Science Culture and Politics — Donald A Fowler

Public science literacy is a public good: It is better for people to know more about the world than to not, and having the opportunity to be exposed to the world of science simply shows one how much more there is. Science is also typically invoked in conversation in terms of “knowing the facts,” especially when touching on some broader cultural or political issue. Improved public science literacy is generally connected to all sorts of issues of public interest, and it stands to common reason that “informed” positions should unify people’s ideas about the right thing to do. After all, surely political opinions and positions are linked to a knowledge of facts.

A fivethirtyeight.com article describes a study that contradicts this intuitive idea (1). The study shows general science literacy offered by popular science communication has little to do with political opinions. In the world of non-professional scientists, increasing or decreasing one’s general science knowledge does not correlate with one specific political alignment. If knowing more about how the world works offers clear guidance about what to do with it, then we should be seeing greater similarities in political opinions among those with general knowledge of science. Regardless of whether one alignment is “right” or “wrong,” there is little consistency between a given amount of science knowledge and political leanings.

This lack of correlation between political opinions and public science literacy contrasts with the pattern observed among professional biologists, who, as seen in many studies, share a much greater political alignment than the general public (2,3). Perhaps the variation in the public knowledge is too small to amount to much of a difference, compared to the expansive knowledge of professional biologists. Perhaps . . . but my experience with scientists and biologists suggests otherwise. Though I agree with many biologists in many areas, their level of political information appears not to be different from that of most other people I know. The scientists I know possess political information that seems proportional to their interest in political issues, as with the general public, and certainly not proportional to their prowess in the lab or their encyclopedic knowledge of biology. That people might know more based on their interests should not be surprising. However, it does point to a reality that all people follow a general set of rules about interest and information and that scientists do not fit into a category of super-geniuses and supersede those rules. Though I am not a sociologist, nor have I endeavored to study this more rationally or empirically, the various tendrils of experience and evidence that I’ve encountered regarding political information make a lot more sense when science is understood as a culture rather than as the acquisition of some large body of facts.

The general public is part of a number of cultures and a number of identities, many of them more dominant than an attachment general popular culture and the general science knowledge that comes with it. Biologists are part of a distinct culture which gives them a certain identity, and that plays a major part in those people’s lives. It should be no wonder that their political leanings overlap more with each other than do the views of the general public. A cultural approach to the political alignment of scientists is better than looking at scientists or biologists specifically as some kind of exceptions to people's innate attachment to and creation of culture and identity. In many ways, I feel a tacit wrestling with this idea enforces a reticence in many scientists to speak on politically charged issues. Regardless, this is one more example of ideas that have been swirling around discussions of culture, politics, and society, that cultures and identities that we are part of shape our political lives far more than the facts that we are able to recall. In many ways, the level of analysis should also go the other way, seeing how science and its sub-fields operates as a culture, can shed good light on the facts and ideas it produces than the other way around.

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1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-are-smart-about-science/

2: https://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/

3: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/27/research-confirms-professors-lean-left-questions-assumptions-about-what-means