On two of the major issues facing us as a society today – COVID-19 and climate change – denialism is a very strong force holding us back. Science denialists are often stereotyped as willfully ignorant, closing their ears to what they don’t want to hear. But internet commentator culture has borne a new type of skeptic who seems, on the surface, to be actively engaged in their own learning. This “engagement,” however, may be urged by a specific media personage, and often results in a chronic questioning that skirts reality.
How do we maintain a questioning, but informed and safe, society? Drs. Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer have become a leading voice in this space. They are are the co-authors of the book Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It. Professor Hofer is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at Middlebury College and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and Professor Sinatra is the Stephen H. Crocker Chair and Professor of Psychology and Education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.
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Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, I’m the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses. And I’m talking with two people that I had a chance to talk with a couple of months ago, Professor Gale Sinatra and Professor Barbara Hofer. This is the first time we’ve had two guests on Sacred Science at the same time. But they are here both together because they are the co-authors of the excellent book Science Denial, about why it happens and what we can do about it. They actually were working in partnership a little bit with Netflix about the movie Don’t Look Up, which I’m sure many of us have seen, and I got to see a month ago, so we’ll talk about that as well. But Professor Sinatra and Professor Hofer – Gail and Barbara – thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us here this afternoon.
Gale and Barbara: Thank you for having us.
Geoff Mitelman: And you’ve done this together – it’s a wonderful, like, in unison to be able to have this. So I want to start because I think a lot of us have been thinking about you were involved in Don’t Look Up. And, boy, pop culture is a great way to be able to engage and talk about some of these different kinds of questions and thoughts. So I would love to know a little bit – when we think about these questions of climate change, and how and why people sort of ignore what’s going on – they “don’t look up,” or they don’t think about these kinds of questions – why is this still an issue? The science is pretty clear on climate change, so it’s not about the science. The two of you, I know, focus on psychology, so I’d love to hear a little bit about what do you see as the psychology of these different kinds of questions.
Barbara Hofer: Well, I think what we want to do first is talk a little bit about “What is denial?” and how do we distinguish it from some of the other ways people respond to science. And so we think about denial as a belief-based stance – a refusal to accept scientific evidence. And when we started writing the book, I don’t think we imagined that we would be where we are now – that we would see people really denying to the grave, that it’s really become so serious during the pandemic. Climate change has been an issue that’s concerned us for a long time. Both of us have done a lot of work in that area, and we see that as now also getting worse. And as you mentioned, we’re now in a really bizarre situation where people are denying what is very clear-cut evidence from the IPCC. But in the book, we also try to talk about doubt and resistance. We know that doubt can be manufactured. If you think about some of the reasons why people deny climate change, is they’re dubious about whether scientists really know for certain what causes it. And of course, it’s to Exxon’s benefit and other fossil fuel companies to have people think that way. So that has become problematic. And they have figured out how to hire PR firms that foster doubt.
There’s also resistance – just a general sort of, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sure that’s right,” or just a lot of concerns. And we’ll unpack some of the psychological reasons behind all of this. I mean, what we try to do in the book is talk about five big ideas in psychology about why people deny doubt or resist science, and we’ll just go through those a little bit and chat about it, I think, as you’re interested. But we think about social identity, obviously a huge factor right now – the kind of thinking and reasoning biases that we’re all susceptible to – because, for us, it’s not just an “us and them” kind of thing, of “those people deny science, but we all think perfectly all the time.” We all have these flaws in our thinking and reasoning. We think about motivated reasoning, about epistemic cognition, and about emotion. And those are the big ideas we want to talk about that we think underride this.
And of course, behind all this, too, is the current landscape of the internet and social media. We know that we’re living in a very different time. I mean, certainly we’ve had denial back to Galileo, and obviously before – he died under house arrest for making claims that we know to be true. We know how long it took for Darwin’s work to get accepted, and it’s still not by a lot of people. So we’re living in a very difficult time where these kinds of things that we’re going to talk about these five issues, can be pretty dramatically exploited – or explored creatively in films like Don’t Look Up.
Geoff Mitelman: Mhm. Thank you. And Gale, I don’t know if there’s more that you want to add.
