The early twentieth century in Russia was a tumultuous time. The October Revolution of 1917 saw revolutionary Bolshevik forces establish the world’s first communist nation. This huge transition created political vacuums, eagerly filled by power-hungry and often unscrupulous men. Joseph Stalin is doubtlessly the most infamous occupant of this rogues’ gallery. His vaulting ambition was apparent to the ailing and wary Vladimir Lenin, who disavowed Stalin, recommending Leon Trotsky as his heir. Yet following Lenin’s death, Stalin outmaneuvered all rivals, consolidating absolute power. Trotsky was forced into exile and eventually bludgeoned to death in Mexico with an ice-axe on Stalin’s orders. Stalin’s brutality is well known, but more obscure is the story of another ambitious man of the era—Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenko’s passion was plants rather than politics. While his peers were shaping the revolutionary effort, he studied seeds in Kyiv under his mentor, Nikolai Vavilov. Their primary interest was investigating conditions influencing wheat yields. This issue acquired political urgency once the new Russian leaders began a forced transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Affluent “kulak” peasants were eradicated as “class enemies,” their fertile land taken over by collective farms. Chronic mismanagement ensued, and famines erupted all over Russia due to Soviet ineptitude.
Lysenko’s 1928 announcement of a new way to hugely increase crop yield, dubbed “vernalization,” was music to the Party’s ears. Inspiring stories of ingenious workers solving practical problems by wits alone were a trope of Soviet propaganda, so this agronomist from peasant origins without any formal scientific training outsmarting a bourgeois scientific establishment was widely embraced. Bestowed with political and scientific awards, he was elevated up the Party hierarchy. Such praise was premature; Lysenko’s lack of scientific training translated into poorly controlled, subpar experiments. Nor was he above bolstering his heroic image with fabricated data.
Still, Lysenko was an unimpeachable Party darling, and the audacity of his claims increased steadily. He insisted that the offspring of seeds treated with his process would inherit wondrous properties, allowing wheat to transmute into barley. This caused consternation to biologists, as it pivoted on Lamarckian evolution. This obsolete theory suggested acquired characteristics of an organism could be passed down to descendants, so a plant plucked of leaves might have leafless offspring. Biologist Julian Huxley pithily observed that “if this theory is correct, it would follow that all Jewish boys would be born without foreskins.”
Unlike Lysenko, most Russian botanists and biologists were educated prior to the revolution. They were familiar with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which provided a richer explanation and had passed the trial-by-fire of intense experimentation. Yet Lysenko did not acquiesce one iota to these concerns. Unable to refute them, he decried critics as rejectors of Marxism, denouncing biologists as “fly-lovers and people-haters.” After this outburst, Stalin himself was the first to stand in ovation, bellowing “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo.”
Emboldened further and with explicit approval from Stalin himself, Lysenko began melding his agricultural ideas with communist thought. The entire field of genetics became his primary target; an interpretation of Marxist doctrine suggested human characteristics could themselves be changed by living under communism. Acquired improvements would be inherited by subsequent generations, creating a heroic “new Soviet man.” This was a far more politically tractable belief than the alternative, and Lysenko thus rejected Darwinism itself as anticommunist.
As World War II consumed Europe, Lysenko began purging scientists who contradicted his grandiose claims. Arrested on overblown charges, his mentor and early champion Vavilov ultimately died in prison from malnutrition. In 1941, Germany attacked Russia, putting Lysenko’s crusade temporarily on ice. At the war’s end in 1945, Lysenko still held dictatorial sway with the Party—but closer evaluations of his work by others began to reveal unjustified and blatantly falsified claims. Apprehensive of his position, Lysenko implored Stalin for support, promising to increase the country’s wheat yield tenfold. Despite ample evidence this was impossible and Lysenko incompetent, Stalin bowed to this much-vaunted genius of the proletariat, bestowing the entire political machinery of the Soviet Union on Lysenko.
Immediately, Stalin declared genetics “fascist,” a “bourgeois perversion.” The entire discipline was prohibited, with Lysenkoism the only “politically correct theory.” The Party decree attesting to this was edited by Lysenko and Stalin himself. All genetics research was forbidden, further discussion outlawed. Researchers across the USSR were fired, their work publicly condemned. Approximately 3,000 scientists were rounded up and executed or sent to gulags. Persecuted scientists were replaced by incompetent sycophants loyal to Lysenko. To make matters worse, this backward agricultural policy plunged the country deeper into starvation.
This had a chilling effect on scientific discourse. It wasn’t until 1964 that the scientific establishment in Russia could finally mount an offensive, when nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov blamed Lysenko for “the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology, the dissemination of pseudoscientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.” In concert with this damning sentiment, reports emerged showing that Lysenko and his acolytes had falsified and misconstrued evidence. Bereft of political sponsors to protect him now, the death knell sounded for his stranglehold on Soviet science.
