Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the United States. In 2010, she and the historian Erik M. Conway published “Merchants of Doubt,” which examined the ways in which politics and big business have helped sow doubt about the scientific consensus. Her most recent book, “Why Trust Science?,” examines how our idea of the scientific method has changed over time, and how different societies went about verifying its accuracy. Her work often addresses climate change and why Americans have rejected climate-change science more than people in other countries have.
I recently spoke with Oreskes by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the Trump Administration’s slow response to the pandemic, the Republican Party’s antiscientific propaganda, and strategies for convincing Americans that the threat of the coronavirus is real.
When you see the way people have responded to the new coronavirus, both in government and average people, do you think the response reflects what you’ve studied regarding the distrust of science?
There’s been a lot of loose talk about distrust in science. The reality is that, if we look at careful public-opinion polls, what we see is that most people do trust science on most things, and most people trust experts on most things. People trust their dentists. People trust their car mechanics. In general, people use experts all the time, and most of us don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing experts on most issues. There are some definite exceptions to that. If we have reason to believe that people are dishonest or incompetent, then we may be skeptical. But, when it comes to science, the big exception has to do with what I’ve written about, which is implicatory denial. That is to say, we reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications.
All of the major areas where we see resistance to scientific findings in contemporary life fall into this category. So if you ask yourself, Why do people reject the evidence of evolution? It’s not because evolutionary theory is a bad theory, or a weak theory scientifically, or that we don’t have good evidence for it. It’s because some people think that it implies that there’s no God, or that it implies that life is meaningless and has no purpose, or that it’s all just random and nihilistic. If we think about vaccinations, it’s a similar sort of thing. It’s not that the science of immunology is a bad science or a weak science. It’s not that the people who reject immunization really understand immunology and have an intellectual critique. It’s a matter of, if their children are autistic, they feel upset that their children have a quite devastating disease and modern medical science doesn’t have an explanation for it. So they feel upset and they want an explanation, and so they turn to something like vaccinations, and they say, “Well, that’s the cause.” And so on and so forth with climate change, et cetera.
This is important because it means that you don’t persuade these people by giving them more scientific facts. But, in some cases, you can persuade them by, in the case of evolution, saying, “Well, actually, evolutionary theory doesn’t really disprove the existence of God, and it doesn’t mean that life is meaningless.” And it’s through engagement in that kind of conversation that sometimes you can actually make some progress.
This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience—how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going to be flooded, reject global-warming science? Is it partisanship?
The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in “Merchants of Doubt” was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn’t want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed—that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that’s happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.
And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let’s say you live in Florida, and you’re now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don’t accept it as proof of the science. You say, “Oh, well, we’ve always had flooding, or maybe it’s a natural variable.” You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don’t want to accept.
Let’s turn to the coronavirus. The Administration’s response was extremely slow, which could be explained by your theory, by the fact that the Administration didn’t want to see this for political reasons or just didn’t want to deal with it. Do you agree with that?
I do agree. And when you think about the position that Republican Administrations have taken over the last thirty years, it not only makes total sense—it’s completely predictable that this Administration did exactly what it did. They didn’t want to acknowledge the severity of the issue, because this is a textbook example of why we need a federal government. In fact, I’ve noticed that, just in the last week or so, increasingly I’m seeing people writing things like “Coronavirus proves the need for big government.” Because it’s really difficult to control a pandemic on the state or local level. The C.D.C. is a federal agency. The National Institutes of Health is a federal agency. All of the organizations we have that are set up to deal with a crisis of this type are federal agencies.
And so for the Trump Administration to have acted briskly and promptly and in line with the scientific evidence on this would have been for it to embrace the role of the federal government and say, “This is exactly why we have a powerful federal government. This is exactly why we have federal agencies of this sort.” So I think that it would have been much easier for any Democrat to have responded to this issue than for any Republican to have responded. And then you add on to it Donald Trump’s particular—how should I put this politely?—reflex to be hostile to science and hostile to experts. Add that into the mix and I think that’s exactly what you’d expect.
Right. I don’t think Trump’s response and skepticism about its seriousness was motivated by some deep, small-“C” conservative concern about the size of the federal government.
Right, exactly. You add them both together and there’s a pretty dangerous combination. That’s why it makes sense that we saw what was essentially a two-month delay in having the kind of response that we should have had on this issue.
I think we also see a lot of resistance from average people. I know the polls say Republicans have been taking this less seriously than Democrats, which certainly makes sense. But people all across the country—regardless of their age or political persuasion—have been failing to take this as seriously as they should, and not embracing social distancing as quickly as they should. Maybe, as you said, people don’t like to embrace things that go against what they believe or how they want to behave—in this case, because they want to go to the bars, or nightclubs, or they want to see their family.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think a short version of this is to say nobody likes bad news. So all of us—Democrat, Republican, Independent, whatever—if we see evidence of something on the horizon that we don’t like, if it’s going to be inconvenient, if it’s going to be unpleasant, we have a tendency to try to deny it, or put it off. There are millions of examples of this in your daily life. My favorite example is that people don’t get colonoscopies, even though it’s one of the most effective things you can do to protect your health, particularly if you’re over a certain age. But, let’s face it, a colonoscopy is no fun, so we put it off. We say, “I’ll get around to it,” and we all do this. It seems to be a feature of human nature.