Gale Sinatra: Well, I think that Barbara gave a great overview of the main themes from our book. Maybe we can unpack them a little bit. For example, social identity – we’ve really seen that play out dramatically in Covid as people decided wearing a mask or not wearing a mask was a decision to be made by what your friends, or your Facebook friends, or your political group, did. And that’s not the best way to make decisions about science; you should follow the science, as opposed to your friend group. But we see the powerful ways that social identity played out. Some people were reluctant to get the vaccine because their social group was also reluctant. We even saw one case in the Ozarks in Missouri during a severe Delta outbreak, that people who had been reluctant to get vaccinated went in disguise to get vaccinated so their social group wasn’t going to see them. And I think that’s just a powerful illustration of that particular way that people think about science, rather than actually thinking about the real science, underneath the power of masking, public health and vaccination, to keep us safe.
Geoff Mitelman: So you bring up some great points of this question of social identity and the phrase of follow the science. And I’m thinking that, I think right before he retired, Dr. Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH, was asked, “What do you wish you could have done differently?” And he said, “I would have invested more in behavioral psychology.” It shocked me that nobody was going to take this. And yet, my wife and I were walking down, we’re like, “Oh, my God, there’s going to be a certain number of people who are just not going to take this vaccine, aren’t there?” And this was like six months before there were all these pushbacks. And some of the challenge has been public health messaging. I think that’s been the phrase of “follow the science,” – which I love, [but] I phrase it this way. I love the idea of following the science, [but] I think the slogan was actually not very effective, because it created a politicization of saying, “I am right, you are wrong, and if you don’t do this, you are going to be a bad person.” And I think – as I’ve said on the show multiple times – I identify as somebody on the left. I live in a pretty liberal area, but I think a lot of people who tend to be liberal – hopefully, I won’t get too much pushback on that – are more interested in being right than being in relationship. And they’re more interested in saying, “let me show you how right this is, and I’ve got it,” as opposed to trying to engage with other people and trying to be able to say, “What’s the actual problem on the ground we need to solve?” And those can be in real conflict with each other.
Gale Sinatra: I think “follow the science” is a difficult thing, because in this particular circumstance – a novel coronavirus – the science was evolving extremely quickly. Communication about that science was flawed, it wasn’t perfect, and then policy had to follow suit. And so it’s kind of like a telephone game. There’s the science, but it’s quickly changing. There’s the communication about the science, which may or may not be keeping up, which may or may not be perfect. And then there’s the actual policy, and the policies are enacted not just on the science, but on what’s realistic. My nephew is an infectious disease doctor, and he said, “Well, if you just keep every single person in America home for a couple of weeks, we’ll be fine.” And of course, he, and we, all know that that’s not realistic. So policy has to be realistic. So by the time you get to the end of that loop, “follow the science” is a little more challenging than the slogan.
Geoff Mitelman: And Barbara, you were going to jump in as well.
Barbara Hofer: I was going to go back to social identity and behavioral psychology, and what we know about social identity. I mean, we really are all tribal creatures. I mean, at the core, that’s who we are. And so there’s vast body of research that shows why we tend to trust people that are in our in-groups more than people who are in our out-groups. And creating an in-group and an out-group around science is really problematic. That is not what anybody ever intended. But what we need to realize is that people are members of a lot of social groups, so we can reach them through other parts of their identity. And that could have been played out a lot better than it has been. It isn’t just your moms group on Facebook that you’re close to. You might also be a member of a family, a member of a religious group, a member of another organization that has different kinds of practices and beliefs. And trying to figure out how to influence individuals through multiple social groups would be really effective.
Geoff Mitelman: And I’ve seen a thing of being able to say the raw numbers, rather than the percentage – to say “x number of millions of people have gotten the vaccine,” as opposed to 68% or 72%. “Well, if I’m one of the 20 something percent, that means, okay, there’s a big enough group that I can resist in this kind of way.”
Barbara Hofer: Yeah.
Gale Sinatra: Well, we know the countries that were most effective in dealing with COVID were the ones who did not politicize it. And I think that was a large mistake that was made in the United States, is that it was politicized, and that made people hunker down into these in-groups that they identify with, as Barbara was saying. And I definitely think that we failed to employ the social psychology and the psychology that we describe in our book about potential resistance and doubt – we went more with, “Oh, if we just invent the vaccine and follow that science, we’ll be fine.” But we didn’t follow enough social science in understanding these points of doubt, resistance, and denial that were going to be inevitable.
