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Many scientific findings continue to be disputed by politicians and parts of the public long after a scholarly consensus has been established. For example, nearly a third of Americans still do not accept that fossil fuel emissions cause climate change, even though the scientific community settled on a consensus that they do decades ago.

Research into why people reject scientific facts has identified peoples political worldviews as the principal predictor variable. People with a libertarian or conservative worldview are more likely to reject climate change and evolution and are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

What explains this propensity for rejection of science by some of the political right? Are there intrinsic attributes of the scientific enterprise that are uniquely challenging to people with conservative or libertarian worldviews? Or is the association merely the result of conflicting imperatives between scientific findings and their economic implications? In the case of climate change, for example, any mitigation necessarily entails interference with current economic practice.

We recently conducted two large-scale surveys that explored the first possibility that some intrinsic attributes of science are in tension with aspects of conservative thinking. We focused on two aspects of science: the often tacit norms and principles that guide the scientific enterprise, and the history of how scientific progress has led us to understand that human beings are not the centre of the universe.

Sociologist Robert Merton famously proposed norms for the conduct of science in 1942. The norm of communism (different from the political philosophy of communism) holds that the results of scientific research should be the common property of the scientific community. Universalism postulates that knowledge should transcend racial, class, national or political barriers. Disinteredness mandates that scientists should conduct research for the benefit of the scientific enterprise rather than for personal gain.

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These norms sit uneasily with strands of standard contemporary conservative thought. Conservatism is typically associated with nationalism and patriotism, at the expense of embracing cooperative internationalism. And the notion of disinterestedness may not mesh well with conservative emphasis on property rights.

Science has enabled us to explain the world around us but that may create further tensions especially with religious conservatism. The idea that humans are exceptional is at the core of traditional Judeo-Christian thought, which sees the human as an imago Dei, an image of God, that is clearly separate from other beings and nature itself.

Against this human exceptionalism, the over-arching outcome of centuries of research since the scientific revolution has been a diminution of the status of human beings. We now recognise our planet to be a rather small and insignificant object in a universe full of an untold number of galaxies, rather than the centre of all creation.

We tested how those two over-arching attributes of science its intrinsic norms and its historical effect on how humans see themselves might relate to conservative thought and acceptance of scientific facts in two large-scale studies. Each involved a representative sample of around 1,000 US residents.

We focused on three scientific issues; climate change, vaccinations, and the heritability of intelligence. The first two were chosen because of their known tendency to be rejected by people on the political right, allowing us to observe the potential moderating role of other predictors.

The latter was chosen because the belief that external forces such as education can improve people and their circumstances is a focus of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is skeptical of that possibility and leans more towards the idea that improvement comes from the individual implying a lesser role for the malleability of intelligence.

The fact that individual differences in intelligence are related to genetic differences, with current estimates of heritability hovering around 50%, is therefore potentially challenging to liberals but might be endorsed by conservatives.

The two studies differed slightly in how we measured political views and peoples endorsement of the norms of science, but the overall findings were quite clear. Conservatives were less likely to accept the norms of science, suggesting that the worldviews of some people on the political right may be in intrinsic conflict with the scientific enterprise.

Those people who accepted the norms of science were also more likely to endorse vaccinations and support the need to fight climate change. This suggess that people who embrace the scientific enterprise as a whole are also more likely to accept specific scientific findings.

We found limited support for the possibility that belief in human exceptionalism would predispose people to be more sceptical in their acceptance of scientific propositions. Exceptionalism had little direct effect on scientific attitudes. Therefore, our study provided no evidence for the conjecture that the long history of science in displacing humans from the centre of the world contributes to conversatives uneasiness with science.

Finally, we found no strong evidence that people on the political left are more likely to reject the genetic contribution to individual variation in intelligence. This negative result adds to the evidence that science denial is harder to find on the left, even concerning issues where basic aspects of liberal thought in this case the belief that people can be improved are in potential conflict with the evidence.

The two studies help explain why conservatives are more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals. This rejection is not only dictated by political interests clashing with a specific body of scientific knowledge (such as human-caused climate change), but it appears to represent a deeper tension between conservatism and the spirit in which science is commonly conducted.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Australian Research Council; Horizon 2020, European Commission (JITSUVAX); Jigsaw (technology incubator created by Google); UKRI (through Centre of Excellence REPHRAIN); Volkswagen Foundation (Germany); European Research Council (Advanced Grant PRODEMINFO); and the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest Universitys Honesty Project). He also receives funding from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany through a Research Award.

Klaus Oberauer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Many conservatives have a difficult relationship with science we wanted to find out why - Yahoo News UK

Mandates for the COVID-19 shots are popping up all over the country now, which means you may soon have to show proof of vaccination if you want to go to work, the gym or an indoor public event.

The requirements are a reaction to slowed vaccination rates that have left significant parts of the population without protection from the virus, just as the highly contagious delta variant is spreading. Among those supporting the new requirements is President Joe Biden, who has issued one for federal workers and encouraged both private and public employers to do the same.

