Individual differences in antecedents to anti-scientific beliefs

<p dir="ltr">Unfounded rejections of evidenced scientific consensus, or Anti-Scientific Beliefs (ASBs) are a growing concern, particularly in the case of Climate Change Denial (CCD). Individual differences in personality, cognitive factors, political traits and beliefs, and perceived threats to the status quo are each established antecedents to CCD, however questions remain as to how antecedent families interact to produce CCD. This thesis attempts to address this research gap by investigating the structure of these antecedent constructs. Our first study investigates bullshit receptivity as a potential CCD antecedent and assesses its unique predictive power when controlling for other antecedents, using a mixed sample of 338 general population and undergraduate participants. Consistent with predictions bullshit receptivity was positively associated with CCD, but lost significance when controlling for measures of political orientation, suggesting that bullshit receptivity likely acts on CCD indirectly via its effect on political orientation. Our second study explored how individual differences in CCD and its antecedents related to patterns of Australian media consumption in the same sample. Results showed two distinct clusters of media consumption, distinguished primarily by trust in lower-credibility right-wing news. CCD antecedents broadly differed across clusters in the hypothesised directions, with news trusters having significantly less open personalities, higher bullshit receptivity, and more conservative political orientations than news sceptics. However, CCD did not significantly differ across clusters. Our third study used path modelling to investigate if Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits act on climate change beliefs indirectly through a suite of political orientation measures, in a sample of 802 general Australian participants. Our results demonstrated indirect effects of all FFM personality traits (bar extroversion) on CCD, through either conservative policy positions or higher Social Dominance Orientation. Our final study employs a statistical technique novel to behavioural sciences, Sequential and Orthogonalized Partial Least Squares (SO-PLS) Path Modelling, to deeply investigate the structure of ASB antecedents, in a sample of 816 general Australian participants. Our SO-PLS Path Model shows that the effects of demographic constructs, epistemically suspect belief predictors, personality, and political traits entirely act on climate change beliefs indirectly through political beliefs, which acts on climate change beliefs largely indirectly through system identity threat. Our model explains upwards of 65% of the variance in CCD, and 40% of the variance in covid conspiracies. This thesis integrates our understanding of individual differences in CCD antecedents into a cohesive and theoretically justified structure. Our structure has excellent predictive and explanatory power, and generalises to ASBs regarding the coronavirus pandemic. This lays the foundation for future work integrating our understanding of different ASBs.</p>