anti intellectualism essay

Department of History

Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965

Together for the first time: two masterworks on the undercurrents of the American mind by one of our greatest historians

Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics are two essential works that lay bare the worrying trends of irrationalism, demagoguery, destructive populism, and conspiratorial thinking that have long influenced American politics and culture. Whether underground or–as in our present moment–out in the open, these currents of resentment, suspicion, and conspiratorial delusion received their authoritative treatment from Hofstadter, among the greatest of twentieth-century American historians, at a time when many public intellectuals and scholars did not take them seriously enough. These two masterworks are joined here by Sean Wilentz’s selection of Hofstadter’s most trenchant uncollected writings of the postwar period: discussions of the Constitution’s framers, the personality and legacy of FDR, higher education and its discontents, the relationship of fundamentalism to right-wing politics, and the advent of the modern conservative movement.

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Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), one of the preeminent historians of the 20th century, is the subject of a series published by the Library of America that’s edited by Sean Wilentz, Princeton’s George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History. The first volume of that series,  Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 , was released in April. Wilentz spoke with PAW about Hofstadter and why he is still worth reading today. 

Many people today might not be familiar with Hofstadter. Who was he and why publish a collection of his writings? 

Hofstadter was a liberal, but he was skeptical even of the liberalism that he found most attractive. His book,  The American Political Tradition , which came out in 1948, is very caustic; he wrote that American democracy was based less in fraternity than in cupidity, which is a wonderful phrase. He debunked the traditional liberal views of Jefferson and Lincoln and what they stood for, but without ever saying that the men themselves were not honorable or valuable. He admired the liberalism of the New Deal while also examining its shortcomings. 

The Library of America is publishing three volumes of Hofstadter’s writings, but you chose to publish the volume covering the middle period of his career first. Why? 

Because it includes perhaps his two most famous works,  Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , which was published in 1963, and  The Paranoid Style , which appeared in 1965. Those are highly relevant to what’s going on in 2020. There’s no question that Donald Trump is the culmination of a lot of things Hofstadter was writing about more than 50 years ago. 

Can you summarize Hofstadter’s views in those two books? 

By the end of the 1950s, Hofstadter had begun to study the irrationalities of American life, one of which was a fundamental strain of anti-intellectualism that runs throughout our history and crosses the political spectrum. Some of it comes out of evangelical Protestantism, which we can certainly see today, but in a sense there is an anti-intellectual quality latent in democracy itself, such as a distrust of elites and people who think they know better than others as well as more than others. Hofstadter believed that intellectual values, including an appreciation of skepticism and nuance, and a rejection of absolutism and dogma, were crucial to a democratic society. 

His next book,  The Paranoid Style , built off of this. He saw a strain of conspiratorial thinking running through American history, sometimes in very good causes but mostly in very bad ones. In his own time, Hofstadter found it in the John Birch Society and the Goldwater campaign. We see a lot of it today in Trump and the far right, but also, to a growing extent, on the left. 

Are cable news and social media the modern drivers of anti-intellectualism and the paranoid style? 

Fox News is something Hofstadter might have imagined, though it would have horrified him. Twitter is something else entirely. The degree to which hitherto honorable institutions pay such inordinate attention to Twitter has astonished me. Social media turns into mob rule after a while, but the mobishness of Twitter is instigated by wacko conspiracy theories and fueled by outrage, which now spread instantaneously. Yet it affects not merely the credulous but people and organizations you’d think would know better. 

In some ways these things are much worse today than they were in Hofstadter’s time, in part because they have acquired a more aggressive, even militaristic tone. Say what you will, but Barry Goldwater didn’t whip up violence at his campaign rallies or encourage armed shutdowns of the Michigan state capitol. Since Nixon, the Republican Party thought it could ride the back of this paranoid and sometimes-violent tiger, and it has ended up being swallowed by it. 

Should we be concerned about anti-intellectualism today? 

Hofstadter was very concerned about the destruction of institutional and intellectual authority in American society, which goes hand in hand with a growing attack on the very idea of objectivity. Towards the end of his life, he saw that happening at Columbia, where he spent practically his entire career, but universities have continued to lose a lot of their credibility since then. 

Unfortunately, those of us in higher education have ourselves to blame for some of it. When we elide and even attack the concept of objective truth, we attack something that has liberated humanity from political tyranny as well as rank superstition. Internet libertarians may applaud that there are no longer social or cultural gatekeepers, but gatekeepers are what a civilization needs — creditable people who can distinguish between fact and fiction. The public can’t always do that on its own, and there are plenty of demagogues, hustlers, and fanatics on both political extremes who are eager to fill the void. 

Can universities still fill their traditional role as intellectual gatekeepers?        

Universities themselves are now a battleground, but also a kind of matrix. You see it, for example, in the growing assumption that racial categories and racial identities so ineluctably define who we are, individually and collectively, that the very idea of a universal human experience is a racist cover for white privilege. That’s not what we’re about as a nation, at least not in aspiration, and it’s not what we fought for back in the ’60s or are fighting for now. Unfortunately, a lot of that ideology, what Barbara and Karen Fields call “racecraft,” has come out of the universities. I would love for some widely respected university leader to make an eloquent plea for objectivity, enlightenment, and universalism, both scientific and humanistic. It would cause trouble, sure, and be misrepresented and misunderstood, but what the hell is leadership for? 

Where do we go from here? 

On the one hand you have Trump standing up for the Confederacy, and on the other hand you have people tearing down statues of Ulysses Grant as a symbol of racism. And now Trump is trying the lump the extremists with those who believe the time has come to take down statues erected purposefully to celebrate the Lost Cause of a slaveholders’ republic. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans are not at either extreme. 

As you noted, protesters recently tore down a statue of Grant in San Francisco, purportedly because he was a slaveholder. Why do you oppose that? 

Look, Grant was raised in an abolitionist family, and when he was given a slave by his father-in-law, he promptly released him from bondage. Grant also, of course, led the army that destroyed the Confederacy and then, as president, fought the Ku Klux Klan, helped secure passage of the 15th Amendment, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. So, some perspective, please. 

But there’s a broader point at stake here. As Richard Hofstadter and historians throughout the ages have shown, the purpose of studying history is to try to understand how different people in different times struggled with challenges that were as great or greater than the ones we face, and with no more or less wisdom than we possess. Removing Confederate monuments is one thing; they were erected for no other reason than to celebrate white supremacy in the long aftermath of Reconstruction. But unless we can learn to distinguish between people who practiced and preached evil and people who were flawed but also achieved great good, history becomes nothing more than dogma and self-congratulation.

Interview conducted and condensed by M.F.B.

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• Published: 28 April 2021

Anti-intellectualism and the mass public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic

• Eric Merkley   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7647-9650 1 , 2 &
• Peter John Loewen 1 , 2  

Nature Human Behaviour volume  5 ,  pages 706–715 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Anti-intellectualism (the generalized distrust of experts and intellectuals) is an important concept in explaining the public’s engagement with advice from scientists and experts. We ask whether it has shaped the mass public’s response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We provide evidence of a consistent connection between anti-intellectualism and COVID-19 risk perceptions, social distancing, mask usage, misperceptions and information acquisition using a representative survey of 27,615 Canadians conducted from March to July 2020. We exploit a panel component of our design ( N  = 4,910) to strongly link anti-intellectualism and within-respondent change in mask usage. Finally, we provide experimental evidence of anti-intellectualism’s importance in information search behaviour with two conjoint studies ( N ~ 2,500) that show that preferences for COVID-19 news and COVID-19 information from experts dissipate among respondents with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment. Anti-intellectualism poses a fundamental challenge in maintaining and increasing public compliance with expert-guided COVID-19 health directives.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust a wide variety of experts into the spotlight. Doctors and scientists are at the forefront of both government plans to control the pandemic and efforts to educate the public on the threat of the virus. Economists have been central in guiding policy to mitigate the inevitable and catastrophic economic consequences of government lockdowns and social distancing. Governments and citizens, for the most part, are heeding this expert advice, but there are exceptions.

Most work to date (particularly in the United States) has focused on the role of ideological conservatism and partisanship in reducing COVID-19 risk perceptions and social distancing practice (Cornelson and Miloucheva 2020, unpublished manuscript) 1 , 2 , 3 . We argue here that anti-intellectualism (the generalized distrust of experts and intellectuals) has played a powerful role in shaping the public’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic above and beyond this concept’s association with ideological conservatism 4 .

People tend to be persuaded by speakers they see as knowledgeable (that is, experts), but only when they perceive the existence of common interests 5 . Some groups of citizens, such as ideological conservatives 4 , populists 6 , religious fundamentalists and the like, may see experts as threatening to their social identities. Consequently, they will be less amenable to expert messages, even in times of crisis 7 . We thus expect citizens with higher levels of anti-intellectualism to perceive less risk from COVID-19, to engage in less social distancing and mask usage, to more frequently endorse related misperceptions and to acquire less pandemic-related information.

To test these expectations, we bring to bear a large representative sample of almost 28,000 respondents from a survey that was fielded in Canada over the course of 11 waves from 25 March to 6 July 2020. This survey has a built-in panel component where almost half of the respondents from the first four waves were re-contacted in waves 5–8 for a total of 4,910 re-contacts. This allows us to test expectations of anti-intellectualism’s relationship to within-respondent changes in self-reported behaviour where we expect it, in this case the usage of face masks, where expert recommendations changed over the course of the pandemic.

We also provide direct evidence of anti-intellectualism’s relationship to observed information search behaviour with a pair of conjoint experiments. We find that people choose COVID-19 news over unrelated news and choose expert-featured news about COVID-19, but these effects weaken or disappear among those with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment. We provide pre-registered replications of both experiments. Together, our results illustrate the centrally important role of anti-intellectualism in shaping the mass public’s response to COVID-19.

Citizens and experts during the COVID-19 pandemic

In an age of pandemic and a warming climate, understanding the conditions under which citizens engage with and process information from experts has taken on a central importance. Most explanations for resistance to scientific and expert consensus focus on the directional motivation of individuals. People may reflexively reject scientific and expert consensus when it is in tension with their worldviews, ideological beliefs or even partisanship 8 , 9 . The appeal of this approach is obvious in the context of climate change: for years there has been a stark divide between Republicans and Democrats in the United States 10 . But ideology and partisanship do a poor job in explaining climate change attitudes in other national contexts 11 , nor are they particularly important determinants of attitudes toward other areas of scientific consensus 7 .

The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded us with a unique, if deeply tragic, opportunity to study how citizens react to expert advice on a novel and vitally important issue. Scientists are gradually learning about the novel coronavirus and how best to mitigate the threat with individual and government responses. It would be wrong to imply that the scientific community has reached consensus on many questions related to COVID-19, but a few key points of advice have remained consistent over the course of the pandemic: COVID-19 is dangerous, especially for the elderly and people with pre-existing health conditions, and people can protect themselves through a number of preventative measures that have together been labelled as social or physical distancing. Public health officials have also converged on a consensus that cloth masks can be effective in preventing transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals.

