Are Liberals More Over-Confident in Their Understand of Science than Conservatives?

If you ever go to vote in England, you will often see three people with clipboards sitting outside the polling station, each wearing different coloured rosettes. They are representatives of the three main parties – Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat – and they are known as “tellers.” On the day of the British General Election in 2015, I happened to be in London so I offered my services to the local Conservative Party as a “teller.” This means that you sit in front of the polling station and as people come to vote you ask for their polling card. You eventually have a record of which of your party’s supporters, according to your own canvassing, have voted such that, before the close of poll, you can chase up those who haven’t.

I first did this in 1998 and it was very good natured and the three of us chatted in a friendly way the entire time, despite our political differences. By 2015, Britain was far more polarised and making conversation with the old woman representing the Labour Party was rather more strained. Somehow, I cannot remember how, I steered the conversation onto the subject of intelligence; this being the area I researched. She wondered out loud how I could possibly research this when IQ tests and the whole notion of intelligence have, in fact, been debunked and everybody knows that there are multiple intelligences.

This woman exemplified a particular type that has emerged in a new study entitled “Does medium matter? Political orientation and variability in scientific self-perceptions” in the journal The Public Understanding of Science. The study drew upon General Social Survey (GSS) data accrued between 2006 and 2018, with surveys of various kinds administered to about 7000 people. These surveys included questions on whether they got their scientific knowledge online or offline, questions on their scientific knowledge (true and false statements and questions on probability and experimental design) and an instrument which allowed them to rate how confident they were in the correctness of their scientific knowledge.

The only clear finding in the study was the emergence of someone rather like the Labour Party activist to whom I chatted for a few hours in 2015, as I imagine this woman got most of her information from reading The Guardian newspaper. However, reports on this study have somehow failed to understand the importance of one of its findings.

Firstly, those who mainly got their information from the internet scored higher in scientific knowledge than those who obtained their information from “traditional sources” such as physical newspapers, these being far more popular in 2006. This, presumably, reflects the way in which all such sources have, to varying degrees, been captured by some kind of ideology, such as Multiculturalism, and, therefore, provide a slanted and inaccurate view of science in a way that the more democratic and diverse internet is less able to.

Secondly, 53% extreme liberals who got their information from newspapers claimed to have a “clear understanding” of a “scientific experiment” compared to only 30% who obtained their information online. Indeed, comparing their scores on scientific understanding with their degree of self-confidence in their correct understanding of science it was found that extreme liberals who obtained their information from newspapers were the most over-confident of any group, with 39% of them over-estimating their understanding of science.

This is likely because liberals have far more confidence in traditional institutions, including newspapers, than conservatives, with liberals having captured most of these institutions. Scepticism is fundamental to science and, in a Woke-influenced society, scepticism on anything from big government to the causes of climate change or the merits of immigration is coded as “conservative.” The liberals have taken over the culture and have thoroughly marched their way through the institutions. It follows that the extreme liberal who obtains his knowledge from a traditional newspaper will be strongly trusting of that biased newspaper and, so, over-confident in his understanding of science.

Most importantly, in my view, was the finding that those who described themselves as “moderate,” rather than “liberal” or “conservative,” over-estimated their scientific knowledge or understanding regardless of whether they obtain most of their information from newspapers or online. I suspect a key reason for this is that people who regard themselves as “moderate” probably regard themselves as highly intelligent and even as superior. “Ordinary people,” they say to themselves, “are black and white. They are conformists who are either Republican or Democrat, but I am better than them. I am very sceptical and thoughtful; I do not fit into these simplistic categories and my opinions shift depending  on the context.” Research has found that moderates tend to see themselves as objective arbiters and some of them are even driven by a need to justify the system in which they find themselves.

The idea that people can rate themselves on a scale from extreme conservative to extreme liberal is an inherent problem with the GSS. Many people who might be regarded as “extreme” liberals or conservatives might not regard themselves as such and so wouldn’t rate themselves as such. I can imagine that a lot of “liberals” would rate themselves as “moderate,” at least in a society of liberal hegemony. It follows that what this study has probably found is that liberals over-estimate their scientific understanding compared to conservatives, which is much as we might expect.