Science communication "pollution"

Yale University’s Dan Kahan ( Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law & Professor of Psychology) has come out with a new research paper that sheds some fascinating light on one of the most pressing challenges in science communication today. With regard to the problem of polarized debate on issues like climate change and evolution, Kahan concludes that we don’t in fact need more public education. Rather, the problem is that our approach to “educating” the public on these topics is divisive, and is actually stoking “belivers vs. deniers” divisions. It doesn’t matter how these divisions began—indeed, Kahan refers to diatribes from both extremes as a form of science communication “pollution.” What matters instead is recognizing how we’re all fueling this problem, correcting our approach, and ending the polarization so we can move forward together with better public policy and education (and his report gives an example of how this is being done). Here’s an excerpt from page 33 of Kahan’s report. The full text is downloadable from the “read more” link below:
 

Climate change and other issues that generate persistent states of polarization are pathological, both in the sense of being rare and in the sense of being inimical to collective well-being. Such conditions occur when positions on risks and other policy-relevant facts become entangled with antagonistic cultural meanings that transform them into badges of membership in, and loyalty to, opposing affinity groups (Kahan 2012).
 
Because ordinary individuals have a bigger stake in maintaining their status within their defining groups than they do in forming correct understandings of science on societal risks, they will predictably use their reasoning powers in such circumstances to give information the effect that protects their identities as members of these groups. Those with the most acute reasoning powers, moreover, will predictably use them for these purposes. Because others within their groups quite understandably view the stances these individuals take as an important cue on what is collectively known, their aggressive deployment of their reason to protect their identities will radiate outward, amplifying cultural polarization.
 
Such antagonistic meanings, then, are a form of pollution in the science communication environment. They degrade the cues that individuals use, ordinarily with success, to recognize collective knowledge essential to their decisionmaking. When they apply their “who knows what about what” sense in a polluted science communication environment, individuals with different cultural identities will form not convergent but wildly discrepant impressions (Kahan 2013a).
 
Ridding their science communication of this form of pollution, then, is the key to overcoming cultural polarization with regard to climate change and like issues. The information individuals have with regard to myriad other forms of decision-relevant science but lack on culturally disputed ones consists of the guidance they reliably derive by observing others like themselves using such science in their practical decisionmaking.
 
People, of all cultural outlooks, trust scientists and are eager to make use of what science knows to improve their lives (Pew Research Center 2009; NSF 2014). But the people whose orienting influence they need to observe are not scientists. They are the people in their everyday lives whose guiding example ordinary members of the public use to figure out what evidence of scientific belief they should credit and which they should dismiss.
 
The communication of normal science, by scientists, is vital to practical decisionmakers—from insurance agents to farmers, from investment brokers to military leaders. But what needs to be communicated to ordinary members of the public, in their capacity as citizens, is the normality of using climate science. And they have to communicate that to themselves.