Thread by @GordPennycook

A couple of days ago I asked Twitter to help identify "anti-science" attitudes that are more common on the left than the right.

https://twitter.com/GordPennycook/status/1118938546386108421

The post got >750 comments. I have since tested the most sensible of the suggestions (thread).

Study was run on Lucid for Academics on an American sample (N=450). I'm reporting Democrat v. Republican here, but results are the same if I used continuous liberal v conservative likert scales.

The primary result is this: I was only able to identify a single item that Republican's were closer to scientists than Democrats: "Nuclear power is a safe and viable source of energy."

(I used a 7-point scale, but coding is just the prop of people who agree with scientists)

There were four questions that Democrats were closer to scientists than Republicans: Anthropogenic global warming, evolution, big bang, and.... vaccines as a cause of autism! (the "pro-science" opinion being "no")

Democrats also trusted scientists more than Republicans.

And then there were a bunch of items where Democrats and Republicans did NOT significantly differ on. Including many that were thought to be e.g. of anti-science on the left: opposition to GMO's, resistance to tech, skepticism about genetics & heritability, & belief in "detoxing"

Here are the specific wordings for all of the items, for those who are interested (suggestions are welcome). For the above figures, I just re-coded the answers so that 1 = agreeing with the "pro-science" position and 0 = not agreeing.

The conclusion seems pretty clear, at least based on this sample and these particular items: Republicans are more "anti-science" in the aggregate, but people probably over-estimate ideological differences in beliefs about science (likely across the political spectrum). [end]

Oh, and error bars are 95% confidence intervals