The state press, which had once heralded his genius, now damned him absolutely. Lysenko retreated into obscurity, dying quietly in 1974. His cult of personality had stifled advances in genetics, biology, and medicine across the Soviet Union. His peaceful end was a stark contrast to that of the scientists whose destruction he had authored in his violent purges. The Lysenko affair was, in the words of scientist Geoffrey Beale, “The most extraordinary, tragic and in some ways absurd, scientific battle that there has ever been.”
But Lysenko’s story is more than just the hubris of one man; it tells us something about the human condition. The very reason his work was so revered was because it jibed with an ideological stance, an all-too-human psychological error known as motivated reasoning, where evidence—instead of being evaluated critically—is deliberately interpreted in such a way as to reaffirm a preexisting belief. It is an emotionally driven, inherently biased form of decision making. It demands impossibly stringent standards for any evidence contrary to one’s beliefs, while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest evidence for any ideas that suit one’s needs. Rather than rationally evaluate evidence that might confirm or deny a belief, motivated reasoning uses our biases to look only at evidence that fits what we already believe and dismiss that which unsettles us.
Motivated reasoning is closely related to confirmation bias: our tendency to seek, remember, and frame information in a way that agrees with our preconceived beliefs and worldviews, while minimizing contradictory information. The idea that we have an internal gatekeeper predisposed to filter information is not new; historian of Greek antiquity Thucydides noted the “habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” This observation is buttressed by modern psychological investigations that have formally examined our propensity to placate ourselves with convenient fictions. Yet there is a high cost associated with clinging to falsehoods, however comforting—so why would we do this?
This question captivated pioneering psychologist Leon Festinger, who postulated that simultaneously holding two or more contradictory beliefs might lead to mental agitation. He termed this cognitive dissonance, the discomfort a person feels when encountering information that conflicts with ideas they already hold. When confronted with clashing information, we endeavor to quell this discomfort. We could accept that our preconceived notions may be flawed or incomplete, refining these in the light of new evidence. But altering ideological leanings is cognitively expensive; an easier option is simply to deny reality to preserve our beliefs. In Festinger’s paradigm, motivated reasoning staves off discomfort from conflicting information, “motivating” us to accept soothing falsehood over challenging realities.
In the early 1950s, Festinger sought a means to test his hypothesis, and an intriguing article in his local paper caught his attention. It concerned a cult led by Chicago housewife Dorothy Martin, who was adamant that she received communications from the planet Clarion through automatic writing. These alien missives revealed that the world would end on December 21, 1954. Martin had previously been involved with the Dianetics movement (later known as Scientology) and cannibalized the B-movie science fiction aesthetic. Martin declared that on the eve of destruction, flying saucers would spirit the faithful to Clarion while a great flood hit Earth. Her movement sought spiritual clarity and salvation, adopting a name reflective of this: the Seekers.
The Seekers were unusual among the chorus of American apocalyptical groups, being both uninterested in proselytizing and averse to engaging with the media. Even so, Martin was surrounded by a band of devotees who believed so strongly in her proclamations that they had surrendered not only their positions and possessions but even their marriages and families. Recognizing a unique opportunity, Festinger arranged for students to join the group undercover to observe how the Seekers would deal with the disconfirmation of their beliefs.
Throughout December 1954, they prepared for the imminent destruction, awaiting communication from Clarion, which came through Martin at 10 a.m. on December 20. Assuring them they would be saved and whisked into space, the aliens decreed they should remove all metal—including bra-wiring, zippers, and adornments. Subsequent communications detailed a series of passwords the saved needed to board the rescue vessel, scheduled to arrive at midnight. At 11:15 p.m., Martin ordered her followers to don their coats, and as midnight approached, they huddled together in silence, awaiting salvation.
But as midnight arrived, nothing happened. One clock read 12:05, while another read 11:55. With mounting anxiety, they agreed that the earlier clock must be correct. They continued waiting for it to strike midnight, sick with anticipation. But as the hands of the clock aligned, no savior emerged. Over the next hours, mournful agitation engulfed the room. Cataclysm was due to devour Earth by 7 a.m. By 3 a.m., they desperately picked apart the words of the prophecy, looking for hidden symbolism they had perhaps overlooked, but attempts to rationalize rang hollow even to themselves. By 4 a.m., some were in tears while others sat listlessly in shock. This dejected mood didn’t linger long; at 4:45 a.m., Martin delivered a new transmission from Clarion: “Mighty is the word of God—and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the earth.”
