Tag Archives: inquiring minds

Michael Pollan Explains What’s Wrong With the Paleo Diet

by Donnell75Z Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The paleo diet is hot. Those who follow it are attempting, they say, to mimic our ancient ancestors—minus the animal-skin fashions and the total lack of technology, of course. The adherents eschew what they believe comes from modern agriculture (wheat, dairy, legumes, for instance) and rely instead on meals full of meat, nuts, and vegetables—foods they claim are closer to what hunter-gatherers ate.

The trouble with that view, however, is that what they’re eating is probably nothing like the diet of hunter-gatherers, says Michael Pollan, author of a number of best-selling books on food and agriculture, including Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. “I don’t think we really understand…well the proportions in the ancient diet,” argues Pollan on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream below). “Most people who tell you with great confidence that this is what our ancestors ate—I think they’re kind of blowing smoke.”

The wide-ranging interview with Pollan covered the science and history of cooking, the importance of microbes—tiny organisms such as bacteria—in our diet, and surprising new research on the intelligence of plants. Here are five suggestions he offered about cooking and eating well.

1. Meat: It’s not always for dinner. Cooking meat transforms it: Roasting it or braising it for hours in liquid unlocks complex smells and flavors that are hard to resist. In addition to converting it into something we crave, intense heat also breaks down the meat into nutrients that we can more easily access. Our ancient ancestors likely loved the smell of meat on an open fire as much as we do.

Michael Pollan. Ken Light.

But human populations in different regions of the world ate a variety of diets. Some ate more; some ate less. They likely ate meat only when they could get it, and then they gorged. Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, says diets from around the world ranged greatly in the percentage of calories from meat. It’s not cooked meat that made us human, he says, but rather cooked food.

In any case, says Pollan, today’s meat is nothing like that of the hunter-gatherer.

One problem with the paleo diet is that “they’re assuming that the options available to our caveman ancestors are still there,” he argues. But “unless you’re willing to hunt your food, they’re not.”

As Pollan explains, the animals bred by modern agriculture—which are fed artificial diets of corn and grains, and beefed up with hormones and antibiotics—have nutritional profiles far from wild game.

Pastured animals, raised on diets of grass and grubs, are closer to their wild relatives; even these, however, are nothing like the lean animals our ancestors ate.

So, basically, enjoy meat in moderation, and choose pastured meat if possible.

Space Monkey Pics/Shutterstock

2. Humans can live on bread alone. Paleo obsessives might shun bread, but bread, as it has been traditionally made, is a healthy way to access a wide array of nutrients from grains.

In Cooked, Pollan describes how bread might have been first created: Thousands of years ago, someone probably in ancient Egypt discovered a bubbling mash of grains and water, the microbes busily fermenting what would become dough. And unbeknownst to those ancient Egyptians, the fluffy, delicious new substance had been transformed by those microbes. Suddenly the grains provided even more bang for the bite.

As University of California, Davis, food chemist Bruce German told Pollan in an interview, “You could not survive on wheat flour. But you can survive on bread.” Microbes start to digest the grains, breaking them down in ways that free up more of the healthful parts. If bread is compared to another method of cooking flour—basically making it into porridge—”bread is dramatically more nutritious,” says Pollan.

Still, common bread made from white flour and commercial yeast doesn’t have the same nutritional content as the slowly fermented and healthier sourdough bread you might find at a local baker. Overall, though, bread can certainly be part of a nutritious diet. (At least, for those who don’t suffer from celiac disease.)

3. Eat more microbes. Microbes play a key role not just in bread, but in all sorts of fermented foods: beer, cheese, yoghurt, kimchi, miso, sauerkraut, pickles. Thousands—even hundreds—of years ago, before electricity made refrigeration widely available, fermentation was one of the best means of preserving foods.

And now we know that microbes, such as those in our gut, play a key role in our health, as well. The microbes we eat in foods like pickles may not take up a permanent home in our innards; rather, they seem to be more akin to transient visitors, says Pollan. Still, “fermented foods provide a lot of compounds that gut microbes like,” and he says he makes sure to eat some fermented vegetables every day.

