How Frames Can Undermine Support for Scientific Adaptations: Politicization and the Status-quo Bias

The politicization of science is a phenomenon that has sparked a great deal of attention in recent years. Nonetheless, few studies directly explore how frames that highlight politicization affect public support for scientific adaptations. We study how frames that highlight politicization affect support for using nuclear power, and test our hypotheses with two experiments. We find, in one study, that politicizing science reduces support for nuclear power and renders arguments about the environmental benefits of nuclear energy invalid, regardless of whether there is a reference to consensus scientific evidence. We find, in a second study, that reference to the potential health risks associated with using nuclear power also decreases support in the presence of additional frames that highlight either science’s progress or its politicization. In the end, our findings suggest that a status-quo bias prevails that, under some circumstances, can serve as a significant impediment to generating public support for scientific innovations. Over the last quarter-century, scientific adaptations and their concomitant consequences have accelerated at an amazing pace. This has led to debates about climate change, genetically modified food, nanotechnology, and sustainable Toby Bolsen is an assistant professor of political science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA. James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, and faculty fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. Fay Lomax Cook is professor of education and social policy, and faculty fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. The authors thank Josh Robison for research assistance and the editors and reviewers for extremely insightful comments. They are also grateful for research funding from the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN). *Address correspondence to James N. Druckman, Northwestern University, Political Science Department, Scott Hall, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208, USA; email: druckman@ northwestern.edu. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 1–26 doi:10.1093/poq/nft044 Advance Access publication February 5, 2014 at N othw etern U niersity L ibary, Srials D eartm nt on A ril 6, 2014 http://poqrdjournals.org/ D ow nladed from energy sources. How each of these debates evolves depends in critical ways on public opinion. Indeed, politicians rarely advocate scientific adaptations without the support (or at least not ardent opposition) of their constituents, and scientific technologies rarely survive the regulatory process or succeed in the marketplace without public acceptance. This makes the recent dramatic growth of the field of public opinion about science and science communication unsurprising. One of the key lessons of this work is that “framing is an unavoidable reality of the science communication process” (Nisbet and Scheufele 2009, 1771). Framing refers to placing emphasis on certain considerations instead of others in a communication. For example, one might emphasize the positive environmental as opposed to potential negative health consequences of generating nuclear power. This, in turn, often shapes opinions about whether it is desirable to develop additional nuclear plants. In this paper, we extend extant research in two ways. First, we employ more realistic frames when it comes to the study of exposure to sciencebased communications and public opinion—that is, frames that do not simply focus on one dimension such as the environmental or health implications of nuclear energy. Indeed, we employ a realistic portrayal of what frames actually look like in action (i.e., they contain multiple dimensions; see Chong and Druckman [2011]). We explore three of the key components of frames related to scientific adaptations: politicization, consequences (e.g., environment, health), and technical evidence (e.g., scientific literacy). Second, we hypothesize and find that exposure to certain frames can decrease support for scientific adaptations. This effect can stem from exposure to frames that highlight the politicization of science itself or, in at least some cases, frames that evoke a negativity bias. We are the first to provide direct causal evidence on how exposure to a frame that politicizes science shapes public opinion.