Global warnings: The impact of scientific elite disagreement on public opinion

This doctoral research investigates the role of scientific elites in influencing concern for the test issue of global warming. An extensive literature suggests that elites are influential in shaping attitudes on a wide range of issues, such that opinion tends to move in the direction of elite consensus and polarize when elites are divided. This literature typically focuses on partisan elites. However, scientists may be equally influential in shaping attitudes, especially for issues where scientific opinion is central to policy debates. Little attention has been paid to the influence of such scientific elites.; A content analysis found that variations exist in the strength of scientific evidence, in portrayals of scientific agreement, and in the presence of political cues in newspaper coverage of global warming. The effect of these variations was experimentally examined to improve understanding of the role of scientific elites in shaping concern. This research found that the presence of political cues in a newspaper article activated ideological beliefs and made such beliefs a stronger predictor of concern, regardless of whether scientific elites were portrayed as agreeing or disagreeing.{09}However, scientific agreement and evidence strength were unrelated to concern. That is, in general, subjects were no more concerned about global warming even when evidence was strong and scientists agreed. Thus, scientific evidence appears to be inappropriately ignored in shaping concern for scientific topics.; One major exception to this finding was identified, however: those high in environmental concern were able to incorporate evidence into their attitudes when scientists agreed and political cues were present. Thus, political cues seem to have activated additional message processing for this audience. This is a surprising finding, because most research on elite influence suggests that political cues serve as heuristic shortcuts, not as cues to cognitive processing. One possible explanation is that political cues made environmentalists anxious and thus more attentive to evidence strength. The dissertation concludes with a call for more investigation into this finding, as well as for additional research into the potential benefits of contextual information (e.g. brief explanations of basic scientific information) on public understanding of science.