HandmadePictures/Shutterstock

4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway). There’s paleo, and then there’s the raw diet. Folks who eat raw tout the health benefits of the approach, saying that they’re accessing the full, complete nutrients available because they’re not heating, and thus destroying, their dinner. But that’s simply wrong. We cook to get our hands on more nutrients, not fewer. According to Wrangham, the one thing absolutely all cultures have in common is that they cook their food. He points out that women who move towards 100-percent raw diets often stop ovulating, because even if in theory they’re tossing sufficient food into the blender to fulfill their caloric needs, they simply can’t absorb enough from the uncooked food.

Our hefty cousins, the apes, spend half their waking hours gnawing on raw sustenance, about six hours per day. In contrast, we spend only one hour. “So in a sense, cooking opens up this space for other activities,” says Pollan. “It’s very hard to have culture, it’s very hard to have science, it’s very hard to have all the things we count as important parts of civilization if you’re spending half of all your waking hours chewing.” Cooked food: it gave us civilization.

5. Want to be healthy? Cook. Pollan says the food industry has done a great job of convincing eaters that corporations can cook better than we can. The problem is, it’s not true. And the food that others cook is nearly always less healthful than that which we cook ourselves.

“Part of the problem is that we’ve been isolated as cooks for too long,” says Pollan. “I found that to the extent you can make cooking itself a social experience, it can be a lot more fun.”

But how can we convince folks to give it a try? “I think we have to lead with pleasure,” he says. Aside from the many health benefits, cooking is also “one of the most interesting things humans know how to do and have done for a very long time. And we get that, or we wouldn’t be watching so much cooking on TV. There is something fascinating about it. But it’s even more fascinating when you do it yourself.”

For the full interview, in which Pollan also discusses cheese made from his bellybutton microbes and the latest research on how plants can hear insects snacking on neighboring leaves, listen here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, is guest hosted by Cynthia Graber. It also features a discussion of the new popular physics book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, by Amanda Gefter, and new research suggesting that the purpose of sleep is to clean cellular waste substances out of your brain.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” shows on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Michael Pollan Explains What’s Wrong With the Paleo Diet

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8 Scary Facts About Antibiotic Resistance

by Megan Smith Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s flu season. And we’re all about to crisscross the country to exchange hugs, kisses and germs. We’re going to get sick. And when we do, many of us will run to our doctors and, hoping to get better, demand antibiotics.

And that’s the problem: Antibiotics don’t cure the flu (which is viral, not bacterial), but the over-prescription of antibiotics imperils us all by driving antibiotic resistance. This threat is growing, so much so that in a recent widely read Medium article, Wired science blogger and self-described “scary disease girl” Maryn McKenna painted a disturbingly plausible picture of a world in which antibiotics have become markedly less effective. That future is the focus of McKenna’s interview this week on the Inquiring Minds podcast:

“For 85 years,” McKenna explains on the show, antibiotics “have been solving the problem of infectious disease in a way that’s really unique in human history. And people assume those antibiotics are always going to be there. And unfortunately, they’re wrong.”

Here are some disturbing facts about the growing problem of antibiotic resistance:

Maryn McKenna. Scott Streble

1. In the US alone, 2 million people each year contract serious antibiotic-resistant infections, and 23,000 die from them.

These figures come from a new CDC report on antibiotic resistance that, for the first time, uses a blunt classification scheme to identify “urgent,” “serious,” and “concerning” threats from drug-resistant bacteria. The CDC currently lists three “urgent threats”: drug-resistant gonorrhea, drug-resistant “enterobacteriaceae” such as E. Coli, and Clostridium difficile, which causes life-threatening diarrhea and is often acquired in hospitals. Clostridium difficile kills at least 14,000 people each year.

2. We’ve been warned about antibiotic resistance since at least 1945. We just haven’t been listening.

From the very first discovery of antibiotics, scientists have known that resistance is a danger. Alexander Fleming himself, credited with the discovery of penicillin, warned us as early as 1945 that antibiotics could lose their effectiveness. His eerily prescient Nobel Prize speech cautions that “there may be a danger, though, in underdosage of penicillin. It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body. The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”

3. Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria are on the rise.

