There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one's environment is predictable and therefore safe. The findings are just the latest in a burst of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA.
Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI and even genetic tests are turning up possible clues to our political origins and behaviors. Positive personality traits associated with liberalism self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic and negative ones attributed to conservatism easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid appear as young as nursery school—age kids—and correlate with those children's political beliefs in adulthood, according to a year study published in in the Journal of Research in Personality.
More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person's startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier , blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise. Needless to say, not all experts are on board with the subtext of these conclusions. Political scientist Evan Charney dismisses links made by the studies between personality and ideology. The studies "take the most value-laden language and treat it as if you're talking about a left-spinning or right-spinning neutron.
They are invariably going to reflect the value assumptions of a society—in this case, academic liberals. Other supposed explanations for political behavior also are controversial. Circuits of cells called mirror neurons that fire or send out signals when we see someone act in a way that's familiar may have played a role in a point, post—Republican Convention swing in allegiances among white, female Obama supporters to the GOP ticket , says Marco Iacoboni , author of the book Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect with Others.
Sarah Palin as his running mate for the shift, but Iacoboni says there's reason to believe biology played a role. At the most basic level, mirror neurons—in the form of empathy with Palin —may have temporarily dazzled swing female voters, says neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine , author of the book The Female Brain , which explores hormonal and other influences on the brains of women and girls.
This responsibility is most frequently discussed as social science investigation of behavior and social conditions. But we emphasize that the responsibility extends to many policies that address natural conditions, when the policy intends, anticipates, or will be affected by changes in human behavior and social structures. The second responsibility of the social sciences is to focus their formidable array of methods and theories on understanding how social and natural scientific knowledge is used as evidence in the policy process.
The committee will develop a framework for further research that can improve the use of social science knowledge in policy making. The committee will review the knowledge utilization and other relevant literature to assess what is known about how social science knowledge is used in policy making. The framework will indicate the potential for new ways of understanding the use of social science knowledge in policy making.
The framework will also have implications for the content and scope of training in schools and programs that prepare students for careers that use social science knowledge in policy making. A familiar argument views science as a means of rescuing policy from short-sighted influence peddling and power politics DeLeon, ; Dryzek and Bobrow, ; Majone, ; Stone, The view that science can be a counterweight to self-interestedness in politics and thereby ensure that policy reflects the public interest has a distinguished tradition, dating to the American progressive movement and famously voiced even earlier by Woodrow Wilson in his Ph.
That view—which could be found as well in the early 20th century among English new liberals and European Christian and social democrats—held that modern knowledge of society, grounded in the new social sciences, could generate useful policy ideas based on putatively objective and factual bases. Henig in press has described the influence of this way of thinking on education policy:.
It informed and justified structural changes successfully promoted by the Progressive Reformers of the early 20th century. Policies like teacher certification, civil service protections, and the formal assignment of education policy making to school boards independent from municipal governments and the political machines that often controlled them were portrayed as a way to empower the experts, who would both know and respect objective data, and explicitly buffer them from political interference, patronage politics, and faddish and emotion-driven popular whims.
This tradition has contemporary adherents. The hope that science could be. Inspired by a vague sense that reason is clean and politics is dirty, Americans yearn to replace politics with rational decision-making.
Politics is the sphere of emotion and passion, irrationality, self-interest, shortsightedness, and raw power. Holding to a sharp, a priori distinction between science and politics is nonsense if the goal is to develop an understanding of the use of science in public policy. Policy making, far from being a sphere in which science can be neatly separated from politics, is a sphere in which they necessarily come together Jasanoff, Our position is that the use of that evidence or adoption of that policy cannot be studied without also considering politics and values.
For both descriptive and prescriptive reasons, then, evidence-influenced politics is a more informative formulation than evidence-based policy. It is descriptively informative in the sense that it occurs whenever scientific evidence enters into political deliberations about policy options, and this occurs much more regularly than the apolitical, narrowly focused activities characteristic of evidence-based policy.
