The Corrupted Scientist Archetype and Its Implications for Climate Change Communication and Public Perceptions of Science

ABSTRACT

In debates about policy responses to anthropogenic global warming (AGW), arguers sometimes challenge the credibility of scientists by alleging that those scientists have been tainted by financial and political commitments – in short, that they are Corrupted Scientists. Arguers use this technique to both challenge and support the scientific consensus on AGW. This study undertakes a detailed discourse analysis of 20 U.S. Congressional Hearings to examine how arguers invoke the Corrupted Scientist archetype to make arguments, how others respond, and the implications of both for climate change communication and public perceptions of science and scientists. Although the archetype might help reveal corruption, it could also distort the public’s understanding of scientific disinterestedness by characterizing it as a matter of individual virtue rather than institutional safeguards (e.g. peer review). This distortion of disinterestedness presents three rhetorical challenges for science communicators and others.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• global warming
• scientists
• disinterestedness
• archetypes

Acknowledgements

Research assistance was provided by Zach Marburger. The author thanks Linda Flower, Kate Kiefer, Leah Ceccarelli, Collin Syfert, Emily Tyner and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I speak of “sides,” but parties in the AGW debate are not neatly divided into two camps, one that believes and one that doesn’t. Maibach et al. (2009) famously showed that six was a better number than two for counting sides on AGW. Furthermore, the emphasis on belief as a point of division may be misguided. As Carvalho and Peterson (2009) point out, “a primary communication challenge lies more in mobilizing a relatively aware constituency than in persuading more people to accept the scientific consensus” (p. 131).

2 Archetypes, schemas and stereotypes all describe cognitive shortcuts to understanding unfamiliar or complex phenomena. But there are important differences. The term schema primarily describes mental/cognitive entities; archetypes, on the other hand, exist in discourse, though they may reveal knowledge and cognitive structures indirectly. Stereotypes are usually understood as widely held, negative beliefs about groups of people. But rhetorical archetypes can be positive or negative and need only be recognizable – you needn’t believe that all or most scientists are corrupt or mad or heroes to understand the arguments that those archetypes make possible.

3 Here and elsewhere, I have classified “career interest” as a financial motive. Career advancement can mean higher salary, higher speaking fees and greater book sales. Chivers (2019) argues that these last two may create conflicts of interest that ought to be disclosed.

4 Lewandowsky et al. (2015) found that scientists in the climate change debate sometimes showed excessive deference to uncertainty in response to aggressive skepticism expressed by non-scientific experts. They call this pattern “seepage.”

5 Examples abound. Here are two. Well-known climate change communicators Hayhoe and Farley (2009) make this complaint in their book for Christian audiences, A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (p. xv). In a profile of influential climate change communication scholar Dan Kahan, Voosen (2014) writes: “While the public gladly accepts scientific advice on most topics … a few issues, like climate change, have become polluted with cultural debris” (emphasis mine). Note the negativity attached to political debate and public interest.

6 As Killingsworth and Palmer (1992/2012) once put it, “the historical forces that shape discourse-practice in mainstream science present an obstacle to those who would assert scientific authority in matters of public policy; objectivism has created a politics out of the scientific majority’s apolitical stance” (p. 52).

7 In his review of Pielke’s (2007) work, Smith (2008) calls such scientists “unicorns.”

8 See in particular Ceccarelli’s (2011) advice about how arguers in the AGW debate might appeal to inter-subjective agreement among scientific experts (p. 215).

9 Syfert (2019), Pielke (2007) and Jasanoff (1994) offer good introductions to this conversation. Jackson (2008) effectively lays out the “predicaments of politicization” faced by scientists who participate in public deliberation. Survey-based quantitative research suggests that the relationship between scientists’ perceived policy advocacy and their credibility is complex, context-dependent, and occasionally counter-intuitive. In some cases, policy advocacy actually increased public perceptions of a scientist’s credibility (Beall et al., 2017; Kotcher et al., 2017). Research on risk communication suggests that scientists may mitigate perceived political bias by publicly acknowledging their values (Elliott et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Resident Fellowship from the School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES) at Colorado State University.