Clearly, antibiotic resistance is not a new phenomenon. Nonetheless, the frequency of these “antibiotic resistance events” is increasing. For example, from 1980 to 1987, cases of penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae (the bacteria that causes pneumonia) remained steady at about 5 percent of all strains. By 1997, 44 percent of strains were showing resistance. Similarly, Enterococci bacteria can cause urinary tract infections and meningitis (among other diseases), and in 1989, fewer than .5 percent of strains found in hospitals were resistant to antibiotics. Four years later, though, that number was at 7.9 percent, and by 1998, some hospitals reported levels as high as 30 to 50 percent. “The more antibiotics are used, the more quickly bacteria develop resistance,” says the CDC.

4. There has been a steady decline in FDA approvals for new antibiotics.

And even as more bacteria are becoming resistant and our treatments are becoming less effective, we’re also producing fewer new drugs to combat infections. One figure says it all—a clear downtrend in FDA approvals for antibiotics began in the 1980s:

Decline in FDA antibiotic approvals. CDC; data from FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Why has this happened? “There’s a kind of curve to antibiotic development,” says McKenna, noting that there was a boom in the 1950s, when Eli Lilly collected samples of biological materials from all over the world in order to capture antibiotic properties in natural substances. By the 1980s, though, much of the low-hanging antibiotic fruit had been harvested. Now, the development of new treatments is becoming increasingly difficult and costly, even as pharmaceutical companies are cutting R&D budgets and outsourcing drug discovery more and more. “The faucet from which antibiotics come has been turned down and down and down and now it’s just a drip,” McKenna says.

5. As many as half of all antibiotic prescriptions either aren’t needed or are “not optimally effective.”

A huge part of our problem is that we’re misusing and abusing antibiotics. “Resistance is a natural process,” says McKenna, but “we made resistance worse by the cavalier way that we used antibiotics, and still use them.” Sick patients pressure their doctors for drugs, and doctors too often yield and dash off a script. Indeed, a recent study found that doctors prescribed antibiotics 73 percent of the time for acute bronchitis, even though, as Mother Jones‘ Kiera Butler reports, “antibiotics are not recommended at all” for this condition.

Adding to the evidence of misuse is another statistic: According to the CDC, almost one in five ER visits resulting from adverse drug events are caused by antibiotics. Children are the most likely victims. Despite the fact that antibiotics are generally safe, they can cause allergic reactions and can also interact with other drugs, harming patients who are vulnerable because they already suffer from other medical conditions. So if we stopped over-prescribing antibiotics we’d not only head off resistance; we’d also lessen adverse drug effects.

6. And it’s not just human medical misuse—a large volume of antibiotics is inappropriately used in livestock.

ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com

Antibiotics are also often used in the agricultural industry; in fact, there is reason to think that more antibiotics are used to treat animals than to treat people. And these livestock drugs are not just used to fight off infections, but are often fed to animals in smaller doses to encourage weight gain and growth—a practice, the CDC says, that is “not necessary” and “should be phased out.” A recent draft document from the FDA similarly states that “in light of the risk that antimicrobial resistance poses to public health, the use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals for production purposes does not represent a judicious use of these drugs.” For now, though, the FDA’s approach to curbing this threat has been limited to issuing voluntary guidelines.

7. Before antibiotics, death rates were much higher from very common occurrences like skin infections, pneumonia, and giving birth.

In her Medium article, McKenna gives some disturbing stats. Just giving birth could be deadly: Five out of every thousand women who had a baby died. Pneumonia killed 30 percent of its victims. And “one out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite.” If we run out of antibiotics, our future looks rather bleak.

8. The next major global pandemic may involve an antibiotic-resistant superbug.

For millennia, infectious diseases have reshaped civilization, culled our species, and spread fear, superstition and death. But over the last century, we haven’t seen anything as devastating as the 1918 global flu pandemic, which killed some 50 million people around the world.

But with drug-resistant bacteria, the threat rises. “Plagues still really have power and almost a hundred years later, we shouldn’t think that we’re immune to them because we’re not,” warns McKenna. For instance, tuberculosis kills over a million people a year, and it is becoming increasingly drug resistant, according to the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, although the 1918 flu was of course caused by a virus rather than a bacterium, recent research suggests that most victims actually died from bacterial pneumonia. Viruses can weaken our immune systems just enough to allow bacteria to take hold and, often, death results from secondary bacterial infections that, at least until recently, were largely curbed by effective antibiotics.

So are we doomed to recede back into a time when infections were the most significant health threat that our species faced?