Geoff Mitelman: I love – we talked with Professor Cailin O’Connor – I think I’ve quoted this on the show before. She had done a presentation for us that she said something – we talked to her in sort of the middle of 2020 – maybe July of 2020. And she brought up a statement that if you had asked people in July of 2019, “What is hydroxychloroquine?” 99.9% of people would have said “hydroxy-what!?”. And by March or April of 2020, if you asked somebody, “What do you think about hydroxychloroquine?” They would know. They have an answer and they would have a feeling about it, and they would feel very strongly about that because that’s part of their identity.
And I wonder – and, Barbara, you mentioned this a little bit – that there’s actually, though, some good in that, of harnessing the questions of social identity, because not only am I not a scientist, even more so, I am not an epidemiologist. So being able to understand, “Okay, what do I need to do right now? Can I go to this store? Do I need a mask or do I not need a mask?” I can’t 60% put a mask on. And making these kinds of trade-offs. So, being able to look at, “What are my peers doing? What are my friends doing? What is my social group doing?” That’s a lot easier to be able to make a quick heuristic as a decision.
Barbara Hofer: Yeah, yeah. I’m going to jump in and talk about thinking and reasoning biases, because you’re really coming into that territory here. But we know that we all have biases about our thinking and reasoning, and these have been pretty well documented by psychologists, and many of them come into play in the kinds of issues that we’re talking about. So Daniel Kahneman, for example, talks about System 1 and System 2 thinking. And so System 1 is this very quick, impulsive response, which is great if you’re trying to drive and need to brake quickly – you don’t want to be spending a lot of time thinking about it. But System 2 is the slower, analytical, more thoughtful response. And it’s essential if you’re trying to decide whether to take hydroxychloroquine. (Laughs) I mean, that’s really important.
But as you’re pointing out, often on social media, we’re just quickly using System 1. We’re thinking, “Oh, they like it? I like it. I’ll retweet it. These are my peeps. I’m moving it forward,” without stopping to think. And that’s a really critical component of how we can address all of this, is if we all learn to slow down a bit, know when it’s important – I mean, it’s conditional knowledge. It’s not something you want to do all the time. It’s that you want to know when to slow down and when to make sense of scientific claims, rather than just listening to your friends.
Geoff Mitelman: You know, you mentioned doubt. And I think there’s Professor Michael Shermer, who’s the founder of Skeptic magazine. He talks about skepticism versus pseudo-skepticism. And I think there are elements where skepticism is valuable. And then there’s the, “well, I’m just asking questions,” when in fact you’re not “just asking questions,” right? It sounds really wonderful and it sounds very reasonable – you know, thinking about everything from Joe Rogan to, to Aaron Rogers, to the different people who are saying, “I’m not a crazy anti-vaccine person, but I’m just raising some questions here.” And I can understand people saying, “Okay, that’s a reasonable approach” – until you dig down a little bit. But we’re bombarded by so many different stimuli that it’s hard to know what’s reasonable skepticism and what’s pseudo-skepticism.
Barbara Hofer: It’s a really good point. We talk about healthy and unhealthy skepticism – that scientists rely on skepticism. It’s a tenet of the discipline to be skeptical, to look at your data, to really carefully analyze the results, to figure out if there’s another explanation for what you’re seeing. So skepticism can be really good, and we encourage people to do it when they’re reading, say, a single study on something – “eating chocolate before breakfast is going to make you lose weight.” That’s a real study that’s out right now. But you want to read that really carefully. There were only 19 people in that study. You want to be skeptical.
But there are other times where it is pseudo-skepticism. It is that phony thing that you’re talking about on the news where, “Well, I’m just asking. I just wonder if anybody’s thought about this.” And that really sows doubt in ways that are unhealthy.
Gale Sinatra: And you can also be motivated in your reasoning when you evaluate studies. So, motivated reasoning means that you’re really reasoning towards a preferred conclusion. I definitely prefer that that chocolate study works out rather than motivating towards the accurate conclusion that one would get by really weighing the evidence and recognizing that one study of a small number of people is really inconclusive. So, when to be [a] skeptic is important. And you can’t reason with your skepticism towards your desired conclusion, because you’re now moving towards motivated reasoning –which is another topic we cover in the book, which doesn’t get you towards an accurate evaluation of evidence.
