A little while back, I wrote a post about belief in global climate change, in which I argued that people’s willingness to believe in anthropogenic climate change was directly tied to their political - or perhaps philosophical and psychological - position. New studies from the Cultural Cognition Project seem to support that conclusion. Don Braman of the project says that “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view”. Another member of the project says that “… the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values. If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way.”
Put another way, you can throw all the scientific studies you want at people, but if they don’t like the conclusions, they can’t hear you.
The package of ‘core beliefs’ associated with any worldview may shift slowly over time - it is no longer controversial to say that our world revolves around the sun - but if you need to orchestrate a rapid response to a pressing problem before it’s too late, you may just be out of luck.
