Health Law, Policy & Management

New Book Examines Effects of Anti-intellectual Thought on Science

Anti-Scientific Americans, by SPH Assistant Professor Matt Motta, expands upon his research into how anti-intellectual sentiment harms public opinion of science and damages policymaking that affects health.

Among the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic most likely to affect population health is the decline of trust in science—and in scientists themselves.

A November 2023 poll by the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who said they had trust in scientists dropped from 87 percent at the beginning of the pandemic to 73 percent in 2023. The percentage of people who claimed little or no trust in scientists jumped from 12 to 27 percent over the same span.

Experts in all fields suffered reputational damage over the past few years, but the discounting of knowledge and expertise has a long and storied history, explains Matt Motta, assistant professor of health law, policy and management. Motta examines that decline in trust in a new book, Anti-Scientific Americans: The Prevalence, Origins, and Political Consequences of Anti-Intellectualism in the US.

Motta earned a PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota and began researching science communication and anti-science attitudes during postdoctoral work at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and as an postdoctoral scholar at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University Law School. He came to BUSPH from Oklahoma State University, where he was an assistant professor of political science.

Anti-Scientific Americans expands on Motta’s prior and current research into American politics, public opinion, science communication, and policymaking that affects health. He began writing the book after becoming increasingly concerned about the anti-intellectual rhetoric on the campaign trail in 2016, which he contends eventually degenerated into outright derision towards scientific experts. What worried Motta most is that the disparaging language and dismissive tone used by politicians was becoming useful in appealing to the public and created an opening for those politicians to undermine the role that experts play in effective policymaking.

At that point, Motta says, “It’s not just empty rhetoric that’s thrown around on the campaign trail. If members of the public believe it, then politicians have an incentive to cater to it because they want to be reelected. And I fear that that’s what we saw in the first Trump presidency, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, I would say the COVID-19 pandemic was the encapsulation of many of the fears I had going into writing the book.”

What are some examples of the discounting of scientific knowledge that you currently see influencing politics?

There are a couple of different ways that I identify the discounting of expertise in Anti-Scientific Americans. One pertains to the effects of anti-intellectualism, which I refer to as the dislike and distrust of credentialed experts. This dislike and distrust of experts motivates opposition to policies that are favored by expert communities, opposition to evidence-based medicine and climate science, economic policy. At the individual level, we see people who hold anti-intellectual attitudes expressing stronger levels of opposition to policies that advance public health, that are informed by economic sciences, climate science, and the like. There’s also perhaps even a more pernicious macro phenomenon going on as well beyond the individual level. We tend to see Congress spend less effort trying to invite credentialed experts to participate in hearings on issues that pertain to highly complex topics surrounding climate change, public health, the economy, immigration, and much more.

All of this is to say that anti-intellectualism, dislike and distrust of scientific and other credentialed experts, is important because it makes people more likely to oppose what experts and scientists have to say politically in policy-relevant domains.

I think one of the contexts that really inspired me to write the book was the rise to power of former President Trump. Something that really struck me about his candidacy in 2016 was how his personal attacks on science and scientists were often making an effort to cast doubt on the intentions and the credentials of medical scientists, climate scientists, and the like. He notably referred to climate scientists as ‘hoaxsters’ on the campaign trail in 2016. He routinely derides the press, journalists and academics, especially with respect to DEI initiatives and affirmative action. This is someone whose disdain for expertise is highly personal and he uses it in service of his electoral goals. He appeals to that anti-intellectual sentiment in order to try to win votes. And I think even worse, he allows that anti-intellectual sentiment to govern the policy decisions he makes. I think we all remember during the COVID-19 pandemic where former President Trump would routinely deviate from his health policy advisors by telling people to research injecting bleach as a way to prevent COVID-19, or telling people that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19. This, I think, all stems from his dislike and distrust of scientific experts, and that’s one of the things that motivated me to write the book.

Has there been much scholarship around the way that experts are devalued?

During periods where public anti-intellectual sentiment is high, we tend to see those peaks in public anti-intellectual attitude endorsement correspond with the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump in 2016, like George Wallace in the late 1960s. I think that these things go together, and indeed in some of my past research, I’ve shown that people who hold anti-intellectual attitudes are more likely to vote for the Donald Trumps of the world. They’re more likely to express sympathy with the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom.