Barbara Hofer: I was going to say another one of the biases – very similar – is confirmation bias. This idea that – you can think about any time you’ve ever been on Google trying to settle an argument with someone, and you find something that confirms what you already thought, and you just stop like, “Okay, well, there’s my answer,” without going any further. So we all have a human tendency in our reasoning biases to seek out, to confirm, to accept, to verify those things that we want to believe. And that’s also problematic. Again, you need System 2 to make you slow down and start to think, “Okay, but is there contradictory evidence here? Who actually says that? Is this authoritative?”
Geoff Mitelman: There was a line that someone said: “When we’re presented with evidence, it’s a question of ‘Can I believe it?’ versus ‘Must I believe it’?” If I find this, is it able to confirm, like, “Okay, I want this to be true so I can believe this,” versus “All right, do I really have to believe this?”
One of the things that actually – there’s a lot in Judaism about the role of both truth and trust – they’re actually linked words together. And in Judaism, there is a tremendous responsibility to be speaking truth and speaking things that are trusting. Because the problem is that when we hear information – and you know this better than I do, so please correct me if I’m wrong on this – that when you hear information, you hear it and you automatically assume that it’s going to be true, but you can’t be able to determine “Is it true or not?” until you actually hear it. Once you hear it, your filter is going to say, “it’s going to be hard to dislodge this.”
There was an article a couple of weeks ago – and my wife and I still deal with this. We still sometimes react to the guidelines from March of 2020 because that’s what happened. “And this is what we’ve got to do, and we’ve got to shut it down and wipe down the groceries…” because that was the first thing that we able to hear. And so the responsibility of not just hearing the information, but the real responsibility is communicating it clearly and effectively and accurately, and knowing who your audience is.
So I’d love for you to talk about the importance of not just science, but science communication, because that’s a whole other skill set. So I’d love for you to share a little bit of what are some of the ways in which we need to be able to communicate both truthfully, and in a way that our audience can trust us.
Gale Sinatra: Well, I’d like to start with when we initially started communicating to the general public about COVID. I wish the communication had been clearer that the situation was inevitably going to change. And, you know, we were washing down groceries, but then we learned that that wasn’t necessary, and people were up in arms about, “Oh, first we had to not wear a mask, now we have to wear masks. Scientists are lying.” That’s not lying. That’s evaluating the evidence and changing recommendations based on new evidence, which is exactly what you want science to do. So I think one major communication failure was not preparing people for the degree to which this was an evolving situation that was inevitably going to result in rapid changes in our thinking. If people had been more prepared for that, then I don’t think they’d still be washing their groceries down today.
Barbara Hofer: And some of that can be traced back to what we talk about as scientific literacy, that it’s not just knowing content, but it’s knowing how that content was derived. So – understanding the epistemology of science. What is it that scientists know? How do they know? How do they produce knowledge? What are the basic values that they hold? And some of the basic values that scientists have – basic principles – are attentiveness, this idea that you’re always pushing at the edge of knowledge, that you seldom hear a scientist talk about something that they know with absolute certainty. They try to get as close to the truth as possible. They try to approximate that. But they’re always open to new ideas, new suggestions, replication. And yet, what we heard cries of were “flip-flopping.” “The scientists don’t know anything. They’re just flip-flopping. They told us one thing then, and now they’re telling us another.” Instead, if people had good scientific educations and understood more about scientific literacy and how science is produced, we might not have been in as bad a situation.
Gale Sinatra: And I think this relates to your other point about trust. Dr. Fauci is trusted by people who understand that the situation is going to inevitably change and respect his expertise. And he is not trusted by those who didn’t understand that it would be an evolving situation, and also lack trust in authority, lack trust in legitimate authorities, lack trust in expertise. And that’s a broader issue that we discuss regarding science communication, is: Who is it that people trust, and who should you trust in regards to science?
Geoff Mitelman: What’s so challenging – and I heard this from a couple of different people – that one of the problems that came up with COVID is that the public got to see how the sausage is made. They got to open up and like “this is…” for those of us who are not scientists, it feels like flip-flopping. But as laypeople, we’re not able to distinguish from things that are accurate and are always going to be accurate, right? You drop something and it will fall on the ground. That’s always going to be true – at least on Earth, there are things that are true and are basically always going to be true; things that are true right now, but maybe overturned with new evidence; then there’s knowledge that is inaccurate but well-meaning, right? Like, “I meant to say this, oh, and I got this a little bit wrong,” or “I got this conflated and I shared something that was inaccurate, but that was a mistake that I made.”