We support this assertion throughout this report, starting below in the section on democratic theory. Evidence-influenced politics is also prescriptively important. Policy routinely involves value and related considerations that are outside the expertise of science. Even when values are at stake, scientists can legitimately advocate for attending to knowledge that accurately describes the problem being addressed or that predicts probable consequences of proposed actions.
It is our normative position that if policy makers take note of relevant science, they increase the chances of realizing the intended consequences of the policies they advance. This is evidence-influenced politics at work. Some mixture of politics, values, and science will be present in any but the most trivial of policy choices. Our selective entry point is the theory of democratic accountability.
This theory emphasizes electoral competition among ambitious people who want power and want to retain it after they get it. See Schumpeter, , for a representative treatment of this theory.
When leaders are indifferent to the strength of their political support, the link between democratic accountability and elections is correspondingly weaker. Making policy choices based, even in part, on gaining or retaining majority support. A similar logic holds for interest group politics.
Institutional arrangements in democracies are, after all, designed around the assumption that policy choices are contested.
Democratic political theory also places values at the center of politics. Esterling contrasts normative and instrumental reasoning, making the point that arguments for why a policy is desirable or undesirable can be made independently of its immediate social consequences.
Just as electoral calculations and interest considerations cannot be suppressed in a democracy, neither can value preferences. In fact, political principles, such as the first amendment, are designed to promote forceful value expression.
The neoconservative critique of the social welfare state blended scientific and normative arguments. Wilson , p. Things never work out quite as you hope; in particular, government programs often do not achieve their objectives or do achieve them with high or unexpected costs.
Lobbying Database. Other voices in the neoconservative movement, with a less scientific bent than Wilson, simply started from the premise that the market is superior to the state in producing solutions to social problems ranging from poverty to education. If democratic politics invites competition for power, contesting interests, and the expression of diverse values—all of which interact in complicated and not always welcoming ways toward science at the policy table—another feature of democracy more clearly does open space for science.
Political scientists seek to understand the underlying ways in which power, authority, rules, constitutions, and laws affect our lives. Like other social sciences, political science focuses on human behavior, both individually and collectively.
Although the study of politics and power is ancient, the discipline of political science is relatively new. Like other social sciences, political science uses a "scientific" approach, meaning that political scientists approach their study in an objective, rational, and systematic manner. After all science is about objective empiricism — and society, and the inequity, politics and power that comes with it, is anything but.
But what if by separating science from society, researchers are excluding key variables. What if they are not, in fact, protecting themselves, or science after all?
And if we can think about that more carefully, and also, as scientists be a little bit more reflective about it, then we can actually start to think about the systems that shape this kind of these kinds of decisions, and then do a better job, I think, of actually addressing the things that most of us do want to address these kinds of biases and structural inequalities.
But if we assume that they're not there, then we tend to locate the politics in the individual or the bias in the individual, but by and large, the folks that might be producing technologies that we find problematic or saying things that we see as problematic. They're actually part of systems. And we don't understand that enough.
Thank you for listening and see you next time. After all, anything can get twisted in the rumour mill. So how should we talk about science? Science journalists act as one of the most direct links between researchers and the rest of society. And after reporting on science for over 30 years, Deborah is under no illusions that science and politics are separate. So I don't believe that science exists in a vacuum, separate from the rest of humanity or human endeavours, which include political issues, right, or politics and I don't think that's ever been true.
So part of that part of the reason for arguing that science and politics are distinct is so that you can define things you don't like as being politics, and define things that you do like as science. The decisions that I've made are pure science.
Yes, I know, they're not the same ones that are used in the legislative system. Instead of acknowledging the political context that might have gone into setting those standards.
The tricky thing is that sometimes when a line is blurry, there is no hard and fast rule to point to. It's always situational ethics, right? And that's not fair. But it is true that a lot of times, we're going to make a decision in a case-by-case basis. And that can confuse matters. The difficult thing is that, from the perspective of those outside the scientific community, and sometimes within, it can be easy to dismiss certain evidence as political when it conflicts with our core values.
When people like what they're seeing, then they support it, and when they don't like what they're seeing, they don't support it, if it conflicts with other values, then science is only one set of values. Science likes to claim its value free, but it's not. It values knowledge over loyalty, over personal commitment, it values knowledge over faith. And for many people, emotion and faith are key drivers. It is as human for us to be emotional as it is for us to be rational.