And so it takes some kind of extra evidence, extra direction, or extra attention, to make us wake up and say, “You really have to do this.” To me, one of the things that’s really interesting about what we’ve just seen over the last month was that about three weeks ago someone called me and said, “Why aren’t we reacting more strongly to this coronavirus thing?” And I said, “For years, I’ve listened to people say that one of the reasons that we aren’t responding appropriately to climate change is that there’s this feeling that it’s not really urgent. It’s not acute. It’s somewhere off in the future, and we’re just not ready to deal with things unless they’re really immediate.” So the coronavirus is an interesting test of that theory, because, if that theory is correct, then there’s going to become a moment when the coronavirus seems urgent, and then we will respond, and I do think that’s happened, but it took getting to the point where people saw it as urgent. Then the question becomes, Well, what makes people get it that it’s now urgent?
And what’s the answer?
I think it’s a combination of things, but I think it’s mostly leadership. I think that, as long as the people that you pay attention to, whether it’s the President of the United States, or politicians of other sorts, or celebrities, or your priest or minister, or rabbi, imam, whatever—we all pay attention to someone in our lives, and we have an influencer. People pay attention to folks on Instagram. I was in California when Tom Hanks announced that he had the virus, and it was all anybody in Los Angeles could talk about. And I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. People have died in a nursing home in Washington State, but, when Tom Hanks says he’s got it, suddenly everybody’s paying attention.
What is your theory for why the Republican Party, as far as I know, is the only mainstream party in one of the richest countries on Earth that denies the science behind climate change? Why wouldn’t that process repeat itself in other countries?
This particular type of conservatism, this small-government conservatism, the libertarian streak in American politics, is not really replicated in most other places in the world. There’s a bit of it in Australia, and you do see climate denial in Australia. There’s a little bit in Britain, and you do see climate denial in Britain. But if you go to France or Germany or Italy, or pretty much any other place in Europe, they are more—I won’t say they’re socialists, because they’re not, but they’re more socialistic. Most people in Europe embrace the fact that there’s an important role for government to play in their lives. Most Europeans recognize that they have mixed economies, in which some part of the economy runs on, more or less, market principles, but there’s an awful lot that the government’s involved in. And, of course, that’s true here, as well, but our rhetoric, our national narrative, is very different.
I think this runs very, very deep in American culture. It ties into a kind of extraordinary individualism that you don’t generally see in other places in the world, so we tend to be more resistant to collective action in the United States than people in other countries. And it ties into this very, very deep idea in American culture that the government that governs best governs least. I think we can explain the American exceptionalism, in this case. The next book that Erik Conway and I are writing, right now, actually attempts to answer that question. And what we’re looking at is a hundred-year history of American business constructing a narrative about the virtues of the marketplace and the infelicities of government.
To allude to something you mentioned earlier, which was how to talk to people about science that they don’t want to accept: What have you learned in your work that could be helpful for this crisis? I know you said that bombarding people with more facts does not do the trick, so how would you apply what you’ve learned to where we are now?
I think one thing we’ve learned is that there isn’t just one answer. Different people are different, and there are people who do welcome facts. I found that, when I work with schoolteachers, for example, a lot of schoolteachers are actually quite hungry for good factual information. So I would never want to be quoted as saying facts don’t matter, because that’s not true.
But for people who are resisting, for whatever reason, you have to acknowledge that the resistance is reasonable on some level. Nobody wants to be stuck in their house for the next six months, or possibly longer. Most people like to go out to restaurants, bars, clubs. We like to go to our gym. We like to go to work. We like to not be laid off. I mean, this really sucks. This is a really lousy situation. I think starting with the acknowledgement of the lousiness of it is really important, because then people feel that you’re not invalidating their feelings. You’re recognizing that this is lousy, but denying it doesn’t make it go away. In fact, the opposite: denying it makes it worse, and that’s the argument that I found works with climate change. You say to people, “Yeah, we’re going to have to make some big changes in the way we live, but we can make those changes.”
In some ways, climate change is actually a better story than the coronavirus, because, with a lot of the things we need to do for climate change, we’ll actually be fine, and we’ll actually be better off in the long run. We’ll have better transportation systems. We won’t sit around in traffic. Or, if you’ve driven an electric car, you know electric cars are better—they’re more fun to drive than internal combustion. So it’s partly about acknowledging the legitimate concerns but also about showing that there is a solution, and the solution is probably better than the non-solution.
You’ve written about the importance of people in science being honest, and the absolute necessity of that. I’m curious what you’ve made of scientists in the federal government—I won’t say shading the truth, but, it seems, not being as forthright as they would like, especially when they’re at the podium with the President. I totally understand why they’re doing it. I understand why they don’t want to get fired in the midst of an emergency. But it also seems like they’ve been walking a very fine line. What have you made of that, and how do you think scientists, especially in the federal government, should think about their role right now?
I can’t say that I have any inside information at the C.D.C. I do not know what is exactly going on there, but, as you suggested, it seems pretty obvious that these people are coming under a lot of political pressure. I have tremendous empathy for them. I can see that they’re in a very difficult situation, but I do think that it’s incredibly important for scientists not to allow themselves to be pressured into saying things that are untrue, half-truths, or misleading, for a few reasons. The first one is obvious: if the scientists don’t stand up and give us the right information, people will die. This is truly an issue of life and death, and scientists have a moral responsibility to tell the truth about this matter.
Now, as you pointed out, it could be that, if they speak too clearly, they could get sacked, but that might actually be the right choice. Because it might be that the American people need to know that this is the truth, and to see what’s going on here, and to see that the federal government, or at least some portions of the federal government, is firing people for telling them the truth. I think that’s information that, if that’s really the case, we would need to know.
And then the third thing has to do with the long-term credibility of science. If scientists want the American people to trust them, then they have to stand up for the truth about these matters. Otherwise, it will be a big mess where, later on, people say, “Well, Naomi, you tell us we should trust science, but look at those C.D.C. people. They told us all kinds of things that weren’t true.” It will undermine the reputation of science in the long run.
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