Meanwhile, a number of verifiably false, pseudo-scientific claims have been circulating in popular discourse (especially on social media 12 ) such as a link between COVID-19 and fifth-generation (5G) telecommunications technology, the ability to cure COVID-19 with homoeopathic remedies or vitamin C and the artificial creation of SARS-CoV-2, by either China or the United States. Some of these misperceptions are conspiratorial in nature 13 , while others are more accurately labelled as pseudo-scientific medical folk wisdom 14 . Perhaps the most politically salient misperception about COVID-19 is that it is not a serious disease, and that its effects are comparable to those of the seasonal flu.

Research has begun to accumulate on how citizens have engaged with expert advice on COVID-19 on the one hand, and misinformation on the other. A dominant focus, echoing scholarly research on motivated reasoning discussed above, has been on the role of partisanship in structuring COVID-19 risk perceptions and social distancing behaviour (Cornelson and Miloucheva, unpublished manuscript) 1 , 2 , 15 . However, other countries with high levels of affective polarization, such as Canada 16 , show evidence of cross-partisan consensus 17 , so it is not clear how far a focus on partisanship helps us understand COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours outside the rather unique US context.

Other psychological traits and predispositions also appear to have particular relevance in shaping COVID-19 risk perceptions. Ideological conservatism appears to predict COVID-19 attitudes cross-nationally, especially in Canada and the United States 3 , as does one’s level of science literacy, need for cognition 3 and proclivity towards conspiratorial thinking 13 . Some outcomes are also sensitive to the information environment: COVID-19 misperceptions appear to be stronger among people in the United States who watch Fox News 18 , and among social media users in Canada 12 and the United Kingdom 19 , for example.

Research to date has proceeded along several separate streams, focusing on risk perceptions, social distancing, or misperceptions alone, despite the likely close relationships between them. We argue that the concept of anti-intellectualism is centrally important in shaping the public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic across a wide range of indicators, such as risk perceptions, preventative behaviours such as social distancing and mask usage, misperceptions and information search behaviour. In what follows, we review the theoretical concept of anti-intellectualism, and then demonstrate its relationship to these beliefs and self-reported behaviours.

Anti-intellectualism and the COVID-19 pandemic

Anti-intellectualism has been an understudied concept in science communication, public policy and public opinion research, despite its clear import for understanding how and why citizens engage with expert advice and pseudo-scientific claims. The concept itself entered the scholarly lexicon with the work of Richard Hofstadter, who argued that anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the Protestant fabric of the United States and periodically manifests itself in political life, such as with the McCarthy trials or the rise of the John Birch Society 20 .

Hofstadter implicitly saw populism (the generalized distrust of elites 21 , 22 ) as central to his definition of anti-intellectualism, where people distrust and dislike experts and intellectuals because of a view that “the plain sense of the common man….is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise” 20 . Anti-intellectualism is typically embraced by populists who see experts as a class of elites that aim to exploit ordinary people through their positions of power. The simultaneous democratization of knowledge and rising importance of experts in growing government bureaucracies have potentially raised the salience of this concept in political life 20 .

More recently, scholarship on anti-intellectualism has deviated somewhat from Hofstadter’s conceptualization. Some have identified anti-intellectualism as plain-spokenness 23 , 24 or as a component of populist rhetoric 21 , 25 , rather than as a predisposition. Scholars have also increasingly seen anti-intellectualism as a component of conservative ideology 4 (rather than populism), in part due to conservative rejection of the theory of evolution and embrace of climate scepticism.

A simpler, more unifying definition treats anti-intellectualism as “the generalized distrust of experts and intellectuals” 7 . This mistrust can have a number of different sources, but foremost among them is populism 6 . Some populists see experts as a class of elites who exercise power over virtuous ordinary citizens, and historically there is some link between populism and anti-intellectualism, at least in the United States 25 . However, there have also been historical moments where populists have valued impartial experts as an antidote to corrupt political elites. For example, Progressive Era populists saw experts and a professionalized civil service as solutions to the corruption of machine politics. There are almost certainly other traits that fuel anti-intellectual sentiment, such as ideological conservatism and partisanship 4 , intuitionism 26 and religious fundamentalism.

A lesson from these conflicting theoretical and empirical accounts is that we should not explicitly or implicitly build a source of anti-intellectualism into a definition of the concept or into its measurement, but rather rely on the fact that anti-intellectuals will consistently display mistrust in a wide range of experts and intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism should strongly shape the public’s response to expert recommendations because citizens are persuaded by sources they perceive as trustworthy 5 . Recent work has highlighted the importance of anti-intellectualism and trust in experts in understanding public support for climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, water fluoridation 4 , 7 and vaccinations 27 . And experimentally, the persuasiveness of expert consensus cues appears to be moderated by anti-intellectualism, such that signals of expert consensus may make anti-intellectuals double down in their opposition to positions with expert consensus 7 .

We argue that anti-intellectualism is likely a critical factor in shaping the public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts are at the forefront of the pandemic response by governments. They have communicated messages regarding the seriousness of COVID-19 and the importance of social distancing, and have often been used to debunk pieces of misinformation circulating online. Consequently, our expectation is that anti-intellectualism should be negatively associated with COVID-19 risk perceptions and social distancing compliance, but positively associated with misperceptions.

We surveyed 27,615 Canadians between March and July 2020 over 11 survey waves about their COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours, and we re-interviewed almost half of respondents from the first four waves ( N  = 4,910). We use these respondents to test our expectations that:

H1: Anti-intellectualism is…

A: negatively associated with COVID-19 concern and risk perceptions;

B: negatively associated with social distancing compliance;

C: positively associated with COVID-19 misperceptions.

The time span of our study and our panel data allow us to probe dynamics in public compliance with expert recommendations. For most of the items we surveyed, experts have struck a consistent stance: avoid in-person contact and public gatherings, avoid closed spaces such as shops and keep a distance of at least two metres from other individuals. There is one exception: the usage of medical or non-medical masks.

At the beginning of the crisis, public health officials in Canada cautioned against the use of masks by ordinary citizens because evidence had not firmly established the importance of either pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic transmission. They also feared that masks could increase the risk of transmission due to improper use and that shortages of masks for medical personnel could be triggered by the pandemic.

As experts learned more about the virus and supply problems eased, health experts changed their advice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed their advice on 2 April 2020. In Canada, the federal government’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Theresa Tam, acknowledged that masks could be used as a preventative measure on 6 April 2020, but there was no official recommendation on their usage by ordinary citizens until 20 May 2020.

We expect anti-intellectualism to play an important role in shaping the dynamics of mask adoption in Canada. The mass public is generally responsive to communication from the government and political elites. Polarization occurs when predispositions afford resistance in some groups of citizens to these messages (partisanship being the classic example 28 ). In this case, we expect expert messages regarding mask adoption to be accepted primarily by those who are highly trusting of experts and resisted by those with high levels of anti-intellectualism. Consequently, we expect self-reported adoption of masks to have occurred primarily among those who are highly trusting of experts. Specifically, we test the following two hypotheses using our cross-sectional study and our panel respondents:

H2A: A negative association between mask wearing and anti-intellectualism emerges and grows significantly stronger over the course of the pandemic.

H2B: Anti-intellectualism is negatively associated with within-individual changes in mask adoption.

Finally, we expect anti-intellectualism to be an important factor in COVID-19 information acquisition. A large literature has shown that anxiety triggered by national crises such as terrorist attacks and pandemics increases information seeking among ordinary citizens 29 , 30 , 31 . Moreover, such anxiety generates engagement with threatening information 32 , 33 . People tend to learn about politics from top-down communication through the news media or horizontally through their discussion networks. We see both news exposure and political discussion as important concepts in understanding information acquisition about COVID-19. They are closely correlated, but may have slightly different determinants owing to the fact that political discussion may be, at times, a less voluntary means of political information acquisition.

Nevertheless, individuals are likely to prefer news related to COVID-19 and to readily discuss this information with other people owing to the stresses created by the pandemic. This may be less true of anti-intellectuals, who feel less threatened by COVID-19 and anticipate such news to be laced with information from sources they distrust. We test this expectation in two ways. First, we evaluate whether anti-intellectualism is associated with self-reported news exposure and discussion related to COVID-19:

H3A: Anti-intellectualism is negatively associated with COVID-19 information search behaviour such as COVID-19 news exposure and discussion.

Second, we implement a conjoint design that randomizes the source and headline of profile pairs of hypothetical news articles. One limitation with the above analysis for H3A is its reliance on self-reported behaviour. People may not accurately recall their behaviour or may give socially desirable answers. Our conjoint will allow us to directly observe their information search behaviour to help mitigate this concern. We expect people to prefer COVID-19-related news profiles and to perceive these stories as more important, and that these relationships will weaken or even reverse themselves for respondents who exhibit high levels of anti-intellectual sentiment:

H3B: Anti-intellectualism moderates the effect of COVID-19 news on information selection.

H3C: Anti-intellectualism moderates the effect of COVID-19 news on perceived story importance.

A finding that anti-intellectualism structures information search about COVID-19 raises the question of why it does so. A large part of the answer is likely that anti-intellectuals are comparatively less concerned and threatened by COVID-19 because of their lack of trust in experts. However, it is also possible that anti-intellectuals are less interested in stories about COVID because they expect experts (and expertise) to be featured in such stories. Citizens gravitate towards experts in times of public health crisis 31 and thus might choose to engage with information about COVID-19 from experts. This effect should weaken as anti-intellectualism rises because anti-intellectuals see these sources as less credible. We test these expectations with a modified conjoint design where news article profiles contain randomized headlines either featuring experts or not. We expect people to prefer news profiles with headlines featuring experts and to perceive these stories as more credible, and that these relationships will weaken or even reverse themselves for respondents who exhibit high levels of anti-intellectual sentiment:

H4A: Anti-intellectualism moderates the effect of expert sources on information selection.

H4B: Anti-intellectualism moderates the effect of expert sources on perceived story credibility.

Observational analyses

We begin by presenting the results of wave-by-wave cross-sectional models using COVID-19 risk perceptions, social distancing, misperceptions, COVID-19 news exposure and COVID-19 discussion as our outcome measures. Figure 1 provides the point estimates for anti-intellectualism and right–left ideology across all of our survey waves. The results show a largely consistent link between anti-intellectualism and these outcomes, after controlling for other factors. The relationship between right–left ideology and our outcomes is notably less reliable.

Effects of anti-intellectualism and ideology on COVID-19 concern (top left), risk perception (top centre), social distancing (top right), misperceptions (bottom left), COVID-19 news exposure (bottom centre) and COVID-19 discussion (bottom right) ( N = 25,074). The 95% confidence intervals are based on heteroscedastic-robust standard errors. Controls are applied for science literacy, generalized trust, news exposure, social media exposure, political discussion, partisanship, education, age, religiosity, urban/rural, gender and region. Data are weighted within region by age and gender. Markers represent OLS regression estimates for each wave. The dashed line is at a marginal effect of zero. All variables are scaled from 0 to 1. Full regression estimates are provided in Supplementary Tables 6 – 11 .

The estimated negative effect of anti-intellectualism (scaled 0–1) on COVID-19 concern (also scaled 0–1) increased from 0.11 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.16 to −0.05) in wave 1 to 0.25 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.32 to −0.18) in wave 11 (top-left panel), net other factors, including right–left ideology. The negative effect of right–left ideology (scaled 0–1) similarly increased from 0.08 in wave 1 to 0.15 in wave 11. We see similar results when asking citizens their perceptions of the threat posed by COVID-19 to Canadians (top-centre panel). Both anti-intellectualism and right–left ideology contribute to COVID-19 risk perceptions, and the relationship, if anything, has grown stronger over time. These results support H1A.