Value systems are not constant. And so, a scientific result presented by someone with one system can be interpreted very differently by someone with a different set of values. The same data, the same words, can be warped based on how they are perceived. And so when something like climate change, which means that in order to control it, there is going to have to be more government control and more limitations on what you can do in business or with your land, or something like that people say you're attacking my independence.
So that's just politics. And, herein lies a danger. If people pick and choosing what they support, what they believe based on value systems and not a reasoned analysis of the evidence that opens the door for a bit of a buzzword.
Politicization is really, really interesting because when you tend to hear it, you tend to think about it as a sort of epithet.
The problem with that is that anytime science is involved in politics, it is politicized, inherently politicized, because you are drawing statements of facts into arguments about values and preferences about how the world should be. Deliberately distorting scientific evidence to support an agenda — politicisation at its worst by those nasty politicians. But it can work both ways, and scientists do it too.
We sometimes take political issues that are about values and make them seem as if they're issues of facts and who is asserting facts most correctly. So, I'll use simple example that right now is flaring up in the pages of the magazine I edit, having to do with the issue of fish pain, and animal welfare — can fish feel pain?
And it turns out that there are scientists who are very skeptical of the idea that fish can feel pain, because of their understanding of what pain means as a neurological phenomenon. And there's scientists who feel that fish can clearly feel pain because of a different understanding of neurological phenomenon. And those scientists accuse one another of politicizing the science because of their concerns for different issues.
Some of the scientists are more concerned with the importance of preserving freedom to for anglers, which they see as not only an important social activity, but one that's environmentally important too. Others who are concerned with animal welfare feel like that animals shouldn't be subjected to any suffering. And yet, if you ask scientists about this all say, well, ultimately, it's subjective. We can never know, because we can never be in the brain of a fish. And that mess, depending on your values of course, can get an awful lot more damaging than a spats over sprats.
There have been similar protests across the world. In the UK…. They can save lives. So why the backlash? Trump and his supporters are Corona deniers, and are especially against masks, for example, or other preventive measures. And he regularly attacked science and scientific advisors who try to convince him of the necessity and importance of preventive measures.
So I think the most current example is his use of a quote of Mr. Fauci in an election commercial to create impression that Mr. Fauci praises the efforts of Trump and the fight against corona. And he took the quote out of the context. And Mr. Fauci stated that he never said this that way. So I think this is a very typical example of politicization because a politician picked a quote of a scientist to support his standpoints and just merits in the fight against the pandemic.
Sometime simply the context in which evidence is viewed can cause radically different outcomes. Just look at the difference between Norway and Sweden, for example, right? They pursued radically different approaches, based on consultation with their experts in the context of their political and social cultures.
And those have led to different sets of actions and different outcomes. So yeah, if you really want to get a sense of why a kind of simplistic view of why the experts must inform politics and policy is sort of not very helpful.
COVID is a fabulous example of how politics, uncertainty and science interact, and claims of expertise can be made on behalf of all sorts of different and contrary actions. And when science is politicized that is what happens.
Sure there is a lot of disagreement in science, and if you go looking you can likely find experts to disagree with others, but equal and opposite…? More, coming up. And throughout her career she has witnessed first-hand how scientific issues were talked about in the media. Take climate change for example. At that time, science journalism really followed what I think of is, you know, it was the political model of reporting, right?
There's always two sides. But for a story about climate change — that can cause problems. And, you know, there was not all scientists didn't believe in it. And there was much debate and a lot of stuff that turned out to be mostly not reliable information. Host: Nick Howe. And it got to the point where Deborah realised that the whole industry of scientific journalism was making a mistake.
At some point, we started having discussion in the National Association of Science Writers, and I was president of that group, right in the early aughts of the 21st century. And we sort of say, well, we screwed this up, right? We're giving people the inaccurate impression, that there's this huge debate when in fact there's this growing consensus, and we've just hung the readers out to dry.
