are inconvenient to a prior belief. Sadly, the often valuable (but sometimes questionable) skills gained with education make people better able to sift and reject evidence they find disagreeable.

Citizens and scholars on the Right often dismiss evidence about climate change, while the Left may do it most often about gender differences.

In another Psychology Today blog, Leonard Sax wrote about recent evidence that the brains of male and female fetuses display remarkable differences in neural structure. These findings suggest that gender differences may be innate, contradicting the prevalent idea that gender is fully socially constructed. In an interview with Catholic News Agency—an organization interested in this debate—Sax pointed out that a recent editorial in The New York Times argued in favor of the social construction interpretation of gender. Sax suggested that the author was likely “unaware of the relevant research.” When contacted by CNA for comment, the author clarified her position, that she tends “to be pretty critical of the science, because I think it’s often motivated by a particular political agenda, as all science is motivated by a particular political agenda.”

And with a wave of the hand, the evidence is meaningless. We might think this is the reaction and tactic of the uneducated. People without exposure to universities will dismiss egg-heads as cracked. But it is the highly-educated who are more adept at dismissing science when it suits them. The most guilty may be university faculty themselves: the egg-heads dismiss other egg-heads as empty shells.

Some writers on dueling facts blame the culture of postmodernism within the academy. Postmodernism is hard to define, but it generally includes the denial of the availability of knowledge as well as the accusation that knowledge production is really about power. In Respecting Truth, Lee McIntyre argues that postmodernism is often interpreted “as a claim not just about the impossibility of objective knowledge, but a denial of independent reality itself. Thus there is no truth, because there is no objective fact or reality to which it could correspond. Why then would anyone insist that they know the truth? In order to assert their power” (page 104). McIntyre concludes that “promoting fashionable academic notions, even though the arguments for them are weak, is playing with fire and can cause real damage” (page 107).

The same argument appears in Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. As the chief book critic for The New York Times for many years, Kakutani has a claim to know as much about the influence of books as anyone. She argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture” (page 45).

Whether it is postmodernism or simply a greater ability to justify their impulses, the highly educated are even more likely than ordinary citizens to see only what their values dictate. And to casually dismiss inconvenient evidence. In future posts we will examine more evidence of the unfortunate connection between greater education and dueling fact perceptions.