The Seekers were ecstatic, convinced they had saved Earth from doom. They rationalized away the abject failure of their prophecy, instead painting it as a glorious thing. Completely reversing their prior position, they became vocal evangelists, urgently seeking media attention. They were not the first—nor last—group to persevere despite a failure of prophecy. The Millerite movement believed Jesus Christ would reemerge in the year 1844, dubbing his nonappearance the “great disappointment.” Yet the Adventist churches that arose from Millerite beliefs today have roughly 22 million followers worldwide. That people can become more fervent believers after tenets of their faith are explicitly refuted seems strange but was precisely what Festinger predicted (Festinger et al. 1956). He noted, “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic, and he fails to see your point.”
This is not solely a failing afflicting the religious; controversy over climate change is underpinned by a similar rationale. The perception that climate change is scientifically contentious is widespread but mistaken—the scientific consensus is simply overwhelming that we are drastically altering our climate. The mechanism of action has been known for over a century; French polymath Joseph Fourier hypothesized a human effect on climate in 1827, and the effect of greenhouse gases were demonstrated experimentally by Irish physicist John Tyndall by 1864.
That humans can affect climate is no surprise; what is surprising is just how fast we’re doing it. Analysis of millennia of temperature and atmosphere records embedded in ancient ice-cores show our current rate of warming is hundreds of times in excess of anything in geological history. More alarmingly, while at no point during any previous glacial or interglacial period has the CO2 concentration level reached as high as 300ppm (parts per million), we surpassed the 400ppm threshold in 2016, with up to 600ppm possible in coming decades. This is most distinctly not natural variation. Nor can we evade responsibility by postulating that this is unrelated to human activities—chemical signatures released from fossil fuels point to our guilt as readily as fingerprints on a smoking gun. The incontrovertible conclusion is that we are driving the destruction of our environment.
While evidence for this is virtually incontrovertible, a sizeable contingent reject this utterly. Self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” deny that climate change is happening or insist we are not responsible. But these ostensible “skeptics” engage in a calculated misnomer. Scientific skepticism is a vital element of the scientific process, crucial to probing whether a hypothesis is supported by evidence. Climate skeptics by contrast ignore empirical evidence, rendering their position untenable. This isn’t skepticism; it is unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought. Accordingly, such individuals are climate change denialists, not skeptics—a definition that encompasses unwarranted doubt alongside outright rejection.
A deficit of scientific validity seems no impediment to this veritable brigade of underinformed armchair experts, however. Lurking on comment threads worldwide, they lambast climatologists and journalists communicating this reality. Such disdain is not confined to the foaming underbelly of social media; the editorial position of many tabloid newspapers is denialist, the Rupert Murdoch press being especially vehement. The schism is apparent in politics too, perhaps most obviously in America, where a 2016 survey found a third of Congress members were denialists. The Republican Party is unique among major conservative groups worldwide as the explicitly denialist party. The insistence by former President Donald Trump that climate change was a conspiracy by the Chinese to hobble American industry is but one egregious example.
Given that the weight of scientific evidence is so strong against these claims, why do they muster such unrelenting support? Naively, we might assume the problem is simple misunderstanding. Certainly, increasing average global temperature can have counterintuitive repercussions, such as extreme cold snaps. Were this the problem, the solution would be to articulate scientific details more clearly and more often. Yet this well-meaning “information-deficit” approach hinges on the presumption that the intended audiences base their positions on evidence alone.
Sadly, data suggest that rejection of science is often not motivated by reason but ideology. Climate denialism is far more common among political conservatives with traditional values. In a fantastically titled 2013 study, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science,” Lewandowsky et al. found that subjects subscribing to conspiracist thought tended to reject all scientific propositions they encountered, while strong free-market worldviews tended to reject only scientific findings with regulatory implications—namely, climate science.
Political alignment itself is the biggest predictor of climate change denial, and evidence suggests that the stronger one’s belief in the free market, the more likely one is to dispute climate change. For those who actively distrust market regulation, the existence of climate change presents an ideological challenge. Accepting that human activity has consequences for others is cognitively difficult, because it forces believers to refine nuances of their personal philosophy. But for many, it is simply easier to quench intellectual discomfort by retreating into naked denial, ignoring or attacking evidence that conflicts with deeply held beliefs.
If one accepts human-mediated climate change, then supporting mitigating action should follow. But the demon of regulation is a bridge too far for many libertarians. Given that climate change affects everyone, whether they consent to it or not, then unregulated use of natural resources infringes the property rights of others, rendering it ideologically equivalent to trespass. When faced with this dilemma, some free-market advocates resolve the inevitable dissonance by simply denying the reality of climate change rather than acknowledging that the axiom they cling to may require revision.
