To explain people in another way, the conservatives tend to be religious and liberals tend to be atheists/secular. This argument of liberals being 'logical and rational' vs conservatives being 'anti-intellectual and anti-science' is the same thing if conservatives said that they are the party of 'God and morality', whereas liberals are the supporters of 'Satan and immorality'.
This is what we get when one side gets to frame the debate. The whole debate on science and reason is framed by the liberals, so they get to decides the rules here. According to these rules, you need to look at 'scientific evidence' of things in order to form your opinions.
My claim has been that people form their opinion first, and then they look at the scientific evidence. Jonathan Haidt has done some work on this in his book righteous mind[1]. In addition to it, the concept of 'Mental Models' is another reason why either side accept 'proofs' or evidence for their opinion.
A simple example is the resurgent 'Flat Earth Theories'. Most of the people would reject any attempts to prove that the Earth is flat. Only a small minority of people who believe that earth is round, spend their time debunking and debating that Earth isn't flat.
To the rest of us, we don't even go around and say "There is some debate whether Earth is round" even though a group of individuals is very heavily advocating for it and writing pages and pages worth of material on it. Would a rational and scientific minded person just reject 'evidence' on it's face value? Apparently we do because that 'evidence' isn't really proper evidence. Saying that there is a conspiracy among the world authorities to claim that Earth is round isn't a proper hypothesis, not because it requires it doesn't sound feasible.
The same thing goes with why the right rejects what left deems as 'scientific evidence and reason'.
This is what we get when one side gets to frame the debate. The whole debate on science and reason is framed by the liberals, so they get to decides the rules here. According to these rules, you need to look at 'scientific evidence' of things in order to form your opinions.
My claim has been that people form their opinion first, and then they look at the scientific evidence. Jonathan Haidt has done some work on this in his book righteous mind[1]. In addition to it, the concept of 'Mental Models' is another reason why either side accept 'proofs' or evidence for their opinion.
A simple example is the resurgent 'Flat Earth Theories'. Most of the people would reject any attempts to prove that the Earth is flat. Only a small minority of people who believe that earth is round, spend their time debunking and debating that Earth isn't flat.
To the rest of us, we don't even go around and say "There is some debate whether Earth is round" even though a group of individuals is very heavily advocating for it and writing pages and pages worth of material on it. Would a rational and scientific minded person just reject 'evidence' on it's face value? Apparently we do because that 'evidence' isn't really proper evidence. Saying that there is a conspiracy among the world authorities to claim that Earth is round isn't a proper hypothesis, not because it requires it doesn't sound feasible.
The same thing goes with why the right rejects what left deems as 'scientific evidence and reason'.
1. http://righteousmind.com/