Barbara Hofer: Or there things we don’t know enough about yet to give any measure of certainty on. And early in the virus that was the case. I mean, wash down your groceries because we don’t know if it’s fomites, we don’t know how it’s transmitted. And yet policies have to be made, guidance has to be given. Those are very challenging times for scientists and policymakers and for all the people who are communicating science. I mean, you’re raising really good issues about the importance of science communication. One of the things that’s really hard in this country is that not in this country anywhere. Scientists don’t get a lot of training in how to communicate to the public. And their language often sounds very tentative and hedged because that’s how they’re trained, even when it’s pretty clear they know what’s going on, they’re going to sound more nuanced than maybe is necessary. So trying to figure out how to communicate effectively, how to let people know how they know what they know and how certain it is, is really critical.
Gale Sinatra: We could have done a better job teaching in this country in K-12 education that science is not the collection of facts you find in a textbook, science is the process of trying to understand the natural world. And that process is messy, because the natural world is messy! It doesn’t fall into clean, neat, easy answers. If it did, we would know everything we need to know. But science is a process of discovery, and so it is messy. And we don’t teach it that way (and we should). The next-generation science standards do encourage teachers to teach about the process of science and engage students in discovery and asking questions – engage in the process themselves. And that’s very important. I think if we do that more, people would not be as surprised that it’s a little bit of a messy process that evolves over time.
Geoff Mitelman: So this may be a little bit beyond the scope – so if it is, feel free to table this. But one thing that has always struck me is the relationship between what we might call natural facts versus social facts. And in our society right now – there’s a lot of argument on both sides of this, of everything from natural facts, of “COVID is spread through the air. Masks help. Vaccines are good” – there’s already a lot of back and forth [about those]. But then there are what we might call social facts, of “Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States,” or “We need to teach about slavery in American society, and [different] cultures.” What is the fact of racism, of the history of America? Those are also things where there are arguments, where it is framed as questions of facts, of “I have one set of facts.” “I have another set of facts.” There’s absolutely motivated reasoning here. Are there any analogies that you can see of effective science communication, going to these questions of these social facts, where I’m feeling like our social fabric is really fraying and we’re losing a lot of trust in our society here.
Gale Sinatra: Yeah, I think, back to this issue of what Barbara mentioned a while ago about the epistemology of science – I think we need to say more about what scientists know and what scientists don’t know, and why they don’t know it. So, to be clearer about the sort of domain of knowledge that science can weigh into. You can count the number of votes. That’s something you can do. But how and whether to teach about the history of slavery in the United States – that is definitely more of an interpretation of how is best to do that could involve multiple interpretations. Whether or not we have slavery in this country is not something up to interpretation, but how we would teach children about it certainly is something worth thinking about very carefully and entertaining different points of use.
I think helping people understand “Where can science weigh in?” Where does science have, quote, “answers?” What do scientists not know? And what can they not tell us about? I don’t know what science could tell us about how we should teach about slavery. That’s not really where they could weigh in, but they certainly could tell us how to do a better job counting votes, perhaps. So when it’s fact-based and in the natural world and in the evidence-based world, that’s where science can weigh in.
Barbara Hofer: But, you know, I think you’re bringing up some really broader issues, too, about where we are in this nation right now. in what’s been called a, quote, “post-truth society.” We are in a period where people are defaming what we do know to be facts. We know who won the election – that, as Gale pointed out, that you can do, you can count those votes and know, but that becomes dubious. And that there are people fighting about that is really scary in many ways, because it plays right into an authoritarian culture that wants to take the idea of facts and truth, in areas where they are obvious, away from people, for their own vested interest. And that’s really disturbing to think about.
I keep bringing up this line. Many times people will say, “How can they possibly think that?” And I say, “Well, instead of asking yourself that question, ask who wants them to believe that and why? Who benefits from having people believe that?” And I think we can go into many of these sorts of areas, whether it’s doubts about climate change and what caused it, whether it’s doubts about who won the election, whether it’s doubts about whether we should be teaching about slavery – somebody’s benefiting from those issues, of trying to create controversy where there really shouldn’t be any.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, and I think that’s a great point. One line that we often like is to “Get curious, not furious,” and – I’ve quoted this many times from community organizing – which is to be able to ask people “What keeps you up at night and what gets you out of bed in the morning?”