We see slightly different patterns when examining social distancing (top-right panel). Anti-intellectualism has been negatively associated with such self-reported behaviour from the very start of the pandemic, increasing in effect from 0.27 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.35 to −0.19) to 0.39 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.47 to −0.31) in waves 1 through 11 on the 0–1 scale. However, we find no evidence of a statistically significant association between conservative ideology and social distancing until the final three waves collected in June. These results support H1B.

A similar story is told with COVID-19 misperceptions (bottom-left panel). Anti-intellectualism is positively associated with these misperceptions, with effects ranging from 0.15 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.10 to 0.20) to 0.22 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.27) over the 11 waves on the 0–1 scale, providing support for H1C. We find no evidence of a consistent and statistically significant association between conservative ideology and misperceptions.

Finally, we find that anti-intellectualism is negatively associated with COVID-19 news exposure. We see consistent effects between 0.11 ( P  = 0.001, 95% CI −0.16 to −0.05) and 0.11 ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.17 to −0.05) over the 11 waves on the 0–1 scale (bottom-centre panel). However, we find no consistent, statistically significant association with COVID-19 discussion (bottom-right panel). We find no statistically significant association between conservative ideology and either concept. Individuals with high levels of anti-intellectualism appear less likely to consume news about COVID-19, but we find no evidence indicating that they are less likely to talk about COVID-19 with others, in partial support of H3A.

One complication in interpreting the above findings are the threats of reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity between respondents. It is possible that the trust people have in experts (especially towards doctors and scientists) is affected by peoples’ attitudes towards COVID-19 and their willingness to engage in social distancing. We are able to exploit the panel component of our survey to reduce the threat of endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity.

Figure 2 shows the effects of the lags of anti-intellectualism, ideology and science literacy on each of our outcomes, controlling for other lagged confounders and, importantly, the past values of the outcomes. Lagged anti-intellectualism is associated with a 0.09 lower level in COVID-19 concern ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.12 to −0.05), a 0.07 point lower level in risk perceptions ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.11 to −0.04), a 0.08 point lower level in social distancing ( P  = 0.001, 95% CI −0.13 to −0.03), a 0.06 point higher level in COVID-19 misperceptions ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.03 to 0.08) and a 0.05 point lower level in COVID-19 news exposure in a later time period ( P  = 0.004, 95% CI −0.08 to −0.01), controlling for past values of our outcomes and confounders. This gives us some confidence that at the associations we observe between anti-intellectualism and our outcomes are not entirely due to the latter’s effect on the former.

N = 4,474. The 95% confidence intervals are based on heteroscedastic-robust standard errors. Controls are applied for lagged outcomes, generalized trust, news exposure, social media exposure, political discussion, partisanship, education, age, religiosity, urban/rural, gender, region and contact/re-contact fixed effects. Data are weighted within region by age and gender. Markers represent OLS regression estimates. The dashed line is at a marginal effect of zero. All variables scaled from 0–1. Full regression estimates provided in Supplementary Table 12 .

The recommendation to wear medical or non-medical face masks in public presents an interesting case because it is one in which the advice of experts clearly changed over the course of the pandemic. On 6 April 2020, health experts associated with the federal government noted that the use of masks could be beneficial, while they officially recommended their use on 20 May 2020.

Self-reported mask adoption increased as expert advice changed, as we would expect, but less so for those with strong anti-intellectual sentiment. The top panel of Fig. 3 shows the estimated effects of anti-intellectualism and ideology on the share of respondents wearing a mask in the past week. We find no statistically significant association between anti-intellectualism and mask usage when we began fielding the question in wave 3 (9–11 April 2020). A remarkably strong negative relationship developed as the pandemic progressed. It is associated with a 50 point reduction ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.62 to −0.38) in the probability of wearing a mask over the past week as of wave 11 conducted at the beginning of July. These results provide strong support for H2A.

Estimated effects of anti-intellectualism (AI) and right–left ideology on mask usage (top); predicted mask usage over time by levels of anti-intellectualism (bottom left) and ideology (bottom right) ( N = 20,579). The 95% confidence intervals are based on robust standard errors. Controls are applied for science literacy, generalized trust, news exposure, social media exposure, political discussion, partisanship, education, age, religiosity, urban/rural, gender and region. Data are weighted within region by age and gender. In the top panel, dots represent OLS regression estimates for each wave, and the dashed line is at a marginal effect of zero. In the bottom panels, dots represent linear predictions. All variables scaled from 0–1. Full regression estimates are provided in Supplementary Table 13 .

The bottom-left panel of Fig. 3 displays predictions of the share of respondents using masks for low and high levels of anti-intellectualism. Among those with the lowest levels of anti-intellectual sentiment, mask usage grows from 21% in wave 3 to 81% by wave 11. It rises to only 46% for those with higher levels of anti-intellectualism (0.65, 95th percentile), while at the furthest reaches of the index it does not increase at all. Resistance to adoption of masks is far stronger among those distrusting of experts. The bottom-right panel presents the same predictions for ideology, where we find no such pattern.

Our panel respondents also allow us to provide stronger causal evidence of anti-intellectualism’s importance. We estimate a model predicting within-respondent changes in mask usage between the contact and re-contact periods. This allows to account for unobserved heterogeneity between respondents. The estimates are illustrated in the left panel of Fig. 4 . The share of respondents using masks with the lowest possible level of anti-intellectualism increased from 21.6% (95% CI 0.17 to 0.26) to 44.4% (95% CI 0.39 to 0.50) between contact and re-contact periods, which is a 22.8 point increase ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.28).

Predicted level of mask usage across contact and re-contact periods by levels of anti-intellectualism (AI, left) and ideology (right) ( N = 4,568). The 95% confidence intervals are based on heteroscedastic-robust standard errors. Controls are applied for science literacy, generalized trust, news exposure, social media exposure, political discussion, partisanship, education, age, religiosity, urban/rural, gender, region, and their interactions with the re-contact period. Data are weighted within region by age and gender. Full regression estimates are provided in Supplementary Table 14 .

In contrast, mask usage only increased from 22.6% (95% CI 0.18 to 0.27) to 29.4% (95% CI 0.25 to 0.34) for respondents with high levels of anti-intellectualism, a much smaller 6.8-point increase ( P  = 0.004, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.11). Respondents at more extreme reported levels of anti-intellectualism are not expected to increase their mask usage at all, though these estimates are noisy owing to the relatively small number of respondents in that part of the distribution. In contrast, we see no evidence that ideology is significantly associated with within-respondent change in mask usage (right panel). These results strongly support H2B.

Experiment 1 analysis

In experiment 1, we find that anti-intellectualism strongly conditions news preferences in support of H3B and H3C. The marginal effects are shown in the top panels of Fig. 5 . Respondents with the lowest level of anti-intellectualism were 27 points more likely to select COVID-19 news ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.23 to 0.31). COVID-19 news also scored 0.26 points higher in perceived importance among these respondents on a 0–1 scale ( P  < 0.001, 95% CI 0.23 to 0.28). In both cases, causal effects weaken as anti-intellectualism rises, though it does not entirely vanish in the case of perceived importance. The interaction terms for the story selection and perceived importance models are both significant at the 0.001 level. These behavioural results support our self-reported observational findings related to news exposure for H3A.

Marginal effects of COVID-19 news on story selection (experiment 1, N = 15,054; top left) and perceived importance (experiment 1, N = 15,054; top right) as well as the marginal effects of expert featured headline on story selection (experiment 2, N = 10,016; bottom left) and perceived credibility (experiment 2, N = 10,016; bottom right). The 95% confidence intervals are based on cluster-robust standard errors. The dashed line is at a marginal effect of zero. Data are weighted within region by age and gender. Models include effects of source, author (experiment 1 only) and date (experiment 1 only) and controls for ideology, cognitive sophistication, conspiratorial thinking, age, and rural/urban residence and their interactions with the treatment. Full regression estimates can be found in Supplementary Tables 17 and 18 . Comparisons of exploratory and pre-registered replications can be found in Supplementary Tables 2 and 3 and Supplementary Figs. 2 and 3 .

Experiment 2 analysis

We find that the effect of receiving headlines featuring experts is heterogeneous across levels of anti-intellectualism, in support of H4A. The marginal effects on story selection are shown in the bottom-left panel of Fig. 5 . Respondents with the lowest levels of anti-intellectualism are 7 points more likely to select stories featuring experts than stories that do not ( P  = 0.003, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.12), but this effect disappears around 0.5 on the 0–1 scale. This interaction is statistically significant ( P  = 0.047). These are impressive effects given the simplicity of the treatment. In support of H4B, we find similar results when using credibility assessments as our outcome (bottom-right panel). Expert-featured headlines scored 0.04 points higher in perceived credibility among respondents with the lowest level of anti-intellectualism on a 0–1 scale ( P  = 0.001, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.06), an effect which disappears around 0.5 on the anti-intellectualism index. The interaction term itself is statistically significant ( P  = 0.036).

The inability of society to cope with a warming climate has gradually drawn scholarly attention to understanding the conditions under which citizens seek out and engage with advice from experts. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought this topic to the forefront with sudden urgency: people’s lives are at risk if citizens do not take seriously the advice of experts to wear masks and socially distance. Research to date, especially from the United States, has rightly pointed a finger at ideology and partisanship for undermining public compliance with health guidelines. The evidence we provide here consistently shows that anti-intellectualism matters in its own right and not simply as an outgrowth of ideological conservatism.

We find that anti-intellectualism is associated with lower levels of COVID-19 concern, risk perception, and social distancing compliance, as well as higher levels of misperceptions about COVID-19 (H1). Our data allow us to show that this has been consistently the case since the early days of the pandemic, while our panel respondents provide us some measure of confidence in saying that these associations are not simply the product of COVID-19 attitudes altering people’s trust in expert communities.

Moreover, anti-intellectualism appears to be related to behavioural change as communication from experts evolved. Public health experts changed their advice on the efficacy of masks during the pandemic. At the same time, we see a growing association between anti-intellectualism and mask usage (H2A) and evidence of a strong negative association between anti-intellectualism and within-respondent changes in mask usage (H2B). Self-reported mask adoption occurred far more rapidly among those who are highly trusting of experts.

Finally, anti-intellectualism is associated with less information acquisition related to COVID-19, at least on some dimensions. Anti-intellectualism is associated with less self-reported COVID-19 news exposure, though not COVID-19 discussion (H3A), and experimentally we show that observed preferences for COVID-19 news (H3B) and for expert information about COVID-19 (H4A) are lower for those with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment. These behavioural observations provide independent confirmation of our findings on self-reported news exposure for H3A.

There is one important caveat: we find no evidence that anti-intellectuals avoid expert information or COVID-19 news. This is consistent with previous work demonstrating that individuals select congenial information, but do not necessarily avoid dissonant information 34 . The upshot is that anti-intellectuals are less likely not only to accept expert information, but also to opt into important streams of information about COVID-19 compared with more trusting individuals, even if they do not explicitly avoid such information.

