Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” a quip that implies that empirical data is more important than anecdotal evidence. Yet a recent psychological study suggests that conservatives, not liberals, are far more apt to let their feelings to get in the way of accepting facts.
In a paper published in the journal Political Psychology in October, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College describe a pair of studies that they conducted to determine if there is a connection between a person’s political ideology and their willingness to accept scientific and non-scientific views on non-political subjects. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. They allowed the surveyed individuals to either rate one higher than the other, or argue that “both sides” were equal.
Scientists always bicker about their results, though, so there is feeling even within the scientific community. Only constantly testing the results of experiments with new experiments do we come to a conclusion which we, as scientists, can accept (until some newer experiments prove us wrong).