And I think trying to ask people those kinds of questions that can address everything from “What are my kids learning?” – I want my kids to be able to learn certain kinds of things, and that can then talk about these kinds of questions of, well, “How is this part of a larger societal question? What does it mean to be part of a multicultural society?” to “What does this mean about what’s going to happen to our planet 50 years from now?” to “What are the ways in which we can act? What are the things in which we can be inspired to be able to do things?” And both you, I know, were able to come – Barbara, I know you were invited, but weren’t able to come – for the red carpet premiere of Don’t Look Up, which got a lot of conversation going about this movie. And there are a couple different ways that we can talk [it] about here.
I would love to hear your reactions and thoughts to the film, but one of the things that struck me is the level of distractedness that we deal with in our society. There are so many different stimuli and so many different crises that we’re grappling with, and some of it is manufactured crises. But manufactured crises are still crises. Manufactured panics are still panics. They still impact us here.
So what are some of the lessons that you would share from this film, and that you want people to be able to know about and take away, particularly if they saw the movie and were walking away going either, “that was hysterical,” or, “whoa, that just hit way too close to home for me.”
Gale Sinatra: Well, first, we want to be clear that we weren’t engaged in the film in any way in its development. We were simply invited, after the fact, after the film was made, to view it. I did get to see it. Barbara was unfortunately unable to, but we both were able to view it, then, when it was on Netflix, and then speak with Netflix about some of their climate-related activities. So I’d encourage your audience to look at our article in The Conversation – maybe you can share that – where we did unpack, what we saw, were some of the very clear science-denial themes, very similar to the ones we’ve been talking about with you here, and that we emphasize in our book. So, certainly, we saw social identity, people wearing their “don’t look up hats,” and people who were questioning the science. We saw motivated reasoning, where people wanted to believe what they wanted to believe, and evaluate the evidence about whether they could harvest the comet for minerals, and perhaps there was a little motivated reasoning there. So we see a lot of the themes from our book playing out in that film, and we appreciate the effort and attempt to try and illustrate those challenges through film. I think it’s a very difficult subject for people to wrap their heads around, and I think it did illustrate a lot of the challenges we have in communicating science and understanding science.
Barbara Hofer: There are also some issues around the film that everyone, I think, has noted – that it’s not a perfect parallel for climate change; there was a six-month window, it was going to happen, it was scheduled for a precise time that it would hit, it had to be resolved in that time frame. We’re in a much more open-ended kind of situation, but potentially as catastrophic, with climate change, and yet we have people unable to wrap their minds around it.
And another topic we talk about in the book is emotion – that there’s a lot of fear around climate change that keeps people with their heads buried in the sand. I mean, there’s a lot of difficulty in engaging with it. There’s a lot of psychological work, now, on climate anxiety. How are people feeling about it? And certainly, in the film, you sense all the different ways in which people respond to the anxiety of an impending comet. How is it that emotion either has them ignoring it and thinking, “Well, I’m just going to have to live out what I’m going to do,” or trying to do something about it?
The biggest difference is, there wasn’t much any individual could do about an impending comet. There’s a lot we can all do about climate change, and anybody who’s interested can go on the Netflix site, and there are wonderful links to how to get involved, what kind of climate action is necessary. They’ve had fabulous consultants putting together ideas and resources. And I think that the hopeful aspect of it is that we can address this, and that’s part of why they made the film – to try to get people motivated to think about what needs to be done, and what can individuals do to help make change.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, I think one of the analogies of both climate change and Covid, and the challenge for both of these, is that they are abstract and communal and long-term, versus, [for] most of our evolutionary history – if a tiger is coming at you, that is a concrete, definite, personal thing that you’ve got to deal with. And so I think there can be a tremendous amount of “What can I do as an individual?”
And we’ve talked with actually previous people from Interfaith Power and Light and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. And I think one of the things that’s important, but also challenging, is that I think on a lot of levels, there’s not much that we can do as individuals, but as part of a larger society, as part of a –
Barbara Hofer: Definitely, yeah.
Geoff Mitelman: So how do we harness our individual elements? Because all we can do is things as an individual human being. But when we add more people, it actually multiplies what the impact is going to be. How do we move out of our self-centeredness to be able to think about what we can do as a society, as a town, as a faith community, as a nation. How do we move beyond just ourselves to think about other people here?
