One of the most consistent thing that I’ve encountered during the more than two decades that I have studying ragwort, its ecology, toxicology, etc, is that conversations about this plant very often take on an authoritarian tone.
I don’t mean the sorts of people who wear jackboots , although some of the attackers definitely meet the definition of far right trolls, but rather a certain type of rigid mindset that appears over and over again in online postings, public commentary, and even in important policy documents. So having studied this I think it’s worth mentioning some of the reasons why this happens and as I'll show it leads to poor information being disseminated.
Psychologists who have studied it define authoritarianism not merely as a political stance but as a cognitive style. Its nature is characterised by:
Deference to authority figures
Hostility toward dissent or ambiguity
A preference for certainty, control, and clear rules
This scientific framework is well-documented in Canadian scientist Dr Bob Altemeyer's work on Right-Wing Authoritarianism from which I will show a large quote in a section below,
In ragwort debates, this often manifests as:
Appeals to status over evidence ("He’s a vet, you’re not")
Harsh reactions to being questioned ("Stop spreading misinformation")
Misuse of rules and laws to assert control ("You’re legally required to remove that") It's generally not true with regard to ragwort anyway
Dismissal of uncertainty or nuance ("It’s poisonous, so it must be dangerous")
The issue here is that ragwort pushes several psychological buttons:
Fear: It is widely believed to be a serious poison, especially to horses. Largely as I show due to false information from equine organisations.
Control: It grows in unmanaged spaces, often defying neat control measures.
Tradition: It has become a kind of symbolic enemy in some of those narratives that surround land management
When people perceive that there is a threat whether it is real or not, and especially when it concerns animal welfare, a subject that is almost bound to give rise to emotional arguments, it’s natural for some people to want simple answers and clear action. However, it is the case that desire often overrides careful reasoning and that is quite simply a problem for society.
So when someone like me comes along and says, "Yes, it's toxic, but the science doesn't support the hysteria," the reaction isn't just to disagree with it. I find there is often moral outrage, which leads to me being abused and attacked as if questioning the narrative is dangerous in itself.
I've seen it time and again this kind of poor reasoning accompanied with the most illogical statements.
People objecting to Freedom of Information requests and claiming they're a "waste of official time"
Individuals insisting that because a respected vet made a claim, it must be true
Accusations that questioning public messaging is "dangerous"
Dismissals of scientific studies as "too old" when they're still valid and widely cited
For example, Harper & Wood’s 1957 study is still very relevant and cited today in scientific literature. It is clear to anyone with proper reasoning ability that longevity alone doesn't invalidates scientific findings. Let's remember that we still learn Newton's laws which come from the late 1600s!
Sometimes it is so irrational that even minor corrections (like a typo or small logically irrelevant wrong number) are jumped upon with glee on the quite incorrect assumption that they undermine my position.
It is worth noting in this context that authoritarian thinking tends to correlate with lower educational attainment. This is particularly so in fields that emphasize critical thinking and openness to complexity. The research demonstrates that individuals with higher education and in particular those who score high in the well established and studied personality dimension of openness to experience tend to to tolerate ambiguity and question traditional hierarchies. Studying complex ideas and the concepts around them are often their idea of fun. This is me. I identify strongly with this sort of behaviour and thinking.
Something I have noticed quite often is many of the people who make the most rigid arguments in ragwort debates also show basic literacy errors and also a tendency to rely on memorised claims rather than reasoned evidence. Of course, spelling errors alone don’t indicate authoritarianism, and in my case spelling errors can and do sometimes creep in, but poor literacy can be a sign of gaps in the kinds of reasoning skills that protect against it.
This is a serious problem because authoritarian reasoning stifles scientific discourse. It replaces open debate with really poor thinking.
If we are to care about understanding the issues and the science properly then, naturally, we need to resist this style of thought. It's of course entirely possible to take plant toxicity seriously without falling prey to exaggerated fear or rigid dogmatic thinking. However, this blog exists because so many people do just that with all sorts of crazy claims having been made.
Ragwort isn't just a ecologically very important wildflower. It's become a symbol onto which people project all sorts of irrational and illogical thinking . We find that when those things get challenged, the reaction is all too often highly emotional and so often it is not about about the facts.
It is an essential part of its nature that science thrives on questions. It is crucial and important that we must be free to ask them without being accused of endangering society every time we point out that the emperor, or the expert, might just not have all the clothes that some poor reasoners would think that they have.
These people rely so far too much on concrete thinking that abstract ideas and complexity are invisible to them. I often joke to myself that the concrete starts at one ear and ends at the other!
Here is the extract from Dr Altemayer's work illustrating the all too typical poor thinking that frustrates me when dealing with these people. Research shows that this sort of personality has poor creativity and rarely succeeds in the complex world of scientific endeavours.
I should also explain that RWA in his text, means Right Wing Authoritarian. It has not escaped my attention that when I examined a certain word in the copy of the Oxford English Dictionary , the definitive dictionary of the English language, in my local library that the definition included the phrase, "a person of right wing authoritarian views." If you haven't already guessed, that word is "fascist." I would hasten to say of course that not all the people whose bad thinking I criticise here would necessarily fall into that camp, but I do know that some of them do.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989, Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight. Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea.
Therefore, sharks are fish.
The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
This is not only “Illogical, Captain,” as Mr. Spock would say, it’s quite dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false.
Deductive logic aside, authoritarians also have trouble deciding whether empirical evidence proves, or does not prove, something. They will often think some thoroughly ambiguous fact verifies something they already believe in. So if you tell them that archaeologists have discovered a fallen wall at ancient Jericho, they are more likely than most people to infer that this proves the Biblical story of Joshua and the horns is true--when the wall could have been knocked over by lots of other groups, or an earthquake, and be from an entirely different era (which it is).
---------------------------------------------------
This is good stuff and if you like it then the good Dr has made it available for free for you to read as a free download. Don't let the fact that it is free make you think it is of less value. He actually warns against that irrational conclusion. I suspect strongly that he has a good wage or pension and is keen for as many people to read his work as possible, REmember hIt can be found here on his website The Authoritarians
No comments:
Post a Comment