The Partisan Brain: How Dissonant Science Messages Lead Conservatives and Liberals to (Dis)Trust Science
Abstract
There has been deepening concern about political polarization in public attitudes toward the scientific community. The “intrinsic thesis” attributes this polarization to psychological deficiencies among conservatives as compared to liberals. The “contextual thesis” makes no such claims about inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, but rather points to interacting institutional and psychological factors as the forces driving polarization. We evaluate the evidence for both theses in the context of developing and testing a theoretical model of audience response to dissonant science communication. Conducting a national online experiment ( N = 1,500), we examined audience reactions to both conservative-dissonant and liberal-dissonant science messages and consequences for trust in the scientific community. Our results suggest liberals and conservatives alike react negatively to dissonant science communication, resulting in diminished trust of the scientific community. We discuss how our findings link to the larger debate about political polarization of science and implications for science communicators.
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The impact of PST partly depends on the identity of its audience.
“the effects of PST depend partly on who the PST audience is (for example, different political orientation might lead to different trust assignments and information uptake;Nisbet et al. [2015]).”
From Science Communication and the Problematic Impact of Descriptive Norms (2023) · cites this paper as Nisbet et al. [2015]
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- Authors
- Nisbet, E. C., Cooper, K. E., & Garrett, R. K.
- Affiliations
- The Ohio State University (US)
- Venue
- The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2015-02-08
- Volume
- 658
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 36-66
- ISSN
- 0002-7162 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-3349
- OpenAlex
- W2132998485
- Cited by
- 437
- References
- 64
- Citations by year
- 2026: 21 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 42 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 44 · 2021: 59 · 2020: 59 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 33 · 2017: 28 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 95.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Academic Freedom and Politics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Science and Science Education
- Keywords
- political polarization, science communication, public trust in science, conservatives, liberals, audience response
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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