These findings provide important insight into how the mass public responds to public health recommendations and national crises more broadly. Previous work has shown that citizens gravitate towards government officials and experts as a result of the stresses produced by national crises 32 . And indeed, there is evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a rally effect for incumbent governments 35 . We might think that predispositions such as anti-intellectualism, partisanship or ideology matter less in these circumstances, but this does not appear to be the case. People who are highly distrusting of experts are not simply willing to put aside their distrust of these sources to resolve the crisis and return to normalcy. Relaying information from experts is unlikely to be of use in persuading these individuals, even in times of crisis. Other communication strategies are needed.

Our study has important limitations. Most crucially, we cannot randomly assign anti-intellectualism, so we are limited in our ability to definitively attribute our effects to anti-intellectualism, rather than another closely related construct. However, a few points mitigate this concern. First, our panel analyses allow us to lessen the threat of endogeneity. It is possible that people’s reactions to the unfolding crisis affect their trust in doctors and scientists. By controlling for past values on our outcomes, we can minimize the threat this poses to our inferences. Second, we are able to examine how the relationship between anti-intellectualism and outcomes respond to exogenous changes, such as expert recommendations regarding masks or our randomized headlines, which reduces the likelihood that either omitted variables or endogeneity bias our inferences.

We also note that our data come from Canada. We must be careful in generalizing to other contexts. However, we believe our particular case is advantageous. Canada lacks the polarized, elite debate on COVID-19 that is found in the United States 17 . We see the Canadian case as more closely resembling what is found in other established democracies struggling to contain the pandemic. Consequently, we fully expect these findings to travel, although we suspect that partisanship and ideology matter more (relative to anti-intellectualism) in the United States. More cross-national comparative research needs to be done to examine the determinants of COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours across different political contexts.

There are also some limitations to the experimental approach we use here. Individuals do not make decisions about which news to consume in a manner similar to an artificial survey task. That being said, the source and headline are two of the most visible components of a news story that drive engagement. In the case of experiment 2, we have reason to expect that our results are conservative. All of our headlines feature topics that are likely to make heavy use of experts whether or not they are mentioned in the headline, which may not have been lost on many respondents.

There is a strong association between anti-intellectualism and a wide range of COVID-19 attitudes and self-reported behaviours. Anti-intellectualism is also related to the public’s dynamic response to expert advice and their information search behaviour. All of these effects rival, if not exceed, the effects of ideological conservatism. The implications are considerable: we cannot take trust in experts for granted. To improve public compliance with health directives, science communicators, journalists and practitioners need to use a wider variety of trusted messengers to reinforce the messages of public health experts. Anti-intellectualism appears to be a central predisposition governing the response of citizens to the COVID-19 pandemic and is deserving of further research in other contexts.

Our research was approved by the University of Toronto Social Sciences, Humanities and Education Research Ethics Board (protocol no. 38251). Informed consent was provided by the participants. We surveyed 27,615 Canadian citizens 18 years and older from 25 March to 6 July 2020 using the online survey sample provider Dynata. This survey was fielded in 11 waves over that period ( N ~ 2,500 per wave). Respondents were paid a nominal fee for participating by Dynata. Sample sizes were chosen based on imperatives for the broader Media Ecosystem Observatory project, rather than for this study in particular. Nonetheless, our large sample sizes give us the power to observe small effects with a high degree of confidence.

A total of 2,576 individuals were excluded for being non-citizens, being under the age of 18 years, completing the survey in under one-third of the estimated time, for straight-lining three or more matrix questions or for being duplicates (the second response of a duplicate respondent ID was dropped). These exclusion criteria were set in advance to ensure data quality for the Media Ecosystem Observatory project and not for reasons to do with this specific research project. These criteria were also applied to the panel data and to the survey waves containing the conjoint experiments.

National-level quotas were set for each wave on gender, age, language and region (Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario and West) to ensure their representativeness. Of the sample, 51% is female, while the mean age is 48 years. We further weight our data within region by age and gender in our analyses. We used an iterative proportional fitting algorithm to construct our weights with a maximum of 2.62 ( N  = 29) and a minimum of 0.65 ( N  = 111).

Approximately half of the sample for waves 5–8 were re-contacts of respondents in the first four waves ( N  = 4,910). The fielding dates for each wave are presented in Supplementary Table 15 . Note that wave 1 was conducted in English only, thus Quebec was under-sampled. Direct comparisons of the results of wave 1 with later waves should be treated with caution.

Measuring anti-intellectualism

We measure anti-intellectualism with an index based on questions asking respondents to evaluate their level of trust (‘trust a lot’ to ‘distrust a lot’, five-point) in different groups of experts: doctors, scientists, economists, professors and experts (following ref. 7 ). We also ask respondents about their trust in the Public Health Agency of Canada (a close equivalent to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention), which is an independent government agency that has been at the forefront of Canada’s COVID-19 response. We construct an index of anti-intellectualism using the extracted factor from a confirmatory factor analysis estimated with GSEM in Stata (version 16) and re-scale it from 0–1, where 1 represents someone with the highest possible level of anti-intellectualism. Results for our analyses are robust to using only the trust in scientists and doctors items of the index (Supplementary Figs. 4 – 7 ). Future work should map out the relationship between trust in scientists and doctors and the broader concept of anti-intellectualism.

The left panel of Supplementary Fig. 8 shows the distribution of anti-intellectualism among our respondents. Most Canadians have low levels of anti-intellectualism (mean 0.36, s.d. 0.18). About a quarter of our respondents have middling trust in experts or worse (0.47 or greater), while only 10% of our sample lies beyond 0.59. The pandemic may have increased trust in experts because of the active role they play in mitigating its threat. However, as shown in the right panel of Supplementary Fig. 8 , trust in each group of experts and our index have remained relatively steady, at least over the course of our sampling (starting on 25 March 2020).

Our panel respondents (not shown in Supplementary Fig. 8 ) reported significant but substantively small decreases in the share of respondents trusting doctors (−0.02, P  = 0.005, 95% CI −0.03 to −0.00), scientists (−0.02, P  = 0.004, 95% CI −0.03 to −0.00), professors (−0.02, P  = 0.012, 95% CI −0.03 to −0.00) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (−0.03, P  < 0.001, 95% CI −0.04 to −0.02), though not at statistically significantly levels for trust in generic experts ( P  = 0.925) and economists ( P  = 0.986). We see a very slight increase in our anti-intellectualism index as a result of these changes (0.01, P  = 0.001, 95% CI 0.00 to 0.01).

We do not take these declines in trust as evidence that the pandemic is reducing trust in experts. We began our survey a few weeks after the start of the crisis. We may have missed a spike in trust in experts precipitated by the crisis, which is slowly regressing back to the mean as the crisis wears on. Further, we find no evidence that the notable reversal in expert advice on mask wearing produced changes in respondent trust in experts or their overall level of anti-intellectualism. We see no significant difference in trust between respondents surveyed before and after the CDC announcement in April 2020 and the PHAC announcement in May after controlling for trending. These analyses can be found in Supplementary Tables 4 and 5 . Anti-intellectualism and the trust people have in expert communities appears rather stable, even during a salient, rapidly unfolding crisis.

COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours

We evaluate risk perceptions by asking respondents their level of concern about the coronavirus (‘very’ to ‘not at all’, four-point) and how serious of a threat they perceived COVID-19 to be for other Canadians (‘very’ to ‘not at all’, four-point). The averages across waves are shown in the top-left panel of Supplementary Fig. 9 . The panel illustrates a modest decline in COVID-19 concern and risk perceptions.

We measure social distancing by asking respondents whether they have engaged in the following actions over the past week in response to the pandemic (1 = ‘yes’): (1) avoided in-person contact from friends, family and acquaintances, (2) kept a distance of at least 2 m from others, (3) avoided bars, restaurants and crowds and (4) avoided domestic travel. We construct an additive index of social distancing from these items, scaled from 0–1. We also ask the same of their mask usage over the past week, which enters our survey during wave 3, fielded from 9–11 April 2020. The top-right panel of Supplementary Fig. 9 shows that social distancing has declined somewhat, while mask usage is on the sharp rise.

Misperceptions are measured with a battery of questions asking respondents to rate the truthfulness of the following claims (‘definitely false’ to ‘definitely true’, five-point):

The coronavirus is no worse than the seasonal flu;

Drinking water every 15 min will help prevent the coronavirus;

The Chinese government developed the coronavirus as a bioweapon;

Homoeopathy and home remedies can help manage and prevent the coronavirus;

The coronavirus was caused by the consumption of bats in China;

The coronavirus will go away by the summer;

Vitamin C can ward off the coronavirus;

There is a vaccine for the coronavirus that national governments and pharmaceutical companies won’t release;

High temperatures, such as from saunas and hair dryers, can kill the coronavirus

We construct an additive index with these items, scaled from 0–1. The bottom-right panel of Supplementary Fig. 9 shows that endorsement of these misperceptions has remained largely stable.

Finally, COVID-19 information search behaviour is evaluated by asking respondents how often they read, listened to or watched news related to the COVID-19 pandemic over the past week (‘several times a day’ to ‘never’, six-point) and how often they discussed the COVID-19 pandemic with friends, family or acquaintances (‘daily’ to ‘never’, five-point). The bottom-right panel of Supplementary Fig. 9 shows that self-reported COVID-19 news exposure discussion has been on the steady decline.

We control for science literacy with an additive 0–1 index constructed from a seven-item battery taken from the American National Election Study. Cognitive sophistication and awareness of science-related issues may be associated with both anti-intellectualism and our outcome measures 4 . Our anti-intellectualism measure is based on a battery of trust items, so we control for generalized trust in people as well.

We also control for right–left ideology with an additive index constructed from a battery of policy questions where we coded responses as either right wing, left wing or neutral. Ideological conservatism is one of several sources of anti-intellectualism 4 . However, it can also exhibit effects on COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours for unrelated reasons, such as through aversion to the policy consequences of dealing with the pandemic. Furthermore, a central argument of this paper is that anti-intellectualism is more than a simple extension of conservative ideology and has important effects in its own right, so we include ideology as a control. The estimates of anti-intellectualism are then interpreted as its effect on each outcome for reasons unrelated to its causal relationship with ideology, and vice versa.

We control for partisanship because political leaders have been another source of communication about the COVID-19 pandemic 16 , as well as a standard suite of demographic and non-demographic characteristics: political news exposure, social media usage, education, age, urban/rural residence, religiosity, gender and region. More information on our measures can be found in Supplementary Table 1 .

We test our first hypothesis by estimating the following model for each outcome measure and each wave separately in our survey, where X is a vector of control variables:

We expect the coefficient on β 1 to be negative and significant for each outcome aside from misperceptions (which we expect to be positive) in support of H1 and H3A. We have no expectations about changes in the strength of the coefficient over the course of the pandemic for these items since we did not begin fielding this survey until late March 2020. We estimate all of our observational models with robust standard errors to account for heteroscedasticity. Our models otherwise meet the assumptions of ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression. All of the tests we present are two tailed. Model estimates can be found in Supplementary Tables 6 – 11 .

