EDUCATION, SCIENCE LITERACY, AND POLARIZED BELIEFS ABOUT SCIENCE

Background: Research suggests that Americans’ beliefs about many contemporary science and technology issues are polarized by political and religious identity. Moreover, individuals with greater education and scientific knowledge have been found to have more polarized beliefs about some science, including climate science and vaccines. We assess whether public beliefs about a range of scientific issues are related to political and religious identity, and how those relationships are related to education and science literacy. Methods: We used data from the 2006 and 2010 General Social Survey to assess the determinants of public beliefs about six scientific topics: climate change, nanotechnology, evolution, the big bang, stem cell research, and genetically modified foods. We used regressions to model beliefs about each of these six topics as a function of political and religious identity, education, science literacy, and additional covariates including age, gender, and science education. We tested whether respondents with greater education and science literacy had more polarized beliefs by including interactions between education, science literacy, and religious and political beliefs in our models. Results: We found evidence for political and religious polarization for four out of the six topics studied: those with more conservative political views were less likely to express beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus with regards to belief in human evolution and the big bang, support for stem cell research, and perception of the dangers of climate change; those who reported having a more fundamentalist religion were less likely to express beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus regarding belief in human evolution and the big bang as well as support for stem cell research. Respondents with greater education and science literacy had more polarized beliefs regarding stem cell research, the big bang, and climate change, but not regarding human evolution, genetically modified foods, and nanotechnology. Conclusions: We find that beliefs about many contemporary scientific topics display political and religious polarization, with the exception of less familiar technologies including genetic modification and nanotechnology. For polarized science, education and science literacy are associated with increased rather than decreased polarization. Our results suggest that science education alone is unlikely to promote a fair hearing for science in cases of skepticism about scientific evidence.