Barbara Hofer: It’s such a good question. And I think – I did not mean that the solutions are individual. It’s not about “if we all change our light bulbs, then tomorrow this problem will go away,” but that individually, we can figure out how to collectively solve this problem. And so there are a lot of ideas on that. And obviously, the biggest power we all have right now is voting. Who is it that we’re going to put in positions that are going to make decisions about these kinds of things? Because they have to happen at a big, big level in order for us to have any impact at all.
Gale Sinatra: So, definitely voting – also, pushing for policy change and working in your community to make local changes – those are still beneficial. You can make local changes, and you can make changes in your own home and your own lifestyle. And while individual changes don’t make a huge difference, if everyone makes individual changes, that does make a difference, and it’s also creating a different mindset.
So I think that we just saw quite an interesting social phenomenon, I thought, during the Super Bowl – the very huge number of ads were for EV electric vehicles, and they weren’t Priuses, which I think that shows you that they understood their audience perhaps wanted some different kind of vehicle, but there’s a lot of – there are trucks, there’s different vehicles now that are EV. And I thought that was just a very huge trend. And as individuals in a community have the opportunity and the resources to drive an EV truck, then their neighbors will see that. So you can make a difference in that way if you have the means and the opportunity. So there are individual differences, smaller and more affordable, and bigger like that, that can be illustrative to your community and have other people get on the bus and be thinking about how we can, as a community, address these. But, of course, individual actions aren’t enough. We need to make systemic changes.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, and I think one of the things that religion is able to do is to be a moral exemplar. And there’s some work that was done – I think the Interfaith Youth Corps had done some work on Covid and vaccinations. And when their pastor, or their religious leader got vaccinated publicly, or said from the pulpit or from the bimah, “Get vaccinated, get vaccinated,” and drove that message home, that made an impact. And I think that’s something that we don’t even think about, which is that there’s x number of people who were going to always get the vaccine, and there’s y percentage of the people who are never going to get the vaccine no matter what. But there’s actually a fairly significant percentage of people where there’s some persuasion, and the social identity and the relationships and the trust can change that needle one way or another. And I think that’s 3 or 4% of people. That’s a couple million people – right?
Barbara Hofer: We talk about this as the “movable middle” – that we’re not talking about trying to take flat-earthers and change their minds – I mean, people who are at one huge extreme there. But we’re talking about all those people who might be somewhat ambivalent or puzzled or unsure. And this ties into another psychological phenomenon we were going to talk about in terms of epistemic cognition. So, “epistemic” means “knowledge.” So we think about epistemic trust. What knowledge authorities do you trust? And many people trust their religious leaders implicitly. And there have been some wonderful examples in the New York Times of churches where, in the South in particular, where pastors stood up and said, “I got vaccinated yesterday, all of you need to do this. Here’s why. And I’m running a clinic outside after church.” That happened. I mean, there are these great stories. Because that was a source of moral authority, as you say. I mean, this wasn’t a scientist saying that, this was someone they trusted on another level to help them make decisions about their own lives.
I mean, I had a relative who wasn’t going to get vaccinated for underlying-medical-condition reasons. And I said, “I think you should talk to your doctor.” And the doctor, of course, encouraged him to get vaccinated for that very reason, not to hold off. That was an epistemic authority in his life. We all have multiple epistemic authorities, and we have to figure out, when we’re trying to make changes like this, how do we nudge people towards those authorities who can give them more accurate, more valid, more useful life-saving advice?
Geoff Mitelman:
And you bring up a point that I think is also important in terms of leverage points, of being able to say –when I reach a religious leader, that’s not just the religious leader, that’s going to be a couple hundred, couple thousand people, for better and for worse.
Barbara Hofer: Yes!
Geoff Mitelman: Like Joe Rogan – there’s a large leverage point that happened there, as we’re seeing. But I think that’s being able to train not just scientists, but I think being able to say, “How can you communicate?” How can you share this in a way that’s both sharing the tentativeness without it also being about, “I’m right and I know things. I’m the expert. Shut up”?
Gale Sinatra: Yeah. It is interesting how many people on Twitter became epidemiologists in the past couple of years.
Geoff Mitelman: Yup.
Gale Sinatra: Yeah, it’s a lack of respect for expertise. I don’t think you’d want me to come do surgery on you if you needed your gallbladder removed, just because I have some expertise in understanding science – that’s not my expertise. So people need to understand what expertise is.
