Anyone paying the slightest attention has likely realized that people tend to hold positions in line with their general world view. In the US, for example, political conservatives tend to hold conservative opinions, while political liberals tend to hold liberal opinions. This is true even when the topic at hand is scientific or factual, and not a matter of value or opinion.

Whether the issue is climate change, GMO, gun control, nuclear power, the death penalty, or biological facts surrounding pregnancy and fetal development, your political ideology is likely to determine your scientific opinions.  Further, depending on how strongly held the political values are, facts are not very helpful in changing opinions. Presenting fact may actually backfire, motivating people to dig in their heels. 

All of this is old news to readers of the skeptical literature. The basic phenomenon at work here is motivated reasoning, which is a catchall covering the suite of biases and cognitive flaws that lead people to arrive at confident conclusions they wish to be true, rather than objectively following facts and logic wherever it leads. Further, as I discussed yesterday, the process of motivated reasoning leads us to a false confidence in our conclusions. We all think we have facts and logic on our side.

A recent paper on the issue defines motivated reasoning this way:

Of importance, recent evidence has demonstrated that political ideology, defined as “an interrelated set of moral and political attitudes that possesses cognitive, affective, and motivational components,” can similarly guide, funnel, and constrain the processing of information and alter behavior.

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Richard Brown, president of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), has a tough task before him.  He presided over the BCA’s libel suit against Simon Singh for an article he wrote in the Guardian in which he specifically criticized the BCA, writing that it, “happily promotes bogus treatments.” The libel suit resulted in a magnification of criticism against the BCA by orders of magnitude, and the questioning of onerous libel laws in Britain that stifle free speech. The BCA ultimately had to withdraw the suit and pay for Singh’s outrageous legal expenses.

In a recent speech Brown reflected on the Singh lawsuit, now published in the Chiropractic Report with the title, “After the Storm – What Have We Learnt?” As Edzard Ernst noted in an article about Brown’s speech, “it makes fascinating reading.” To me it reads like desperate damage control, but in it there are some interesting admissions.

Regarding the Singh affair Brown writes:

Singh claimed that the BCA ‘happily promotes bogus treatments’ even though there was ‘not a jot of evidence’. The BCA was faced with a dilemma. Did it sit by and permit an assault on its reputation and good name, or did it stand up for its members and challenge the criticism? For years, chiropractic had been castigated in a succession of critical articles, but here was a published article which had explicitly named a chiropractic association and had made defamatory comments about it.

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We are still in the midst of the libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh, and now another defender of science has been targeted by such a suit. Paul Offit, Amy Wallace, and Wired Magazine have been sued for libel by Barbara Loe Fisher, the head of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).

Here is a pdf of the complaint.

The subject of the suit is the excellent article by Amy Wallace criticizing the anti-vaccine movement. Wallace was attacked for this piece by anti-vaccinationists – essentially because she got the story correct. Wallace pointed out that the science strongly favors vaccine effectiveness and safety, and that the anti-vaccine movement is dangerously wrong – hurting the public health with their misinformation. The anti-vaccinationists were apparently very upset over be called out by a mainstream journalist. They got a lot of bad press this year, the Chicago Tribune also did a series of articles detailing the dangerous pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement. Wallace’s article earned her a place in the infamous baby-eating photo (along side Offit and yours truly) that only served to further embarrass the anti-vaccine movement via the blog, Age of Autism.

The lawsuit, in this context, seems like just the next step in the campaign against Offit and Wallace.

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Skeptical bloggers have been focusing this year on England’s terrible libel laws – and with good reason. Our attention was sparked by the suit against Simon Singh brought by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).  Last year Simon wrote this piece, criticizing the use of chiropractic to treat certain childhood conditions, treatments for which there is no credible evidence of efficacy. Actually I would go further – there is evidence that some of the treatments don’t work.

The BCA responded by suing Simon Singh, it what certainly seems like a transparent attempt at silencing legitimate criticism through the chilling effect of England’s oppressive libel laws. Being sued for libel in England is so expensive that most people will just settle rather than risk financial ruin. And the laws are so liberal that they lend themselves to libel tourism – foreigners suing in English court to take advantage of the favorable laws.

BCA’s lawsuit seems to have largely backfired (due largely to Simon bravely sticking out the law suit, at great personal expense). They have been embarrassed by the episode, and if anything it has just highlighted how terrible the evidence is for their treatments. It further spawned a movement to reform English libel laws, spearheaded by Sense about Science. There is currently a reform libel campaign going on, and you can sign the petition.

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