According to McKenna, it is not clear that we can fully curb antibiotic overuse. So the better approach is to get the drug industry research engine firing again. “There’s a really active discourse around what’s the best way to get pharmaceutical companies back into manufacturing antibiotics,” she says.

Our future, then, once again lies in the hands of scientists, whose quest to find new treatments for drug-resistant bacteria is now of the utmost importance.

For the full interview with Maryn McKenna, you can listen here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of the surprising reasons that US students are so bad at math (just 26th in the world, in a recent study). Plus, Indre takes apart a highly controversial new study purporting to show that male-female gender stereotypes are rooted in different wiring of our brains.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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8 Scary Facts About Antibiotic Resistance

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The Science of Tea Party Wrath

by gjrrkjujp Posted on October 25, 2013

Mother Jones

If you want to understand how American politics changed for the worse, according to moral psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt, you need only compare two quotations from prominent Republicans, nearly fifty years apart.

The first is from the actor John Wayne, who on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 said, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president and I hope he does a good job.”

The second is from talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who on the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 said, “I hope he fails.”

The latter quotation, Haidt explains in the latest episode of Inquiring Minds (click above to stream audio), perfectly captures how powerful animosity between the two parties has become—often overwhelming any capacity for stepping back and considering the national interest (as the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis so unforgettably showed). As a consequence, American politics has become increasingly tribal and even, at times, hateful.

And to understand how this occurred, you simply have to look to Haidt’s field of psychology. Political polarization is, after all, an emotional phenomenon, at least to a large degree.

Jonathan Haidt thinks our political views are a by-product of emotional responses instilled by evolution.

“For the first time in our history,” says Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, “the parties are not agglomerations of financial or material interest groups, they’re agglomerations of personality styles and lifestyles. And this is really dangerous. Because if it’s just that you have different interests, that doesn’t mean I’m going to hate you. It just means that we’ve got to negotiate, I want to win, but we can negotiate. If it’s now that ‘You people on the other side, you’re really different from me, you live in a different way, you pray in a different way, you eat different foods than I do,’ it’s much easier to hate those people. And that’s where we are.”

Haidt is best known for his “moral foundations” theory, an evolutionary account of the deep-seated emotions that that guide how we feel (not think) about what is right and wrong, in life and also in politics. Haidt likens these moral foundations to “taste buds,” and that’s where the problem begins: While we all have the same foundations, they are experienced to different extents on the left and the right. And because the foundations refer to visceral feelings that precede and guide our subsequent thoughts, this has a huge consequence for polarization and political dysfunction. “It’s just hard for you to understand the moral motives of your enemy,” Haidt says. “And it’s so much easier to listen to your favorite talk radio station, which gives you all the moral ammunition you need to damn them to hell.”

Here’s an illustration of the seven moral foundations identified by Haidt, and how they differ among liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, from a recent paper by Haidt and his colleagues.

Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, PLOS One

To unpack a bit more what this means, consider “harm.” This moral foundation, which involves having compassion and feeling empathy for the suffering of others, is measured by asking people how much considerations of “whether someone cared for someone weak and vulnerable” and “whether or not someone suffered emotionally” factor into their decisions about what is right and wrong. As you can see, liberals score considerably higher on such questions. But now consider another foundation, “purity,” which is measured by asking people how much their moral judgments involve “whether or not someone did something disgusting” and “whether or not someone violated standards of purity or decency.” Conservatives score dramatically higher on this foundation.

Vintage

How does this play into politics? Very directly: Research by one of Haidt’s colleagues has shown, for instance, that Republicans whose districts were “particularly low on the Care/Harm foundation” were most likely to support shutting down the government over Obamacare. Why?

Simply put, if you feel a great deal of compassion for those who lack health care, passing and enacting a law that provides it to them will be an overriding moral concern to you. But if you don’t feel it so strongly, different moral concerns can easily become paramount. “On the right, it’s not that they don’t have compassion,” says Haidt, “but their morality is not based on compassion. Their morality is based much more on a sense of who’s cheating, who’s slacking.”