This is back to this issue of epistemic cognition Barbara was just bringing up, and that is understanding who to trust, understanding who has expertise. Joe Rogan, by his own admission, does not have expertise in medical science. So he has been clear about saying that. But then two minutes later on his broadcast, he’s making recommendations for what people should do. So it is confusing for people to sort that out. But people with expertise are people who have a long-standing engagement in the research and in the literature, and that doesn’t mean they just Googled a few things and watched YouTube videos.
Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s also the importance of relationship, of “Who do we trust?” I know you talk a lot about this as well, which is the importance of both having one-on-one relationships, but also relationships with an audience, relationships with a community, relationships with your social-media group – that there’s tremendous power of that relationship, which can influence people and help them at least know, “Okay, this is somebody who said something, but I should actually look and see what’s their background.” Who am I? Am I trusting somebody who’s here? Or is it my uncle that read this two years ago that’s dated here?
So, as we’re coming towards a close, I’m wondering if there are any last suggestions or recommendations that you might want to share of how can we think. I would say two questions. One, how can we think more accurately like a scientist? And I think, even more importantly, we are communicators. We have a responsibility to share accurate information, and we’ve got our relationships with a variety of different people. What are the ways in which we can be accurate conduits of information and knowledge? What are our rights and what are our responsibilities when we’re communicating with people here?
Gale Sinatra: Well, we definitely like to encourage people to be thoughtful about information they find about science online. So, the best place to find information about science is not Facebook, and it’s not necessarily YouTube either. So, understanding where to get science information that is reliable, and that you can use in your day-to-day life, is a challenge. And we know that it isn’t easy, but you have to be thoughtful. When you read information online, you have to look to see if there’s a credible expert. We often say “use lateral reading,” which means “open up another window and check to see who this person is, and do other people agree with this person because there’s a large body of evidence supporting that point of view, or not?” So, being more thoughtful about the information you consume, who you get it from – and most importantly, who you share it with. We definitely encourage you not to share misinformation. Even if you think it’s funny, it shouldn’t be shared. And obviously, don’t share things you’re not sure are correct, because that just spreads more [mis]information. So we can all be more thoughtful about how we consume and share information.
Barbara Hofer: And I think we’d like to see more happen at the Big-Tech level, too. These aren’t just individual solutions. Much like climate change, we need to see solutions happening at a larger level. Both Twitter and Pinterest did this in 2019, back when the concern of antivaxxing was about childhood vaccinations. They both realized that a lot of people were going to their sites and spreading misinformation, and they ended up, both of them, setting up a link so that if you searched for anything about anti-vaccination, you got sent to several links – the CDC, the National Institute for Health, et cetera, American Pediatric Association – so that you’ve got accurate information.
Twitter also did something last year that was a really good move, in that if you try to forward something, retweet it, without having read it, you get a little quick message that says, “Hmm, would you like to read it first?” Which is what Gale is advocating. So it takes the responsibility away from the individual of always thinking about that, and prompts you for a moment to engage System 2 instead of the knee-jerk reaction that social media prompts from System 1. Instead, it gets you to think, “Is this worth sharing? Do I know that this is accurate? Was I just sharing it because it was funny? I think I’d better stop.”
Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s so helpful and valuable. And thank you both. Because trying to think through of not just what is the science, but what is the science communication, and what’s the science behind science communication? And being able to know what we say isn’t always what’s heard, so how do we both recognize what’s our individual responsibility, but how can we also advocate for larger communal responsibility?
Barbara Hofer: Yeah.
Geoff Mitelman: So I want to thank you both, first of all, for your book. So I highly recommend people buy Gail and Barbara’s book, which is called Science Denial. You can get it wherever books are sold. And people can also follow you on Twitter. I believe. Gale, you are at @GaleSinatra, and Barbara, you are at @bkhofer. So people can find great information and accurate scientific information from both of their social media accounts. You can follow me. I’m at @RabbiMitelman. And you can follow us at @SinaiandSynapses. We will be having more conversations over the next couple of weeks. We’re lining up guests. We’re going to be talking with Daniel Pink, who is the author of the new book The Power of Regret – we’ll be talking with him in a couple of weeks, so we hope you will join us Tuesdays at 02:00 p.m. Eastern. But Gale and Barbara, thank you both so much for your time and even more importantly, for the work that you’re doing to create a better, more scientifically literate community.
Barbara Hofer: Thank you.
Gale Sinatra: Thank you. And thank you for the work that you are doing to engage this great conversation with your followers.
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