Endogeneity is a potential problem: it is possible that people’s reactions to COVID-19 shape their trust in expert communities. We address this issue by leveraging the panel component of our survey. We expect the lag of anti-intellectualism to be associated with the outcome measures controlling for their past values and other lagged confounders. We also control for the particular pairing of contact and re-contact waves for our respondents ( c ). Our initial contacts occurred through the first four waves of the survey, and were gradually re-contacted over the following four waves. We therefore account for any independent effect of any particular pairing of contact and re-contact wave on our outcomes. Our estimates are then of the effect within these pairings:

Again, in support of H1 and H3A, we expect the coefficient on β 1 to be negative and significant for each outcome aside from misperceptions. Model estimates can be found in Supplementary Table 12 . Unlike for our other outcome measures, we have expectations of a relationship between anti-intellectualism and within-respondent change in mask usage. First, we estimate a series of cross-sectional models for each wave where we predict mask usage with anti-intellectualism and our controls.

We expect a negative coefficient on β 1 that increases in magnitude over the course of the pandemic in support of H2A. This will show us descriptively that the effect of anti-intellectualism has grown over the course of sampling after controlling for confounders. Model estimates can be found in Supplementary Table 13 .

Second, we again leverage the panel component of our survey to provide stronger causal evidence of anti-intellectualism’s effect on changes in mask usage. Including a lagged dependent variable in a model is insufficient to provide evidence of relationships between explanatory variables and within-respondent change 36 , 37 . We instead evaluate whether within-respondent change between the contact and re-contact periods was weaker for anti-intellectuals, controlling for the dynamic effects of other confounders ( X ). We include respondent-level fixed effects to eliminate between-respondent variation ( v ) and ensure that our inferences are robust to the existence of time-invariant confounders with constant effects:

We expect the coefficient on β 3 to be negative and significant to support H2B. We present predicted effects of both anti-intellectualism and ideology for comparison. Model estimates can be found in Supplementary Table 14 .

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 was conducted in wave 7 (8–12 May 2020) of our survey with a sample of 2,509 Canadian citizens, 18 years and older. National-level quotas were set on region, age, gender and language based on the 2016 Canadian census. Of the sample, 51.5% is female, and the mean age is 48 years. Data are weighted within each region of Canada by gender and age. More detailed sample characteristics for the surveys of both experimental studies can be found in Supplementary Table 16 .

We expose respondents to three pairs of news story profiles in this study. We made no indication that these profiles were of real news stories. They were asked to choose the news story they would be most likely to read from each pair and were also asked to evaluate the importance of each story (‘very’, ‘somewhat’, ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’, re-scaled 0–1).

Each article was randomized across eight outlets in four different groups. Our first group is ‘national news’, which includes CTV News and the Globe and Mail ( TVA-Nouvelles or La Presse for French-language respondents). Our second group is ‘local news’, which includes reference to their local television station or local newspaper. Our third group is ‘right-congenial news’, which includes Rebel Media and True North News . Our final group is ‘left-congenial news’, which includes the National Observer and Rabble.ca . The classification of left- and right-congenial news was taken from Owen et al. (2020, https://ppforum.ca/articles/lessons-in-resilience-canadas-digital-media-ecosystem-and-the-2019-election/ ), who classified Canadian news sources based on whether they were selectively shared or followed by partisans on social media.

Attributes that indicated the author (male versus female) and date (6 May, 29 April, 22 April and 15 April 2020) of the story were also each randomized independently of other factors. We are not interested theoretically in these randomizations, but they were included to maximize the realism of the task at hand. When people are making a choice of which news stories to read in the real world, these four characteristics are the first to be apparent.

Our attribute of theoretical interest is the headline. They were randomized so that respondents would either get a headline related to the health impacts of COVID-19 or one that was not. We selected our headlines by using Lexis Uni to download all newspaper headlines from the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail between 30 April and 6 May 2020 ( N = 719). We did a keyword search for headlines with ‘coronavirus’ or ‘COVID-19’. We randomly assigned numbers to headlines with and without the keywords and chose the first randomly identified 15 headlines in each category that we manually verified as either being about COVID-19 health impacts or not. This left us with 30 headlines, a list of which can be found in the Supplementary Information . An example of the conjoint task is shown in Supplementary Fig. 1 . Data collection and analysis were not performed blind to the conditions of the experiments.

We expect respondents to prefer to read news about COVID-19 health impacts and to perceive these stories as more important, while these effects weaken as anti-intellectualism rises (H3B and H3C). We thus estimate models that predict story selection and perceived importance with the category of source (national, local, right-congenial and left-congenial), headline type (COVID-19 related or not), author gender, article date and an interaction between headline type and anti-intellectualism.

It is possible that there are heterogeneous effects across anti-intellectualism because of its correlation with other traits that may also moderate the treatment effect. We control for the interaction of our treatment with left–right ideology, cognitive sophistication (a combined index of science literacy and need for cognition, following ref. 17 ), conspiratorial thinking (following ref. 13 ), age and urban density, denoted by X below. We cluster standard errors by respondent. The full regression estimates can be found in Supplementary Table 17 .

After this exploratory study, we pre-registered our hypotheses and conducted a successful replication. The pre-registration for experiment 1’s replication can be found at https://osf.io/r4gqz . A comparison of the exploratory experiment and its replication can be found in Supplementary Table 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2 .

Experiment 2

We conducted experiment 2 in wave 6 (1–4 May 2020) of our survey with a sample of 2,504 Canadian citizens, 18 years and older. National-level quotas were again set on region, age, gender and language based on the 2016 Canadian census. Of the sample, 51.6% is female, with a mean age of 48 years. Data are weighted within each region of Canada by gender and age.

We use a modified conjoint design for this study. We expose our respondents to two pairs of news story profiles that indicate their source, headline, author and date. The author and date were fixed for each profile, but source and headline remained randomized. They were asked to choose the news story they would be most likely to read from each pair and were also asked to evaluate the credibility of each story (‘very’, ‘somewhat’, ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’, re-scaled 0–1). Data collection and analysis were not performed blind to the conditions of the experiments.

Crucially, we randomized the headline so that some people received headlines containing a signal that the story would contain information from experts, while others received headlines that had no such indication. All headlines were taken from actual Canadian news stories in April 2020 that featured experts in the headline. We did not allow the headlines to freely vary across all four profiles. Instead, each profile contained one of the following headlines that was randomized to either include the expert signal or not to maximize experimental control. This approach gives us certainty that the only difference between treatment and control is the expert cue, and that respondents will not be exposed to both the expert and non-expert version of the same headline:

‘Remain on guard’ to keep surfaces clean of coronavirus[, experts say]

Time for a Canada-wide standard on social gatherings[, experts urge]

Broad coronavirus testing crucial in lifting restrictions[- experts]

Look beyond the buzz on virus ‘discoveries’; [Experts warn] research on treating COVID-19 is still in very early days

We use the term ‘expert’ in this manipulation because it is a generic term often used by journalists to describe a wide range of experts, including doctors and scientists 38 . We believe that using this abstraction is useful to ensure that the effects we observe are primarily a result of anti-intellectualism on story selection and perceived credibility, rather than feelings towards a specific group of experts. This design choice probably makes our estimates more conservative. Further, ‘expert’ was the term actually used by the authors of these headlines.

Our expectation is that respondents will be more likely to select news stories with headlines that feature experts and to perceive these stories as more credible, while these effects disappear among those with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment (H4A and H4B).

We thus estimate models that predict story selection and perceived credibility with the category of source (national, local, right-congenial or left-congenial), headline type (expert featured or not), an interaction between headline type and anti-intellectualism and interactions between the controls and headline type. The estimation strategy is the same as in experiment 1, with the exception that we control for profile fixed effects ( p ). Regression estimates can be found in Supplementary Table 18 .

After this exploratory study, we pre-registered our hypotheses and conducted a successful replication. The pre-registration for experiment 2’s replication can be found at https://osf.io/t6xz8 . A comparison of the experiment and its replication can be found in Supplementary Table 3 and Supplementary Fig. 3 .

Reporting Summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

Datasets analysed for the current study are available at the Open Science Foundation repository at https://osf.io/pqhju/ .

Coding availability

Code used to analyse data for the current study are available at the Open Science Foundation repository at https://osf.io/pqhju/ .

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank A. Bridgman and S. Nossek for helpful feedback, as well the rest of the Media Ecosystem Observatory team: T. Owen, D. Ruths, O. Zhilin, L. Teichmann, E. Chaudet and J. Ma. This work is funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Digital Citizens Contribution Program (P.J.L.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript

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Merkley, E., Loewen, P.J. Anti-intellectualism and the mass public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nat Hum Behav 5 , 706–715 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01112-w

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Two From the American Enlightenment to Anti-Intellectualism

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Millions of Americans are extraordinarily uninformed. This problem is often blamed on the poor quality of public schools, yet it largely stems from a peculiar conception of education rooted in America’s exceptional history. The birth of modern democracy in America fostered a populist mindset equating education with elitism. Although the Founding Fathers were learned men of the American Enlightenment, many 18 th and 19 th century Americans became convinced that common sense and folk wisdom were sufficient to succeed. Anti-intellectualism became particularly influential in the South, the nation’s poorest region. Conversely, education has been less associated with elitism in France and other European countries. This helps explain why modern America is sharply polarized, as the U.S. political debate reached astonishing levels of demagogy, propaganda, and disinformation well before Trump’s rise. Spurred by the Tea Party, Republicans routinely made ludicrous claims about Obama’s fake birth certificate and Islamism, “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” the “hoax” of climate change, the federal government’s “tyranny,” and other conspiracy theories. Such political extremism thrives on the ignorance, irrationality, and gullibility promoted by anti-intellectualism. Extremism in contemporary Europe is far less mainstream and more focused on immigration, the main concern of nativist far-right European parties.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literary Devices — Leonid Fridman’s Analysis Of Anti-intellectualism In America’s Society

Leonid Fridman's Analysis of Anti-intellectualism in America's Society

• Categories: Literary Criticism Literary Devices Modern Society

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“A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, 1980

It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?” None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

☛ Newsweek : “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, January 21, 1980, p. 19. PDF .

Isaac Asimov was a prolific author as well as a renowned scientist. He wrote many popular science books. I personally found out about him at a younger age through his highly regarded science-fiction novels. I grew up reading most of them. The excerpt quoted above has been reproduced numerous time online. I thought I could produce a copy of the whole article which really is interesting in its entirety. The article is also listed in A Guide to Isaac Asimov’s Essays in the “Various Source” section. It appears with a mention signaling the fact that it was never republished in any collections. Here’s another excerpt from the same article:

There are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read (provided you promise not to use their names and shame them before their neighbors), but most decent periodicals believe they are doing amazingly well if they have circulations of half a million. It may be that only 1 per cent–or less―of American make a stab at exercising their right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are quite likely to be accused of being elitists. I contend that the slogan “America’s right to know” is a meaningless one when we have an ignorant population, and that the function of a free press is virtually zero when hardly anyone can read.

Read the whole article in PDF .

• By Philippe Theophanidis
• on April 7, 2012
• ― Published in Communication
• Tagged: Asimov , culture , elitism , ignorance , intellectual , intelligence , knowledge , United-States

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Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)

in Education , Politics , Sci Fi | October 12th, 2016 26 Comments

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1980, sci­en­tist and writer Isaac Asi­mov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of igno­rance in the Unit­ed States, and there always has been.” That year, the Repub­li­can Par­ty stood at the dawn of the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion , which ini­ti­at­ed a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive groundswell that many pun­dits say may final­ly come to an end in Novem­ber. GOP strate­gist Steve Schmidt (who has been regret­ful about choos­ing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s run­ning mate in 2008)  recent­ly point­ed to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al rot” as a pri­ma­ry cul­prit, and a cult-like devo­tion to irra­tional­i­ty among a cer­tain seg­ment of the elec­torate.