And we've done that, in part because we're covering this like politics, right? You start to see science writers just write about climate change as if it's a fact.
And that, to me, represents a profound shift. If we're good as journalists, we try to cover reality, and we owe our readers or listeners or viewers, we owe them reality, right? We owe them an accurate reflection of what's going on.
Not that science gets everything right, every step of the way. And so you have to acknowledge that too. But the consensus is squarely that this is real. And we try to reflect accurately where the weight of the evidence is.
To Deborah, communicating not just the facts but also the certainty — the level of consensus — that is vital if you want to about science objectively and accurately. Smart journalists do their homework, they figure out where the weight of the evidence is. And they report from that position of scientific strength, and that is actually contrary to what any Republican would tell you in the United States of America.
That's actually apolitical reporting. But in a world where science is intertwined with politics, where everybody has an agenda and where values frame every story — even attempts to be apolitical can be interpreted as something quite different. It's muddied by the swirls of politics that you know continually spiral through society. And so it interferes, I think, quite often politics interferes far too often with people's ability to actually see the reality. It seems that at every stage, the authority of science, evidence and expertise is only one step away from being tarnished — being used and abused to push agendas.
And any attempt to solve this by crudely separate science and politics — well that is not much more helpful than it is realistic. So what do we do? Can there be such a thing as an evidence-based society?
So it's through more democratization and greater openness that we're going to have more accountability for decision making. This is Beth Simone Noveck, a researcher who focuses on how to tackle societal problems, who has advised government herself.
Politicians should of course make political decisions, but they should be upfront about what their basing this on. It's perfectly fine to say I am making this decision based on values.
But we need transparency and how we do that we need to actually have institutions that are set up in a way that allow us to tap into an evidence base, and then to have transparency in how the decision is made, whether it's with regard to or by ignoring the evidence base, that should be clear and accessible to people. Why would politicians show what their basing their decisions on if it could be used against them? But in fact, in many places this is happening. And they have made now over two dozen pieces of national legislation with engagement of hundreds of thousands of citizens through a transparent process that works online.
That term expertise often gets very distorted to mean a specific kind of credentialed knowhow of people with certain kinds of degrees, when expertise is really something that we have to understand very broadly, to include people's experience, to include experiential wisdom to include their situational awareness, we've typically thought about expertise and therefore about the role of science in political decision making much too narrowly, and conflated that with the with a set of professions or a set of professional degrees.
At a certain point, you just have to realize that science is part of the mix. It's not this magic thing. In governing, we're seeing lots of examples of when governments are doing it right, opening up how they work, listening and working with people who have expertise, not in the credential sense, but in the sense of lived experience.
So you take the federal government, which back in , started in the United States started a platform called challenge. And you've had over 1, of these prized-backed challenges that have been run in the United States. In these complex situations, scientists are often asked to do a political job.
And so the thing we need to do is be clear about that. And to recognise that, that actually good politics is more important than good science.
So there's an irony here that I think needs to be kind of unraveled. And that unraveling is going to require more humility around what science can and can't do in the political realm, and more, putting politicians feet to the fire. So they actually have to say what it is that they're after, rather than saying, well, I'll just bring in my expert to say why my side is right.
If you had to chose one place in which Nature has a clear political position - it is that we believe policy is stronger when it is supported by evidence. But if we care about achieving that goal, the evidence suggests that we have to think holistically. To look beyond just the pure output of research. We have to look at how research is funded, who is carrying it out, the values they hold, the systems they operate within, the balance of the evidence, and prevalence of power.
To put it bluntly — the politics. I think the world would be a better place if more people had access to the kind of reliable knowledge that science produces. In order for that to happen, people have to have a much better understanding of what science is. And I do not mean a specific content of science, I do not mean an idealised hypothetico-deductive method of science.
I mean, the complex social reality of how science has produced. The fact that politics is deeply ingrained in how science gets funded. The fact that competition between research groups, is not particularly different than competition between football clubs. That human emotion drives many scientists, that scientists choose problems based on particular concerns.
If you talk to cancer researchers find out how many of them got into the field because someone in their family had cancer. They didn't choose this at random.
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