The requirements seem to be relatively popular. As many as two-thirds of Americans support them, if some recent polling is correct. But there are plenty of opponents out there. Among the loudest are some high-profile leaders in the Republican Party.

Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) says vaccine requirements are products of the lefts authoritarian instincts. Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) describes the push for requirements as vaccine fascism. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) responded to Bidens announcement by tweeting, No mandates for anyone, and vowing that Americans will stand for freedom and then punctuating the line with an American flag emoji.

Republicans at the state level are saying similar things and they are acting too, putting in place prohibitions on vaccine requirements in more than a dozen states. One of them is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has issued orders and signed legislation thatbansvaccine requirements by private companies as well as local government agencies.

Florida is a free state, and we will empower our people, DeSantis said in a fundraising letter this week. We will not allow Joe Biden and his bureaucratic flunkies to come in and commandeer the rights and freedoms of Floridians.

The virtual flag-waving, appeals to personal liberty, and warnings about fascism suggest there is something fundamentally un-American about vaccine mandates.But requirements to get inoculations have been around since the very first days of the republic, claiming broad support and withstanding legal challenges.

This isnt because officials or judges are ignoring freedom. Its because they believe vaccination is a key to securing it.In fact, among those who support vaccine requirements today are some well-known conservative judges and libertarian scholars in other words, precisely the sort of people you would expect to protest government overreach most vociferously.

What Liberals And Conservatives Say About Vaccine Mandates

A basic justification for vaccine mandates is that your freedom doesnt include the freedom to endanger the rest of your community.The principle is a bedrock of democratic philosophy and the American legal tradition, with courts applying it to a variety of contexts including public health.

You cant walk around assaulting people just because you feel like its an important part of your self-expression, Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, said in an interview. And you cant dump pollutants into a towns drinking water just because youd rather not pay for cleanup. By the same token, we require kids to get vaccinated for all sorts of illnesses before they go to public school. Otherwise, their bodies could be used as vectors to harm others.

SOPA Images via Getty ImagesFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state's hospitals are filling up with COVID-19 patients, has said that vaccination requirements threaten freedom.

The most important legal precedent on vaccines specifically is a 1905 case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in which the Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring smallpox vaccination for adults. Just this week, a panel from a federal appeals court cited Jacobson when it upheld, unanimously, a new COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students at Indiana University.

The author of that ruling, Frank Easterbrook, is a well-respected conservative first put on the bench by President Ronald Reagan. In the opinion, Easterbrook argued that the Indiana University requirement was actually less onerous than the old Massachusetts requirement, because it applied only to people who are choosing to enroll at the university.

People who do not want to be vaccinated may go elsewhere, Easterbrook wrote.

That appears to be true for all of the vaccine mandates now in place or under discussion: They are not requirements per se, but rather conditions for some kind of voluntary activity. Although the consequences can still be harsh say, if it means giving up a job many of the mandates, including the one Biden introduced for federal workers, offer alternatives like undergoing frequent testing plus a promise to observe social distancing.

Thats in addition to exceptions for people who can cite legitimate religious grounds or who cant get shots for medical reasons.

In the eyes of the law, nothing under discussion is actually a mandate, in the sense of a government command backed up by coercion, Bagley said.

What Some Libertarians Say About Vaccine Mandates

Bagley is generally thought of as a liberal, but its not hard to find conservatives and libertarians who take the same view.

In a 2013 paper titled A Defense of Compulsory Vaccination, Jessica Flanigan, a University of Richmond professor known for libertarian writings on bioethics, cited the example of people firing guns into the air in order to celebrate Independence Day. Governments can and do prohibit such behavior even though its a form of expression, Flanigan explained, because the bullet could end up hitting and even killing somebody.

People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others, Flanigan wrote.

Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan made a similar argument in a 2018 journal article called A Libertarian Case for Mandatory Vaccination. That was two years before COVID-19, but, he told HuffPost last week, he thinks the case for mandates now remains strong.

Bill Clark via Getty ImagesElise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair from New York, punctuated her tweets on vaccine mandates with an American flag emoji.

In my view, people have the right to harm themselves by making bad choices, Brennan said. This is about protecting others from the undue risk of harm you impose upon them by being unvaccinated. The lower the personal costs/risks of the vaccine and the higher the risk that the unvaccinated impose upon others the stronger the case is for mandating vaccines.

And then there is Ilya Somin, whom nobody would mistake for a fan of government power.

A professor at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, he has spent much of his professional life decrying what he sees as state encroachments on personal liberty, whether its local authorities taking property under eminent domain or the federal governmentpenalizing people for not getting health insurance.

But Somin said in an interview that vaccine mandates make sense under certain circumstances and that the present situation qualifies. He described taking the shot as a small burden for the sake of much larger benefits, like slowing transmission and reducing the opportunities for new, more dangerous variants to emerge.

The issue here is not just that it saves lives, but that it potentially saves a great many of them, and not just those of the vaccinated people themselves, Somin said. It also protects others in the community. That makes it different from primarily paternalistic restrictions on liberty, such as, say, requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets.