It’s a famil­iar con­tention. There have been cri­tiques of Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism since the country’s found­ing, though whether or not that phe­nom­e­non has inten­si­fied, as  Susan Jaco­by alleged in The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son , may be a sub­ject of debate. Not all of the unrea­son is par­ti­san, as the anti-vac­ci­na­tion move­ment has shown. But “the strain of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” writes Asi­mov, “has been a con­stant thread wind­ing its way through our polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al life, nur­tured by the false notion that democ­ra­cy means that ‘my igno­rance is just as good as your knowl­edge.’”

Asimov’s pri­ma­ry exam­ples hap­pen to come from the polit­i­cal world. How­ev­er, he doesn’t name con­tem­po­rary names but reach­es back to take a swipe at Eisen­how­er (“who invent­ed a ver­sion of the Eng­lish lan­guage that was all his own”) and George Wal­lace . Par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing is Asimov’s take on the “slo­gan on the part of the obscu­ran­tists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This lan­guage, along with charges of “elit­ism,” Asi­mov wry­ly notes, is so often used by peo­ple who are them­selves experts and elites, “feel­ing guilty about hav­ing gone to school.” So many of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal class’s wounds are self-inflict­ed, he sug­gests, but that’s because they are behold­en to a large­ly igno­rant elec­torate:

To be sure, the aver­age Amer­i­can can sign his name more or less leg­i­bly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelit­ist Amer­i­cans can, with­out undue dif­fi­cul­ty, read as many as a thou­sand con­sec­u­tive words of small print, some of which may be tri­syl­lab­ic?

Asimov’s exam­ples are less than con­vinc­ing: road signs “steadi­ly being replaced by lit­tle pic­tures to make them inter­na­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble” has more to do with lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty than illit­er­a­cy, and accus­ing tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials of speak­ing their mes­sages out loud instead of using print­ed text on the screen seems to fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand the nature of the medi­um. Jaco­by in her book-length study of the prob­lem looks at edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy in the Unit­ed States, and the resis­tance to nation­al stan­dards that vir­tu­al­ly ensures wide­spread pock­ets of igno­rance all over the coun­try. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has nei­ther the space nor the incli­na­tion to con­duct such analy­sis.

Instead he is con­cerned with atti­tudes. Not only are many Amer­i­cans bad­ly edu­cat­ed, he writes, but the broad igno­rance of the pop­u­la­tion in mat­ters of “sci­ence… math­e­mat­ics… eco­nom­ics… for­eign lan­guages…” has as much to do with Amer­i­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to read as their inabil­i­ty.

There are 200 mil­lion Amer­i­cans who have inhab­it­ed school­rooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent peri­od­i­cals believe they are doing amaz­ing­ly well if they have cir­cu­la­tion of half a mil­lion. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Amer­i­cans make a stab at exer­cis­ing their right to know. And if they try to do any­thing on that basis they are quite like­ly to be accused of being elit­ists.

One might in some respects charge Asi­mov him­self of elit­ism when he con­cludes, “We can all be mem­bers of the intel­lec­tu­al elite.” Such a blithe­ly opti­mistic state­ment ignores the ways in which eco­nom­ic elites active­ly manip­u­late edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy to suit their inter­ests, crip­ple edu­ca­tion fund­ing, and oppose efforts at free or low cost high­er edu­ca­tion. Many efforts at spread­ing knowledge—like the Chatauquas of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the edu­ca­tion­al radio pro­grams of the 40s and 50s, and the pub­lic tele­vi­sion rev­o­lu­tion of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and near­ly always imper­iled by fund­ing crises and the designs of prof­i­teers.

Nonethe­less, the wide­spread (though hard­ly uni­ver­sal ) avail­abil­i­ty of free resources on the inter­net has made self-edu­ca­tion a real­i­ty for many peo­ple, and cer­tain­ly for most Amer­i­cans. But per­haps not even Isaac Asi­mov could have fore­seen the bit­ter polar­iza­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that tech­nol­o­gy has also enabled. Need­less to say, “ A Cult of Igno­rance ” was not one of Asimov’s most pop­u­lar pieces of writ­ing. First pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 21, 1980 in Newsweek , the short essay has nev­er been reprint­ed in any of Asimov’s col­lec­tions. You can read the essay as a PDF here . There’s also, one of our read­ers reminds us, a tran­script on Github .

via Aphe­lis

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Pre­dic­tions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Lat­er

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek Fan & Advi­sor

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (26) |

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Comments (26), 26 comments so far.

Some­one was kind enough to tran­scribe the scanned text into a mark­down file on github. https://gist.github.com/embats/4934c30d900960ce15a7

Asi­mov may not have seen this com­ing, but Orwell did.

“Not only are many Amer­i­cans bad­ly edu­cat­ed, he writes, but the broad igno­rance of the pop­u­la­tion in mat­ters of “sci­ence… math­e­mat­ics… eco­nom­ics… for­eign lan­guages…” has as much to do with Amer­i­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to read as their inabil­i­ty.”

Should­n’t that be stat­ed “poor­ly edu­cat­ed”?

Where pos­ses­sion is 9/10 of the law here in the U.S. igno­rance is also 9/10 of the pop­u­la­tion.

I’m not exact­ly sure what you’re try­ing to say in your arti­cle, but I think you “missed the boat” on what Prof. Asi­mov was stat­ing. Which is, in short, “Amer­i­cans believe it is inap­pro­pri­ate to be intel­li­gent”. At least that is my inter­pre­ta­tion and expe­ri­ence.

One who prob­a­bly described it best is Aldous Hux­ley

“This explains why peo­ple don’t think like I do!”

Okay, that’s tongue-in-cheek, but it sums up the take­away that most peo­ple get from Asi­mov’s say­ing, and this arti­cle fos­ters that by trans­mit­ting the feel­ing of dis­dain for one’s fel­lows, with­out giv­ing any of Asi­mov’s exam­ples, which are what the com­ment is all about. As a result, peo­ple have often used this say­ing to *sup­port* in them­selves exact­ly what Asi­mov was argu­ing against. You can see it in oth­er com­ments on this thread. “Igno­rance is 9/10 of the pop­u­la­tion”. It’s not an argu­ment it’s just a vague feel­ing that oth­er peo­ple just aren’t as good as we are, for no spe­cif­ic rea­son.

This shows once again that it’s impos­si­ble to make any­thing fool­proof because fools are so inge­nious.

One man claim­ing to know the answer to all is igno­rance.

Won­der­ful and time­ly. Thank you so much.

“the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion, which ini­ti­at­ed a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive groundswell that many pun­dits say may final­ly come to an end in Novem­ber”

Only the elec­toral col­lege can save us now, and if you read under “The Mode of Elect­ing the Pres­i­dent” in The Fed­er­al­ist Papers #68 (link below), you’ll get the impres­sion that that is actu­al­ly what it was intend­ed for. The peo­ple were sup­posed to elect wise and capa­ble elec­tors, who would them­selves select the next Pres­i­dent. But that has been sub­vert­ed, and the elec­tors are mere mes­sen­gers.

It was desir­able that the sense of the peo­ple should oper­ate in the choice of the per­son to whom so impor­tant a trust was to be con­fid­ed. This end will be answered by com­mit­ting the right of mak­ing it, not to any preestab­lished body, but to men cho­sen by the peo­ple for the spe­cial pur­pose, and at the par­tic­u­lar con­junc­ture. It was equal­ly desir­able, that the imme­di­ate elec­tion should be made by men most capa­ble of ana­lyz­ing the qual­i­ties adapt­ed to the sta­tion, and act­ing under cir­cum­stances favor­able to delib­er­a­tion, and to a judi­cious com­bi­na­tion of all the rea­sons and induce­ments which were prop­er to gov­ern their choice. A small num­ber of per­sons, select­ed by their fel­low-cit­i­zens from the gen­er­al mass, will be most like­ly to pos­sess the infor­ma­tion and dis­cern­ment req­ui­site to such com­pli­cat­ed inves­ti­ga­tions.

https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-68

Not so much “inap­pro­pri­ate” which seems to be reserved for uncom­fort­able state­ments of truth, but intel­li­gence is deemed “Uncool”, cer­tain­ly.

I’m glad you shared this, since, as you not­ed, it’s not in any of the pub­lished col­lec­tions of his work that I’ve read. I used to say things like “igno­rance can be cured but stu­pid is for­ev­er.” I believe Pro­fes­sor Asi­mov found him­self bang­ing his head against one will­ful­ly igno­rant per­son too many and let it fly. I cer­tain­ly under­stand his atti­tude. Don’t we all?

the cult of the scathing mock­ers is far worse. plen­ty of igno­rant peo­ple laid down their lives for this coun­try in all the wars. and suf­fered brave­ly. The Amer­i­can Rev­ol­un­tionary foot sol­dier was prob­a­bly “igno­rant” too. You did not make the stars and the oth­er plan­ets. You cre­at­ed noth­ing but intel­lec­tu­al snob­bery and the cult of unkind­ness cer­tain of you and its still going on. To heck with your intel­lec­tu­al prowess if you cant even exer­cise sim­ple kind­ness.

the brave igno­ra­mus­es die con­stant­ly in wars for oil, and at the end of their life defend those who sent them to kill inno­cents or die in a stink­ing hole.

Just as it is true for the entire west­ern hemi­sphere, maybe even the entire world, where access to, and the will­ing­ness to read and write is down­sized to a mere sound­bite of char­ac­ters.

2020 could use all of this right now. Out­stand­ing words.

Wow!! Asi­mov was one bit­ter man. He’s exam­ples for his insane arti­cle were ridicu­lous. He said Adlai Steven­son “who let intel­li­gence and learn­ing… peep out of his speech­es” found peo­ple flock­ing to a Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who speak nor­mal­ly and invent­ed a new Eng­lish-lan­guage. I searched for any writ­ings or not­ed dif­fer­ences between Eisen­how­er and Steven­son, I did­n’t found any. Ike’s pop­u­lar­i­ty was what’s sim­ple. A WW2 Supreme Com­man­der of The Allies in Europe. He was so pop­u­lar that even before he picked a polit­i­cal par­ty, with­out for­mal­ly enter­ing the race, he won the New Hamp­shire pri­ma­ry for both par­ties thanks to a write-in cam­paign. He beat Steven­son twice by land­slides in 1952 and in 1956. Heck, Steven­son was the sit­ting Gov­er­nor of Illi­nois when it vot­ed for Ike rather than him.

Ike pres­i­den­cy was among the best pres­i­den­cies. Eisen­how­er was a mod­er­ate con­ser­v­a­tive who con­tin­ued New Deal agen­cies and expand­ed Social Secu­ri­ty. He covert­ly opposed Joseph McCarthy and con­tributed to the end of McCarthy­ism by open­ly invok­ing exec­u­tive priv­i­lege. He signed the Civ­il Rights Act of 1957 and sent Army troops to enforce fed­er­al court orders which inte­grat­ed schools in Lit­tle Rock, Arkansas. His largest pro­gram was the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem. He pro­mot­ed the estab­lish­ment of strong sci­ence edu­ca­tion via the Nation­al Defense Edu­ca­tion Act. His two terms saw wide­spread eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty.

