So, last time I dealt with the mechanisms behind Climate Change denial and psychology. My main point was that people deny Climate Change primarily because of cognitive dissonance and because the threat lacks saliency (and immediacy I should have added). I wonder sometimes whether we would have successfully reduced CFC emissions had the huge hole in the Ozone layer in the Antarctic been discovered much later. That event brought saliency to the whole issue. What will it take for APW? Obviously not Katrina, Sandy, polar ice sheet reduction, the hottest decade in history, etc. We Americans love our SUVs.
But let me switch gears a bit. Instead of asking why people refuse to believe it when science tells them something they don't want to hear, I am going to ask, why do people believe complete nonsense?
I think the answer lies in how we come to the sense of knowing something is true. In the book, "On Being Certain: Believing You are Right Even When You're Not", Robert Burton (a neurologist) proposes that the sense of "knowing" something is true is a sensation in the brain just as pleasure is. He further proposes that we are unaware of why we "know" things are true, we just do. This is because the mechanisms that bring this about are in the subconscious mind. So for example, if someone asks you how you "know" your name, you would be hard pressed to say why. You might make up a story (my parents always called me that), but you don't really know how you know your name. But you do know it. And you know it without a doubt.
Our subconscious brain a marvel of quick heuristic calculations that help us navigate an incredibly complex experience. It instantly sorts out a wide variety of stimuli, and prioritizes which things need to attention of the conscious brain. According to Burton, it also instantly tells us which of our stray thoughts are "real" and what we are "imagining". That is, I can imagine a horse and picture one in front of me, but my brain automatically knows there is not a horse there. Or someone can put a photo of a horse in front of me and same thing: I know it's not really a horse and my conscious brain didn't need to figure that out.
The bottom line is we effortlessly "know" some things are true (or not true). And that sensation is powerful enough that we will almost always trust it more than our reasoning. Put another way, we trust our gut over our head.
Let me add one more important ingredient. Our subconscious brain is fast. It's fast because it uses easy heuristics to reach quick conclusions. One of those short cuts could be characterized as "correlation equals causation". So now take autism. Autism manifest between age 6 months and 3 years. Guess what else happens then? Vaccinations. Now, an upset parent will look for an explanation as to what went wrong. The subconscious brain easily picks up on the correlation. Many parents will say that the "know" it was the vaccination. They have they "know it's true" sensations in their brains.
Now, in a scientifically educated world, this is not so bad, because people will learn to rely on scientist to do things like peer reviewed, double blind experiments before drawing conclusions and setting public policy. But what about a world where science itself has been under relentless undermining? Like, say, the USA. In this case, all theories are need only pass our gut feeling test to have merit. We are free to go with the ones our "gut" tells us to believe. And our "gut" tells all sorts on nonsense.
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