I think that this is a burgeoning field of research. More people are making an effort to study people’s attitudes toward expertise, in particular the degree to which they hold negative attitudes or negative affect towards the people who produce scientific research. There has been plenty of research out there on the relationship between how people feel about science and their acceptance of scientific consensus, how they feel about scientific research, how they feel about scientific institutions, and how that relates to the views of science related policy that they have.

What is relatively new is studying how people’s negative attitudes towards scientists as people motivates their political attitudes and behaviors in domains related to health, climate change, and the economy.

One example that I think really demonstrates well what anti-intellectual sentiment is, at least in the way that I conceptualize it, is [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis and his many public, often one-way, battles with Dr. Anthony Fauci, which he used to in an effort to try to conjure up electoral support by using Fauci as a punching bag. And I mean that quite literally. DeSantis said that ‘someone should grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac River.’ That is a deeply personal attack on one of the most venerable scientists in America, somebody who led us through the COVID-19 pandemic. What I’m trying to say in this book is that our dislike and distrust of science is highly personal and focused on the scientist. And if you’re the type of person who holds negative views towards scientists and scientific experts, you’re going to be more likely to hold negative views toward the policy views that they think would make us run this country a bit better.

When do you think it shifted from being antagonism against the work scientists do to open antagonism against the people doing the work?

I think that it was the rise of the Tea Party movement that really made attacks on the scientific enterprise personal. The Tea Party movement formed in reaction to President Obama’s presidency, but tied up in that were all other sorts of attacks that could stand in for the Tea Party making attacks about the color of his skin. One of the ways that they tried to do that was by attacking his intellectualism, by attacking his academic bona fides, and saying that academics and experts are lumped in with the left-most wing of the Democratic Party. They espouse policy views that are trying to make you worse off. And I think in the early Obama years, we saw this applied most strongly with respect to his stances on climate change.

Since then, it has spilled over to shape how Americans feel about issues related to the economy, health and so much more. There are a lot of social scientists who are trying to understand when people’s rejection of expertise became so personal. There are some people who say it began with Ronald Reagan. There are others who say it began with the highly personalized and combative politics of Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America. I entertain both of those positions in the book. I have data dating back to the 1970s, so I’m able to test these different propositions. And to me, it’s the Tea Party movement explanation that’s the clearest.

Do you feel that there is a mounting anti-intellectual movement or do you think we’re currently experiencing a peak in a series of peaks and valleys? Or has there been a substantial incremental rise?

When it comes to the public overall, anti-intellectual attitudes typically remained relatively constant over the course of the past century or so. I’ve got data on this dating back from the 1940s to present. Typically, we’re talking about somewhere in the ballpark of one in three Americans holding anti-intellectual attitudes at any given time. But, yes, there are peaks and valleys, and those peaks tend to correspond with the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump and George Wallace. In the immediate aftermath of the first Trump presidency, public anti-intellectual sentiment spiked and has since returned to its more or less normal levels. But those normal levels still imply that one in three Americans are harboring these resentful attitudes toward experts. That’s not exactly a good thing.

Have you identified any groups of experts or scientists who are under more scrutiny or more scorn than others?

Scientists who weigh in on matters that are themselves highly politicized are the types of scientists for whom the public holds the most politicized views. Climate scientists are among the most polarizing scientists in American public life. Public health is deeply politicized and public health expertise is politicized, but in very interesting ways. Most Americans hold very positive views toward their own doctors. Most people hold positive views toward the information that they get from medical experts in general. But when it comes to those experts—specifically those credentialed scientists and medical experts—we still typically tend to see that somewhere between one in ten, to one in five Americans hold negative views. And all of that contributes to the general anti-intellectual sentiment that I picked up on in the book.

Was public health always so politicized or is this a much more recent development, possibly in the wake of COVID-19?

Public health has been politicized for a long time and as evidence of this, Dr. [Timothy] Callaghan and I have been seeing the politicization of vaccines for 10, 11 years, well before the COVID-19 pandemic. But vaccines have been politicized, for example, since the 18th century before they were even vaccines, back when we were talking about the process of variolation, where we would scrape cowpox into smallpox pustules to try to inoculate people. Public health has always been political because health pertains to the regulation of our bodies, and anytime you talk about regulation and our personal autonomy, you’re talking about politics. The difficult decisions that we have to make in order to keep society healthy necessarily imply some level of politicization.