Asi­mov is a very hap­less man whin­ning about the chang­ing of writ­ten raod signs to pic­tures. He notes that the valid rea­son is to stan­dard­ize road signs around the world, nonethe­less, in his assess­ment, this is just anoth­er exam­ple of igno­rant Amer­i­cans who don’t want to read.

He thinks politi­cians who are experts are pro­mot­ing dis­trust in experts, because they feel guilty that they have gone to school. And the vot­ers will, some­how, reject them for that rea­son. What a ludi­crous assump­tion.

No won­der this arti­cle was not reprint­ed in any of his pub­lished works. It’s utter­ly stu­pid.

The way you write and your style of argu­ment just rein­forces Asimov’s point.

One of the first polit­i­cal state­ments I remem­ber my father mak­ing when I was a child, was “Adlai Steven­son can’t get elect­ed — he’s too smart.”

In six­ty-some years, I have not seen any­thing to argue that. Peo­ple who both­er to edu­cate them­selves — does­n’t have to be for­mal edu­ca­tion, just look­ing into sub­jects that come up that they don’t under­stand — make bet­ter deci­sions — includ­ing the deci­sion to accept the deci­sions of those who do under­stand, if nec­es­sary. Nobody can know every­thing — but know­ing you know less than some­one else, is a huge indi­ca­tor of intel­li­gence. Dun­ning-Kruger came along lat­er and showed us that — and large swathes of the pop­u­la­tion still won’t accept it.

Until those same folks are will­ing to let the garbage man do their brain surgery if need­ed, I’m not inclined to believe that they’ve put any real thought into it, and just want to be (per­ceived as) right.

Con­sid­er­ing that anti-sci­ence, incom­pe­tent nar­cis­sis­tic tRump was elect­ed and still has his cult fol­low­ing, I appre­ci­ate Asi­mov’s sen­ti­ments. I am hope­ful for the future, though, since the vot­ing pub­lic ush­ered an expe­ri­enced, decent man, Biden, into the White House. But at the same time, the vot­ing pop­u­lace did not rid us of obstruc­tion­ists such as Mitch McConnell, who I loathe as much as the blovi­at­ing lying orange buf­foon.

Re: “Eisen­how­er”: He was the one who inflict­ed us with the invis­i­ble deity non­sense on our paper cur­ren­cy and in our pledge of alle­giance. I remem­ber the dai­ly school morn­ing indoc­tri­na­tion with­out hav­ing to utter “utter god”.

It’s fun­ny how this quote has become even MORE rel­e­vant since the date this arti­cle was pub­lished…

Inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion that man­ages to hit home in 2021..Ignorance has now mor­phed into vio­lence and racism..The next phase will be scape­goat blam­ming and so on and so on.. At some point it will lead to the end of mankind as a civilization..The remain­ing mor­tals will duel each oth­er to oblivion..I would enter­tain a dif­fer­ent outcome..Thanks

Worth cir­cu­lat­ing

Would have been inter­est­ing to have known his take on so-called social media. He would have been even more pes­simistic since appar­ent­ly more than 50% of Amer­i­cans get their “news” from Face­book.

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A brief history of anti-intellectualism in american media.

The June 2008 cover of the Washington Post Magazine featured reporter Liza Mundy’s article “ The Amazing Adventures of Supergrad .” Under this title ran the teaser, “The most sophisticated, accomplished, entitled graduates ever produced by American colleges are heading into the workplace. And employers are falling all over themselves to vie for their talents.”

The lengthy piece portrays Emma Clippinger, then a Brown University junior who was double-majoring in developmental studies and comparative literature, serving as captain of the equestrian team, and helping run Gardens for Health International, an organization she cofounded that focuses on the nutrition of HIV-positive Rwandans. Clippinger also is noted for having worked on Martin Scorsese’s The Departed , having interned with the Clinton Foundation, and being fluent in French (along with speaking some Kinyarwanda and Wolof, languages in Rwanda and Senegal, respectively).

Mundy then breathlessly tells her readers that millennials are “one of the most heavily recruited cohorts to enter the American workforce, their hearts and minds incessantly battled over.” This generation, made up of perhaps “the best-credentialed graduates ever produced by American colleges,” is “computer-literate, well-traveled, hyper-groomed and accustomed to competing for what they want.”

It isn’t until nearly halfway through that Mundy pauses to ask, “Is this generation of graduates really more qualified for entry-level management jobs than, say, World War II veterans?” She spends several more paragraphs answering that question with a huge yes. As the several-thousand-word article continues, Mundy adds in numerous other unsupported assertions: this is a “generation of achievers” who “like working in teams,” “like to exercise,” “are unusually oriented toward public service,” and so on.

That “employers report that members of this generation are poorer writers” and “their face-to-face skills are sometimes lacking” comes two-thirds of the way through the article, and these criticisms are glossed over as if unimportant. “That not every student feels coveted and wined and dined and solicited and cosseted” appears near the article’s end and is similarly not explored. Neither is mention of specific employers looking for new workers who are “patient,” have a “sense of urgency,” “can work in ambiguous situations,” and have majored in “math and computer science,” none of these claims seeming well supported by the article.

Mundy’s article—while not the standard higher education media fare—is not unique. For decades, national newspapers and magazines, elite ones such as the New York Times and large-circulation ones such as the old Life weekly, have celebrated a tiny upper crust of students: the Rhodes scholar, the literature student publishing her first novel at twenty-one, the computer science student who started a company at nineteen or obtained a patent at twenty. Ostensibly, such articles applaud intellect and education, as well as ancillary circumstances, among them selfdiscipline, supportive (and often well-off) parents, and creativity.

More significant from a cultural standpoint, though, is the degree to which such stories, long a media staple, represent a freak show of a certain kind, a nonfiction version of a current television show such as The Big Bang Theory . Perhaps the best known earlier case was that of William James Sidis, who entered Harvard in 1909 at age eleven and was profiled in 1937 by the New Yorker under the headline, “Where Are They Now?” Sidis lost an invasion-of-privacy suit against the magazine, which unsurprisingly he filed, since he had long been living in obscurity and the New Yorker was rather gleefully reporting the sad adult lives of child prodigies.

Articles such as “The Amazing Adventures of Supergrad” are unlikely to inspire other young people, should they see such stories (few teenagers read the Washington Post or New York Times ). The college students profiled are so superlative that they almost surely would discourage other young people. Very late in Mundy’s article, she cites a student who says, “There’s too much competition. . . . I know people who did internships freshman year. . . . I feel like I’m behind the game. . . . Oh, man, it’s so hard.”

Finally, while “supergrads” assign some credit to their college education, such students had often been high achievers in high school, and educational institutions played little role in their accomplishments; sometimes it is suggested that educational institutions are actual or potential hindrances—witness the print and broadcast stories noting that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard (among other high-tech geniuses who also quit college).

Little Teaching and Learning

By offering up its periodic freak show of child prodigies such as Sidis or today’s supergrads—turning such students, in social scientific terms, into deviants—the US news media engage in anti-intellectualism, here not by failing to cover or hire intellectuals (although they do this, too) but by portraying intellectuals in ways that are explicitly or implicitly negative. In this, the US news media are in the mainstream of American culture.

That anti-intellectualism is mainstream was documented by Richard Hofstadter’s Antiintellectualism in American Life , which won a 1964 Pulitzer Prize. It remains the landmark work on the topic, even though a few significant books and articles on anti-intellectualism preceded it (most notably Merle Curti’s The Growth of American Thought in 1943), and even though it has been followed, in recent years, by wellknown books from the Left and Right, including Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals , Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind , Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline , and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason . The list lengthens if one adds in broader books about the “dumbing down” of American society.

With the exception of its quite dated chapters 1 and 15, Hofstadter’s book remains immensely useful (as well as an enjoyable read). Daniel J. Rigney, now professor emeritus in sociology of knowledge at St. Mary’s University, developed a theory of American antiintellectualism based on Hofstadter’s history and other sources. (Hofstadter’s book detailed anti-intellectualism in US religion, politics, education, and business back to the early nineteenth century, omitting the antiintellectualism in the news media that had already been identified by George S. Hage’s 1956 doctoral dissertation, “Anti-intellectualism in Newspaper Comment of the Elections of 1828 and 1952.”) Briefly, and at the risk of oversimplifying and overgeneralizing, Rigney (and Hofstadter) found three types of anti-intellectualism: (1) “religious antirationalism,” the view that emotion is warm (that is, good) and reason cold (bad), an outlook often complemented by absolute systems of belief (primarily conservative Protestantism); (2) “populist anti-elitism,” public skepticism first of the patrician class of “gentlemen politicians” and old money (which still flares up, as against George H. W. Bush) and later public hostility toward progressive politics and support of such figures as Joe McCarthy or George Wallace; and (3) “unreflective instrumentalism,” beliefs and behavior indicating that knowledge is worthless unless it immediately and directly leads to material gain, such as profits or higher salaries and wages.

The national magazine coverage of higher education that I studied for my 2004 book, Antiintellectualism in American Media , spanned from 1944 (when the GI Bill was passed) to 1996. I organized evidence that the US news media both were and were not anti-intellectual using the individual manifestations of Rigney’s three major types as a theoretical framework. Hence, for antirationalism, I looked to examples of news coverage that were either opposed to reason or not, opposed to science or not, defending authority or not, and favoring or opposing deintellectualized curricula. For populist anti-elitism, I similarly looked for evidence of advocating “common people’s” interests, support for right-wing populism, support for left-wing populism, devaluation of book learning and academic standards, and beliefs that intellectuals are snobs. For unreflective instrumentalism, I covered suppression of ethics questions, impatience with theory and ideas, pressure for vocationalism in the humanities and social sciences, and advocacy of less autonomy in education.

The amount and quality of coverage of each of these three topics varied greatly, of course. In general, I concluded that the national magazines studied were mostly anti-intellectual, although none of them was entirely so at any time, and certainly not always or in all ways.

But what was perhaps even more damning was that the magazines devoted almost no attention at all to the core functions of higher education: teaching, learning, researching, thinking, debating, studying, and writing. Instead, what I found was the “college years”: coverage overwhelmingly portraying colleges and universities as places where students play and watch sports, date and possibly marry, drink and take drugs, protest, join fraternities and sororities, go on vacation, avoid the draft, escape their parents, and network and apply for jobs.

Overall, I would not be surprised—based on national media coverage spanning decades—if Americans who have not been to college have very little idea what college is like (except for something a lot like high school, whether it is or not), and Americans who do attend college might be excused if they think that learning is not the top priority in higher education.

Where are the Core Functions?

Although I have not done a formal follow-up study, I see little if any reason to believe that news media coverage of higher education has substantively changed since 1996 or that the tone of coverage is now substantially different in newspapers or on television, radio, or the World Wide Web from what it was in major national magazines from the 1940s until the 1990s. In addition to the higher education topics that magazines cover, newspapers’ coverage of higher education includes a high percentage of articles about university budgets, tuition increases, faculty salary increases, appointments to boards of regents and trustees, national and international rankings of local universities, localized national stories such as endowment sizes and university presidents’ salaries, crime on or near campuses, celebrity graduation speakers, and health issues on campus such as epidemics of communicable diseases. News coverage of higher education on local and national television, whether broadcast or cable, is minimal and certainly does not include topics not covered by newspapers and magazines. In any case, the common denominator is that what is not getting covered is the education part of “higher education.”