For Haidt, the political moment that perfectly captured this conservative (and Tea Party) morality—while simultaneously showing how absolutely incomprehensible it is to those on the left—was Wolf Blitzer’s famous 2011 Republican presidential debate gotcha question to Ron Paul. Blitzer asked Paul a hypothetical question about a healthy, 30-year-old man who doesn’t get health care because he doesn’t think he needs it, but then winds up in a serious medical situation. When Blitzer asked Paul whether society should just “let him die,” there were audible cheers and cries of “yeah” from the audience—behavior that was appalling to care-focused liberals, but that is eminently understandable, under Haidt’s paradigm, as an emotional outburst based on a very different morality. Watch it:

“My analysis is that the Tea Party really wants the Indian law of Karma, which says that if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you, if you do something good, something good will happen to you,” says Haidt. “And if the government interferes and breaks that link, it is evil. That I think is much of the passion of the Tea Party.”

In other words, while you may think your political opponents are immoral—and while they probably think the same of you—Haidt’s analysis shows that the problem instead is that they are too moral, albeit in a visceral rather than an intellectual sense.

As a self-described centrist, Haidt sometimes draws ire from the left for comments about how liberals don’t understand their opponents, and about how conservatives have a broader range of moral emotions. But he certainly doesn’t claim that when it comes to political animosity and the polarization that we now live under, both sides are equally to blame. “The rage on the Republican side is stronger, the Republicans have gotten much more extreme than the Democrats have,” Haidt says.

The data on polarization are as clear as they are disturbing. Overall, feelings of warmth towards members of the opposite party are at terrifying lows, and Congress is perhaps more polarized than it has been in the entire period following the Civil War:

Increasing polarization of the U.S. Congress, based on analysis of congressional votes by University of Rochester political scientist Keith Poole. Keith Poole/PolarizedAmerica.com

But this situation isn’t the result of parallel changes on both sides of the aisle. “The Democrats, the number of centrists has shrunk a bit, the number of conservative Democrats has shrunk a bit, but it’s not that dramatic, and the Democratic party, certainly in Congress, is a mix of centrists, moderately liberal and very liberal people,” says Haidt. “Whereas the Republicans went from being overwhelmingly centrist in the ’50s and ’60s, to having almost no centrists,” Haidt says.

And of course, the extremes are the most morally driven, the most intense.

From the centrist perspective, Haidt recently tweeted that “I hope the Republican party breaks up and a new party forms based on growth, not austerity or the past.”

“This populist movement on the right,” he says, is “sick and tired of the allegiance with business.” And more and more, business feels likewise, especially after the debt ceiling and shutdown disaster.

“I think this gigantic failure might be the kind of kick that some reformers need to change how the Republicans are doing things,” says Haidt. “That’s my hope, at least.”

For the full interview with Jonathan Haidt, listen here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by bestselling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of new research on how marmosets are polite conversationalists (seriously) and of how Glenn Beck doesn’t understand statistics.

To catch future shows right when they release, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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The Science of Tea Party Wrath

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How Do You Get People to Give a Damn About Climate Change?

by KDXRickeygvwipk Posted on October 18, 2013

Mother Jones

As two top researchers studying the science of science communication—a hot new field that combines public opinion research with psychological studies—Dan Kahan and Stephan Lewandowsky tend to agree about most things.

There’s just one problem. The little thing that they disagree on—whether it actually works to tell people that there’s a “scientific consensus” on climate change—is a matter of huge practical significance. After all, many scientists, advocates, and bloggers are doing this all the time. Heck, Barack Obama and Al Gore are out there doing it. And the central message that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sought to convey with its latest report, that scientists are now 95 percent certain that humans are driving global warming, is a message about scientific consensus.

In this episode of Inquiring Minds (click above to stream audio), Kahan and Lewandowsky debate this pressing issue. The discussion begins with a paper published in Nature Climate Change last year by Lewandowsky and two colleagues, providing experimental evidence suggesting a consensus message ought to work quite well.

Dan Kahan of Yale (left) and Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol (right) slugged it out over science communication strategies on our latest Inquiring Minds podcast. (Er, not really. They agreed on some points and cordially disagreed on others.) Maggie Severns

“We told people that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree on the basic premise that the globe is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Lewandowsky, who is based at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “And what we found was that that boosted people’s acceptance of the scientific facts relating to climate change by a significant amount, and it did so in particular for people of a free-market worldview or ideology.” (The 97 percent figure comes from a recent study surveying the scientific literature on climate change.)

