On science skepticism in rural America

Monica Potts reported this week for Five Thirty Eight on how science skepticism has taken hold in rural America, with a focus on her home state, Arkansas.   The headline is "Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity."  The subhead is:  "And why that will make communication around the next crisis so much more challenging."

She marshals a lot of empirical research in the piece, including this about what was happening before the pandemic:  

Matthew Motta, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University, and his colleagues Timothy Callaghan, Steven Sylvester, Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Christine Crudo Blackburn studied parents’ hesitancy about giving their kids routine vaccinations, like those for measles, mumps and rubella. Reasons varied, and the most prominent was conspiratorial thinking.1 Some parents who delayed their children’s vaccines also held strong ideas about moral/bodily purity, which often correlated with higher levels of religiosity. Evangelical Christians, people who distrusted scientists and other experts and people prone to believing in conspiracies were also among the groups finding a home in the Republican Party, too.

Many of these characteristics also tend to cluster in rural areas, where COVID-19 vaccination rates continue to lag. “With the very important caveat that we’re talking about two different vaccines … I would say it’s roughly the same groups of people,” Motta said. “My colleagues and I … tried to shout this from the rooftops. … We saw this coming for sure.”

Potts brings us this discouraging data about rural attitudes toward science, following on research about general resistance to vaccines, a resistance that pre-dated the pandemic:

Some nonprofit groups struggled to correct these rural disparities, but unfortunately, the underlying issues were too deep-rooted for them to fully counteract. Rural Americans were far less likely to take precautions against COVID-19, like wearing a mask, avoiding restaurants or working from home. Last September, during the delta wave, the death rate in rural areas was double that of urban areas. As of Jan. 10, 2022, only 48 percent of rural Americans were vaccinated, compared with 61 percent of their urban counterparts, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

These patterns are partly explained by preexisting issues. People in rural areas hold old, well-known anxieties about scientists, particularly when the scientists come from the government. Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral researcher with the COVID States Project, said this anxiety stemmed from an attitude that pits rural, hands-on knowledge against the kind of knowledge obtained from institutions like universities or government bureaucracies — a kind of anti-establishment view that extends to scientists.

* * *

In a 2021 paper published in American Political Science Review, political scientists David C. Barker, Ryan Detamble and Morgan Marietta looked at Republicans’ growing distrust of scientists and other experts. Their research shows that partly due to the education divide — i.e., college graduates prefer the Democratic Party, and white people without a college degree prefer the Republican Party — the divide between those who are pro-intellectualism and those who are anti-intellectualism is more entrenched in party politics.

I hate to admit it, but the next part resonated with me in a particularly powerful way because it echoes so precisely what my mom was saying to me 40-50 years ago--that I had "book smarts" but "no common sense": 

Importantly, Barker and his colleagues defined anti-intellectualism not as a respondent's ability or personal level of education. Instead, it was about respondents having positive feelings about trusting one’s gut and having negative feelings toward experts, schools and “the book-smarts of intellectuals.” In their paper, the researchers wrote that those who distrust scientists and other official sources of authority “distinguish those who are ‘book smart’ from those who have common sense, the latter of which they view as a superior means of ascertaining truth.”

How is it that these scholars' work is channeling my mom--channeling things she was saying to me probably before they were born?   Has the phrasing of rural skeptics actually changed so little over the decades? Or was my mom somehow a prototype, on the cutting edge?