Politics is all about who gets what and if the ‘what’ is health, then it pertains to politics. I can give you the example of vaccine hesitancy. In the 18^th century, arguably our biggest enemy in the American Revolution was not the British or their allies. It was smallpox. It was the risk of the Continental Army succumbing to smallpox. George Washington variolated his troops in defiance of laws passed by the Continental Congress. I think people forget that George Washington pursued public health even though he wasn’t supposed to. I think public health has been political since day one. I think vaccines have been political since day one.

When you were compiling the research for the book, what, if anything, surprised you the most?

This book is very much a reaction to Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-prize winning work from the 1960s, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. He’s really the person who’s credited with coining the term, and his book was primarily historical and anecdotal. He’s identifying examples of anti-intellectual sentiment in American public life in particular in application to US politics, talking about some of the very personal attacks on Adlai Stevenson, for example, who ran against Dwight Eisenhower. One of the things that surprised me the most is how much of Hofstadter seems to have been forgotten today. So one of the central premises of the book is that I want to take Hofstadter’s work and turn it into data. I want to systematize it. I analyze hundreds of public opinion polls dating from the 1940s to present. And what I want to do is take all of the rich stories that Hofstadter offered in his work and see to what degree his theories and expectations play out.

One central theory in Hofstadter’s work is that negative attitudes toward intellectuals, scientists, and credentialed experts is what fuels people’s opposition to the role that [experts] play in the policymaking process. They want experts to have less of a role in shaping policy if they don’t like experts. But I think something that we forget is that the relationship can also function in reverse. The types of people who are averse to the role that experts play in the policymaking process then may come to harbor some resentment on a very personal level toward those individuals. I refer to this as the bi-directionality thesis in the book, something that I think was very much forgotten in between Hofstadter publishing his work in the 1960s and me trying to pick up and turn it into data in 2021 or so.

I find a lot of evidence in favor of this bi-directionality and I think it’s obvious why it is that people who just don’t like experts would oppose the role that they play in the policymaking process. They don’t want people who they don’t like making decisions about their lives. If you’re also the type of person who thinks that experts have too much influence in your daily life, you might come to resent them. And one of the ways that I like to visualize this is by thinking about something like an appliance, say, a refrigerator. I rely on my refrigerator to keep my food cold so that I can store it for a long time and that I can have something to eat. I have absolutely no idea how this thing works, and in the event that it was broken, I would have no idea how to fix it.

I have become completely dependent on people with skills that are not my own to allow me to live my life with some degree of normalcy. And I think people who are in that position, who are expressing increasing anxiety about the role that experts play in their daily life, may come to resent those people because they feel as if they themselves have lost control. How many times have we had something go wrong with our computer or an appliance or our home and get a little bit testy with the person who’s trying to help us, who has knowledge that we don’t have, because we feel as if we’ve lost some control?

Have you found a demographic or regional breakdown in terms of the preponderance of anti-intellectualism?

One of the strongest predictors of who holds anti-intellectual attitudes are folks who self-identify as Republicans or who are right-leaning and in as much as much as those people tend to be clustered in some parts of the country and not others, we might also extend that there are regional effects—but I don’t actually look at regional effects in the book. I think that politics is one of the most divisive elements here, but I think it’s also noteworthy to say what elements are a bit less divisive.

Educational attainment does not necessarily make people more or less trusting of the scientific community, even though these people may have had more experience with it. What I do show in the book is that people’s experiences with higher education can make them more interested in science, which can in turn make them more likely to trust scientific experts. But I want to be very careful here to say that if you are a college-educated Republican, you may very well use your superior knowledge to apply your political views toward casting doubt on scientists and experts.

I would also note that people’s attitudes toward limited government—if you think that government should play less of a role in your life—is also associated with anti-intellectual-attitude endorsement.

Is it a matter of control to some degree? Not having the knowledge to be able to do something on your own, or even to be able to diagnose something, means that you have to cede control to someone else or some other entity.

That’s not something that I can test directly, but I do tend to think that that’s what’s going on, that people are starting to feel as if they’ve lost control over their daily lives because of how specialized our daily lives have become. That combined with very personal, at times vitriolic, rhetoric directed towards scientific experts and other experts blaming them for many of the things that we cannot control in our lives, such as the looming threats of climate change, responding to an unprecedented global pandemic, the swings back and forth of economic performance—all of those losses of certainty, all of those are areas in which we have potentially lost control.