But Kahan, a Yale law professor who has extensively researched how our ideological predispositions skew our acceptance of facts, isn’t so sure. It’s not that he doubts Lewandowsky’s basic finding. But, he says, “when people get that kind of message in the world, there are all kinds of other influences that are filtering, essentially, the credibility of that message. If that would work, I would have expected it to work by now.”

The two researchers agree that political ideology—and in particular conservative fiscal or free market thinking—is an overwhelming factor preventing acceptance of climate science. “A position on climate change has become almost like a tribal totem,” says Lewandowsky. “I am conservative, therefore I cannot believe in climate change.” But the difference is that Lewandowsky thinks other factors can mitigate this reality—including a consensus message that works, in essence, through peer pressure. After all, who wants to fly in the face of what 97 percent of experts have to say?

“We know from my studies that if you can only tell people about the consensus, that it does make a huge difference to their belief,” Lewandowsky says.

At stake in this debate is much more than the practical question of how we get people to care about what’s happening to the planet. There’s a far deeper issue: Do facts actually work to change minds? Or should we simply resign ourselves to human irrationality, at least on issues where people have a deep emotional stake?

The “smart idiot” effect: Kahan’s research shows that with increasing levels of scientific literacy, liberals (“egalitarian communitarians”) and conservatives (“hierarchical individualists”) become more polarized over global warming. Dan Kahan

Kahan’s research provides an extensive documentation of how wildly biased we can be. After all, it’s not just that liberals and conservatives perceive completely different scientific realities on issues like climate change. It’s that as they grow more educated and scientifically literate, this problem becomes worse, rather than better, as the figure on the left demonstrates.

In response to such findings, many communications researchers have recommended framing strategies—in other words, placing potentially threatening information in a context that makes it more palatable to a particular person. Basically, it’s an acknowledgement of human irrationality and an attempted workaround. Thus, Kahan’s research suggests that you can make conservatives more accepting of climate science by framing it as supporting a free-market solution that they like for ideological reasons, such as nuclear power.

By contrast, what’s so striking about Lewandowsky’s “scientific consensus” message is that it isn’t really framed at all. There’s no sugar-coating present to make it go down easier on the political right. Rather, the message amounts to a blunt assertion of fact—in this case, the documented fact that climate scientists overwhelmingly agree. But in light of the research depicted above—as well as some research suggesting that political conservatives double down and become stronger in their beliefs when incorrect views are subject to a factual correction—there were plenty of reasons to fear this kind of approach would fail, at least in the face of strong ideology.

Image from the Consensus Project, a initiative that has taken up Lewandowsky’s climate communications strategy. Skeptical Science

Still, Lewandowsky insists that it isn’t an all or nothing issue—in large part because there are so many different kinds of people out there to reach, not all of whom are dogged conservative ideologues. “I think underscoring the consensus is an arguably successful strategy for most people,” he says. “I also think reframing is a very important thing.”

The implications of this debate extend far beyond the climate issue. On evolution, for instance, the scientific consensus is even stronger than it is on climate change—a fact that evolution defenders have sought to cleverly emphasize by listing scientists named “Steve” who support evolution (so far, they’re at over 1,200 Steves). And again, Lewandowsky suspects that highlighting the overwhelming consensus on evolution is a winning message. “The consensus message is going to fail with some people, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t also be effective overall,” he says.

So what’s the bottom line? Clearly, communications researchers have a lot of work to do to figure out how to reconcile the views of Lewandowsky and Kahan—both of whom, after all, are leading researchers in the field. So we can expect more studies aimed right at this central problem; in fact, they’re probably already in the works.

Meanwhile, both researchers agree that those going out and trying to communicate should test out different scientifically based approaches, trying to see which ones work in the real world. If anything, Kahan and Lewandowsky suggest that so far, those who actually practice communication aren’t relying on the latest science enough—or, in the case of many scientific institutions, aren’t investing enough in communications in the first place.

“It’s a mistake to assume that valid science will communicate itself,” says Kahan.

You can listen to the full interview with Kahan and Lewandowsky here:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by bestselling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of the strange and disturbing disappearance of moose across much of the United States, and of Oprah Winpfrey’s recent claim that self-described atheist swimmer Diana Nyad isn’t actually an atheist.

To catch future shows right when they release, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Do You Get People to Give a Damn About Climate Change?

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