For this Academe article, I read scores of higher education articles in major national magazines published since 2005, overrepresenting Time magazine, the middlebrow periodical that figured prominently in my book, and skipping coverage purely of sports. Emphasized in coverage have been elite US universities’ deals with foreign universities (in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, China, and India), big tuition hikes and changes in federal student loan and grant programs, underrepresentation of minorities and the poor, booming community colleges, and—in right-wing publications—complaints about liberal campuses and useless degrees.

New since my original study are the international agreements, but also coverage of for-profit institutions (accredited and not—see  Barry Yeoman’s article in this issue of Academe ); college graduation rates (an area in which the United States is falling behind other countries); application coaching; learning assessment; online degrees; colleges “going green”; college rankings; university presidents not as public intellectuals but as quasi-politicians (for example, Gordon Gee of Ohio State University) or as crooks; skyrocketing textbook costs; security (especially after the Virginia Tech massacre); early admissions; and the dishonesty of institutions in marketing themselves and higher education generally, particularly by not collecting or not sharing with prospective students information on completion times, graduation rates, total costs, evidence of learning, employment prospects, job placement rates, campus crime rates, and so on. (An American Association of Collegiate Registrars official says college marketing materials should be marked “buyer beware,” as reported in the September 2009 American Prospect .)

I found a little more attention to college drop-out rates and the number of graduates in jobs that don’t require a college degree—but on that basis alone the United States has had an oversupply of graduates since the 1960s.

The only mentions of curriculum in this coverage were a few anti-intellectual sentences in some articles and a very few articles on whether university education is too impractical (or at least not practical enough) for today’s jobs, on assessment, or on the fact that “anywhere from a third to a half [of college students] require remediation of basic skills,” as Diane Ravitch put it, because “our K–12 system is not up to it.”

Extremely rare are statements such as those made in the New Yorker (June 7, 2010) by Rebecca Mead, who wrote that “an argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic,” or in Time (February 24, 2010) by Ramesh Ponnuru, who wrote that “the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce wellrounded citizens rather than productive workers.”

Also as rare as ever are quotes from students, who supposedly are the reason why colleges and universities exist in the first place; any criticism by higher education institutions of how the news media cover them; or any sense that all students (not only Emma Clippinger) have a great deal of responsibility for their own learning. In other words, lacking is recognition that it is not the sole responsibility of colleges and universities to make students “learn to love learning,” as Bates College president Elaine Tuttle Hansen put it.

Two questions are immediately obvious here. The first is how and why the US news media manage to cover an industry and profession as huge and important as higher education without reporting much on its core functions (granted, a small percentage of the medical and other scientific research on campuses gets covered, but such coverage only underscores the lack of news media attention to all other faculty research). The second, more cynical question is whether it is in the best interest of the news media to encourage the general population to be anti-intellectual.

Either question can be answered quickly and too easily from one of several perspectives. If, for example, one believes that the news media are just another hegemonic institution, one can claim that it is in journalists’ interest to do whatever they can to retain and exercise their own power while limiting that of higher education. Or one could say that the general-interest, mass-audience news media aren’t very good at covering anything, so why would higher education be any different? Or one could suggest that higher education news may not be very popular with consumers, and even news media, let alone other mass media, are interested only in maximizing satisfied audiences these days. I might float the idea that most US news media are so anti-intellectual that they don’t know how antiintellectual they are (certainly they make no attempt to compare themselves with the staff of, say, the United Kingdom’s Guardian —one of many intellectual newspapers and magazines for a mass audience across the Atlantic). There’s at least some truth to each of these arguments, to be sure.

But, of course, it’s more complex than that. Rankand-file journalists in the United States are far less political or ideological than either the American Right claims they are or than American liberals sometimes would like them to be. And consider that print media and wire services still are not very good at giving consumers more of what they want and less of what they are getting too much of. One also must think about the conventions of journalism. As Edward Caudill explains in Darwinism in the Press: The Evolution of an Idea , ideas and theories are not easy for journalists to report on. Ideas “may have little inherent newsworthiness. [A theory] lacks both timeliness and immediate significance for the audience. . . . Although a theory may pertain to all things at all times, it does not have the urgency, event-of-the-moment aura, that news favors. Proximity is another common news standard that ideas fail to meet.”

“Even if such a theory entered the news process,” Caudill concludes, “the reporter still has the problem of converting the information into ‘news,’ . . . [of making information] fit into an appropriate news category. Stories about ideas and theories lose potential impact by being categorized as ‘soft’ or feature news rather than hard news. . . . Just because an idea is important does not mean that it is exciting or even interesting by news standards.” (Thus the number of university press releases that go right into the trash can, deservedly or not.)

But what is more fascinating, if not also more troubling, about the relationship between higher education and the news media in the United States is that it consists of a series of paradoxes, if not outright hypocrisy: US mass media over the past fifteen years have increasingly wanted to sell a “class,” not “mass,” audience to their advertisers, but have done little to attract, develop, or retain an educated audience. US news media, having spent centuries trying to deliver news and information that audiences would find difficult or impossible to obtain anywhere else, have since the advent of the World Wide Web essentially given up that role without really trying to preserve, let alone enhance, it. (In fact, the US news media—despite being in the information and ideas business—are just another industry in which it is relatively easy to not be hired because one is “overqualified,” that is, because one has, in a manager’s opinion, too many college degrees.) News media companies have claimed that they need journalists who are more technologically trained than ever, but these companies do almost nothing—in terms of equipment, training, or money—to help university journalism professors teach advanced technological skills. Perhaps most strangely, US news media executives are still likely to criticize journalism schools while overwhelmingly relying on them for new employees and often being J-school graduates themselves.

The Trouble With J-School

US news media could not maintain their antiintellectualism without widespread public acceptance, but schools of journalism must accept their share of the blame. US journalists historically came from bluecollar backgrounds; nineteenth-century newspapers were staffed by one or two college-graduate editors and high school–dropout reporters. The percentage of US journalists with college degrees did not reach 50 percent until about 1970 but has kept increasing since then. Today, close to 100 percent of journalists have bachelors’ degrees and well over 50 percent have journalism degrees. J-schools thus had a historic opportunity to become a pro-intellectual force in US mass media. They largely failed.

Both because of and despite an increase in the percentage of J-school professors holding terminal degrees, mutual suspicion held sway for decades between “chi-squares” (faculty members with terminal degrees) and “green eyeshades” (retired journalists on the faculty). Even today, most mass-media textbooks are written by eyeshades who cite little (if any) scholarly research, while chi-squares publish research that is, for the most part, not useful to the media industry and does not push the envelope of theory. J-schools, still balancing the two groups, often have research requirements for tenure that are low, ignored, or differentiated, resulting in mean numbers of scholarly journal articles and books of about one and close to zero, respectively. And recently, J-school curricula have become more anti-intellectual, as courses in media history, media management, and public-affairs reporting have been marginalized or eliminated. In their place have come an explosion of courses, majors, and endowed chairs in sports journalism, sports information and public relations, sports marketing, and even sports management; in e-commerce; and in web design, animation, computer games, and other fields that involve both communication and technology.

If US higher education’s future is dependent on mass public opinion, that mass public opinion is largely dependent on the news media, and journalism is a counterintuitively anti-intellectual profession staffed primarily by graduates of anti-intellectual journalism schools, it is no surprise that public funding of higher education was declining before the Great Recession, that graduation rates barely creep up, and that what members of the general public know about universities is usually limited to their semiprofessional sports programs (which are incorrectly assumed to be profitable). US colleges and universities, including their J-schools, need to improve their products: their curricula and their graduates.

Dane S. Claussen is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, author of Anti-intellectualism in American Media, and editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator. Until December 2010, he was chair of faculty and professor at the School of Communication, Point Park University. His e-mail address is [email protected] .

I was very interested in your series of articles about higher education and media bias. I am a former broadcast journalist who is now a professor. I blog for the professional media organization RTDNA. I wrote a blog about this topic and have gotten some responses that might be interesting and shed more light on the topic.

http://www.rtdna.org/pages/posts/from-newsroom-to-classroom-is-the-news-media-anti-higher-education1362.php?id=1362

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G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids” Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

In his essay titled “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids,” Grant Penrod strives to explain why people demonstrate different socialization preferences and characteristics. He is particularly interested in intelligent children’s experiences within the school setting, where they encounter the wrathful influence of anti-intellectuals. Penrod notes that intelligent children usually have difficulties finding friends among school and classmates because of harmful stereotypes about them (760). Anti-intellectuals advance harmful social stereotypes labeling intelligent classmates names such as nerds “excluded from a social activity because of their label, and that label, in turn, intensifies through the resulting lack of social contact” (Penrod 760). The implications of these stereotypes are far-reaching because some students become reluctant to study to avoid being labeled nerds by anti-intellectuals. Penrod attributes anti-intellectualism to bad influence from peers who have little interest in academic success.

Anti-intellectuals criticize intellectual peers for spending much of their time studying instead of focusing on social engagements. Since the majority of peers tend to acclaim success in sports and other non-academic activities, “intellectuals constantly see their efforts trivialized in the rush to lavish compliments elsewhere” (Penrod 759),. However, much as Penrod makes legitimate assertions, he is not convincing enough with his argument about the cause of anti-intellectualism. Ostensibly, so many cliques exist in school settings that everyone interested in social groups can identify and associate with one. Students with an excessive passion for reading tend to have shared interests and hobbies that should bring them together. Nevertheless, a student can be an academic performer and still perform exemplary in academics. Therefore, brighter students should not use the committed pursuit of academic excellence as an excuse for social isolation.

Works Cited

Penrod, Grant. “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids.” pp. 759-763.

• Importance of the Social Model of Disability
• The Task Force on Inclusivity and Diversity
• "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D. H. Lawrence
• Leadership Development Program
• Review of the "Triumph of the Nerds" Video
• What Could the Future Inclusive Play Area Look Like?
• Social Work as an Important Element of Society
• The Role of a Student in Society
• Changing Attitudes Toward Sickness and the Sick
• Examining Whitfield County
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, February 24). G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/g-penrods-anti-intellectualism-why-we-hate-the-smart-kids/

"G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”." IvyPanda , 24 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/g-penrods-anti-intellectualism-why-we-hate-the-smart-kids/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”'. 24 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/g-penrods-anti-intellectualism-why-we-hate-the-smart-kids/.

1. IvyPanda . "G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/g-penrods-anti-intellectualism-why-we-hate-the-smart-kids/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "G. Penrod’s “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids”." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/g-penrods-anti-intellectualism-why-we-hate-the-smart-kids/.

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Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 (LOA #330) (Library of America) Hardcover – April 21, 2020

• Print length 1000 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Library of America
• Publication date April 21, 2020
• Dimensions 5.11 x 1.34 x 8.16 inches
• ISBN-10 1598536591
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America (April 21, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1000 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1598536591
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1598536591
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• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.11 x 1.34 x 8.16 inches
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