Somin said said he would feel differently about imposing a requirement on the public at large, rather than making the vaccines a condition for engaging in certain activities, in part because it would be a law enforcement nightmare. Somin also noted that many of the mandates are coming from private-sector companies acting on their own.

American laws and courts have long given private companies all kinds of leeway to dictate terms of employment, as well as whom they serve as customers. Libertarians like Somin are especially reluctant to see that erode, because they believe owners, workers and consumers end up better off when corporations operate with fewer restrictions.

Where The Debate Goes From Here

One group that would be happy to cut down on management discretion over employees are labor unions, and thats a big reason so many unions representing teachers, health care workers and other sectors subject to the mandates have been fighting them.

The unions are also representing workers who, in many cases, are genuinely fearful of the vaccines. This is especially true for the health care unions whose memberships include large numbers of Black Americans, whose vaccination numbers nationwide have lagged in part because of deep distrust of the medical establishment that has built up over the centuries.

Of course, from a public health perspective, thats all the more reason to impose the mandate: to boost vaccination among people who take the pandemic seriously and are part of communities that have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19. And thats not to mention the biggest reason, which is that unvaccinated health care workers are a direct threat to the safety and well-being of patients.

Still, many of the unions fighting the requirements are focusing more on the specifics of verification and exceptions to the rules.Thats different from the categorical rejection of mandates you hear from Cruz, DeSantis and the other Republicans. And although the unions certainly represent a lot of members, those GOP officials have a lot of influence especially when it comes to the part of the population most hostile to getting vaccinated.

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Opponents Of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Have A Curious Definition Of 'Freedom' - HuffPost

PayPal has a new initiative to reduce hate and extremism that will result in nonliberal groups and individuals being banned by the finance giant, conservatives say, because it has succumbed to pressures to be "woke."

PayPal and the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, announced a new partnership initiative last week to combat racism, hate, and extremism across PayPal's platform and the financial industry more broadly.

The initiative will focus on researching and then disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements by not allowing those individuals and organizations to use PayPal to make and receive payments.

The intelligence that the initiative gathers on those spreading hate and extremism will be shared broadly across the financial industry and with policymakers and law enforcement, which could result in further punishment for those identified by PayPal and the ADL.

"It's essentially a signaling mechanism to all the woketarians out there it's a fist bump for other woke people. They just want to signal how great and virtuous they are," said Dan Bongino, a conservative commentator and entrepreneur who is a prolific investor in tech startups, particularly those popular with conservatives.

CHALLENGE FOR CONSERVATIVE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: ATTRACTING 'LIBS' TO OWN

"But this will end up hurting anyone who is conservative, libertarian, nonliberal, anyone who doesn't toe the company line," he said.

Bongino said the initiative was risky for PayPal's business in the long run because it could alienate 50% of the country.

PayPal says that the new initiative will not change the way it operates "in any way," a spokesman told the Washington Examiner.

"PayPal's long-standing policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance.

"We base our reviews of accounts on these parameters, taking action when we deem that individuals or organizations have violated this policy," the spokesman said.

In 2019, PayPal's CEO Dan Schulman said the company removed 10 to 100 accounts every month that have been flagged by the company's internal algorithm or by outside groups as potentially promoting hate, violence, or racial intolerance.

In the past, PayPal has taken input from groups on the Right and the Left, Schulman said, regarding who might be violating the company's policies, including taking advice from groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, a controversial civil rights advocacy group.

However, neither PayPal nor the ADL clarified what criteria would be used to determine what qualifies as a "hate group" or what will guide its research for identifying extremist individuals and organizations.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS UNVEIL LEGISLATIVE PLAN TO BREAK UP BIG TECH AND STOP CENSORSHIP

Conservatives are worried the initiative could be used to suppress speech and cut off financial resources.

"It's like 1984, except the 2021 version is outsourced to private companies. Modern technology is much more advanced than Orwell would have possibly imagined," said Dan Gainor, a vice president at the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog that tracks censorship on Big Tech platforms.

"We're on a scary path of suppression given how many millions rely on PayPal for payments. So many organizations and freelancers could be affected," Gainor said.

He specifically took issue with the ADL using its credibility with the Jewish community to promote cancel culture.

"ADL used to be a respectable organization that I myself contributed to, to help [fight] Jewish discrimination. But now, it's just another lefty group that hates freedom of speech and nonliberal ideas," said Gainor.

Gainor said he was against hate and extremism of any kind that led to violence and rioting, but he was worried that PayPal and the ADL would not be fair in who they classified as hateful and extreme.

Conservatives and libertarians also say the initiative is a brand-building strategy for PayPal to get more liberal customers and make more money in the short run.

"They are pushing an initiative that has nothing to do with their business but instead pushes cancel culture, which can be very profitable in a world where free speech is not popular," said Jeffrey Wernick, one of the top investors and the former chief operating officer of Parler.

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"This will be good for their profits and their bottom line but will not make the world a better place or reduce their objectives of hate and extremism," he said.

Original Location: PayPal whipped into cancel culture by woke police, conservatives say

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PayPal whipped into cancel culture by woke police, conservatives say - Denver Gazette