Matthew Nisbet and Dietram Scheufele: "scientists’ political ideologies significantly influence their preferences for potential regulatory policies"

Opinion: Scientists’ Intuitive Failures | The Scientist

5. [Myth] Political views don’t influence the judgments of scientists. In debating science-related policy matters, we tend to assume that scientists are not influenced by their own political views. Yet in a recent study co-authored by one of us (Scheufele), we find that even after controlling for their scientific judgments, scientists’ political ideologies significantly influence their preferences for potential regulatory policies. As one of us (Nisbet) concluded in a second study, when turning to questions outside of their area of specialty, the role of ideology in shaping the views of scientists is likely to be magnified, especially when they try to make sense of the polarized politics surrounding issues like climate change.