While ideological blindness on climate change isn’t solely the preserve of free-marketers, constructive solutions can be found only when we acknowledge reality; problems cannot be rectified if unrecognized. Denialists fall at the first hurdle, dismissing the problem and stifling vital dialogue. Like Festinger’s UFO cult, they are unwilling or unable to let their position evolve with evidence. Unable to justify their contention, they resort to shouting down uncomfortable facts that clash with their perceptions, drowning out the intrusions of reality on their perfect ideology. Sadly, this sustained assault on reason has serious implications for the future of our very planet.
Ideological lenses distort how we see the world; an infamous experiment (Kahan et al. 2013) initially gave subjects a neutral numerical problem about whether a skin cream could alleviate a rash. Unbeknownst to the subjects, they had been covertly stratified by political alignment into conservative and liberal cohorts. The neutral question proved difficult for everyone, with 59 percent getting the wrong answer. With the mathematically capable identified, the researchers asked a similar problem. But this time, it concerned a subject teetering at the very brink of the American political fault line: gun control. Random data generated sometimes indicated gun control decreased crime and sometimes the opposite. Now firmly politicized, problems were randomly distributed among liberals and conservatives.
The results demonstrated something extraordinary: Liberals were remarkably effective at solving it when data suggested gun control reduced crime, but when confronted with the converse, their mathematical skills abandoned them; they tended to answer incorrectly. Conservatives exhibited precisely the same pattern in reverse: able to solve the problem only when it suggested lax gun laws reduce crime. One’s mathematical acumen wasn’t enough to overcome the impact of partisanship. The alarming inference from this is that ideological motivations skew our very ability to reason. But why?
The answer might be our propensity to engage in identity-protective cognition; we do not separate our beliefs from ourselves—to some extent they define us. Accordingly, it is a psychological imperative to protect this idea of who we are. We find it immensely difficult to differentiate our ideas from our sense of self, too often condemning us to clutch at wrong-headed positions with dogmatic zeal, unwilling to countenance alternatives lest they threaten our very identity.
Consider too the consequences for people who defy their group identities and the unquestioned beliefs and assumptions inherent therein. We tend to inhabit echo chambers of opinion and ideology reflecting our own. This is extremely apparent in emotive subjects, whether religion, politics, or beliefs. This collective subscription to certain views reinforces ideas until they become unquestioned orthodoxy. Any deviation from these ideas can come at a high social and personal cost—including ostracization. To question aspects of a belief is often conflated with being treacherous to that view, and it risks making one a pariah.
Curiously, cognitive dissonance seems to be somewhat selective. Researchers found that conspiracy theorists had a surprising ability to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs simultaneously. In one study, the more participants believed that Princess Diana had faked her own death, the more they believed she was murdered. Similarly, another study found that the stronger a subject’s belief that Osama bin Laden was already dead when U.S. Special Forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the deeper their belief he was still alive. Somehow, they readily accepted some bizarre Schrödinger’s Bin Laden, simultaneously existing in both an alive and dead state. The reason this caused no conflict to believers is that the specifics of the beliefs themselves were inconsequential—a conspiratorial narrative itself was enough to protect their worldview. As the researchers concluded, the “nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another, but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general” (Wood et al. 2012).
The alarming reality is that people tend to believe what ideologically appeals to them, filtering out information conflicting with deeply held beliefs. This afflicts all of us to some degree, and we need to be actively aware of this predilection to have any chance of overcoming it. What feels to us like a rational position might not be anything of the sort. Often, it could instead be an emotional decision dressed in the borrowed garb of rational thought, entangled with the very fabric of how we define ourselves. This makes us resistant to changing our minds, even when the available data urges it.
As Jonathan Swift once observed, “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” Ultimately, clinging to irrational beliefs is detrimental. Whether the issue is climate change, health policy, or even politics, we need to be able to evaluate available information critically without the distorting lens of ideology coloring our perception. While we may hold incredibly strong personal convictions, reality doesn’t care one iota for what we believe. And if we persist in choosing ideology over evidence, we endanger ourselves and others.
Abridged by the author from his book Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World(The Experiment Publishing, 2021).
References
Festinger, L., H.W. Riecken, and S. Schachter. 1956. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. New York, NY: Harper-Torchbooks.
Kahan, D.M., E. Peters, E.C. Dawson, et al. 2013. Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy 1(1): 54–86.
Lewandowsky, S., K. Oberauer, and G.E. Gignac. 2013. NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science. Psychological Science 24(5): 622–633.
Wood, M.J., K.M. Douglas, and R.M. Sutton. 2012. Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science 3(6): 767–773.