Hearts and Minds
Expelled Suggests Defenders of Evolution are Losing Them
SOURCE: iStockphoto
The successful rightwing documentary demonstrates that science needs a loud, accessible, entertaining, mass media response to creationist nonsense.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled, is a deeply dishonest piece of propaganda. Pretty much everything in it is a sham, from the quality of its intellectual and scientific arguments to the nonsense premise that Stein is going on a learning odyssey to find out what’s really happening in the world of “Big Science” (hint: repression of dissent). In truth, it’s plainly obvious that Stein already had his mind made up, and has set out to deliberately construct a brief against evolution and for intelligent design.
The most disgusting thing about Expelled, though, is the craven guilt-by-association approach. Viewers are bludgeoned with the absurd argument that Charles Darwin is somehow to blame for Dachau, and that today’s scientific establishment has built the equivalent of a Berlin Wall to keep out threatening ideas (which makes Ben Stein, er, Ronald Reagan). The New York Times reviewer fulminated that Expelled “is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry” and shows a “contempt for precision and intellectual rigor.” I entirely agree.
From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences.
However, anyone who acknowledges the foregoing must also go further, in my opinion, and admit this: This disturbing film is has made a considerable splash already, at least when judged by typical standards for a documentary. Expelled came in number ten at the box office last weekend and raked in nearly $ 3 million dollars after opening at over 1,000 theaters nationwide. That means in one week, Expelled! already ranks as the 8th highest grossing political documentary of all time.
In short, this dishonest film is being placed before mass audiences, and I’m afraid that most viewers are not going to have nearly enough grounding in the unending evolution-ID battles to see why it’s so deceptive. Instead, they’re going to find Ben Stein funny (I saw the film; he is), and many of the anti-religion evolutionists featured pretty off-putting (I certainly did, and I’m not even religious). The result? A potential public relations black eye for the world of science, and the evolution community in particular.
Here in Los Angeles, I had the privilege of going to see Expelled with Randy Olson, a pro-evolution documentarian whose 2006 film, Flock of Dodos, explains just how PR savvy anti-evolutionists can be (after all, it’s not like they have anything else going for them). In retrospect, Olson’s film seems like an unheeded warning that something like Expelled was coming. So as a Hollywood neophyte, I wanted to hear Olson react to the film. Also, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
As we walked out of the show, Olson explained that really only one thing matters: Ben Stein is on a thousand screens, and no one in the science world can answer him on the same mass media level. I mean, sure, we’ve got the valuable ExpelledExposed website–but this is a whole different order of magnitude. Now, science might have tried to counter Expelled if it had been planning some kind of opposite response–a kind of Al Gore, Inconvenient Truth response. But as of now nobody in science even contemplates doing this kind of thing. And so Ben Stein has come along and exploited this substantial chink in the armor.
Who knows how much money Expelled will make, or how many minds it will influence. I suspect its strong opening will create additional buzz and attention, but even if not, this horrible but also damaging film ought to serve as a massive wake-up call to all who care about science in this media age. From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences. There are no standards. There is no filter. And the truth is not just automatically going to win in the competition of ideas when the playing field tilts against it.
In this context, it seems to me that we can all remain “dodos,” as Olson would put it, and go extinct–or we can evolve and adapt. Currently, I’m seeing plenty of dodoesque response–for instance, one ScienceBlogger recently labeled me a “creationist apologist” merely for pointing out Expelled’s box office numbers. On my blog, another commenter claims that I’m “helping the anti-intellectuals.”
No, I’m trying to help the science people (although whether they want to be helped is another matter). And I won’t be quiet, because this is too important. This is far too big a mess, and it’s one we have to learn from.
Anyone wishing to do so, it seems to me, can begin by recognizing that our chief existing asset for answering Expelled in the genre of film is Randy Olson’s own funny and humane Flock of Dodos. So pass it on. Order a lot of copies. Until those who care about science start investing in a concerted way in mass communication, it’s all we’ve got.
Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
Comments on this article
I feel like within the scientific community, and more generally within the community of thoughtful people, there’s an aversion to using the techniques of propaganda, even to convey the truth, despite the fact that those techniques certainly do work. We seem to think that it’s cheating somehow, to herd the sheep-like population into believing (for the wrong reasons) what’s true, even if it results in ultimately rational and justifiable behavior on their part. The other side (big coal, big oil, the anti-evolutionists, etc.) have no such inhibitions, and I think we put ourselves at a disadvantage by idealistically believing that people will be swayed by empirical evidence and logical argument. I wish they were, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm“On my blog, another commenter claims that I’m “helping the anti-intellectuals.””
It’s hard not to think that when your comments are quoted verbatim by the said anti-intellectuals as evidence of their claims. Your message made it to the front page of “Uncommon Descent”, the premier ID creationist-crank site.
Your reaction to their little propaganda piece allows them to show how “scientists are afraid of Expelled”, and how their piddly little propaganda piece is “powerfully hurting evolution”. Add your whining about Greg Laden’s reaction, and they are also pointing to you as evidence that science silences and attacks its dissenters, the main point of the movie.
In other words, you are repeating exactly what you did during the PZ Myers/Expelled episode: you are framing their message from them, reinforcing it, and helping them attack evolution more efficiently.
You attack others for saying things that can be used by creationists, but you yourself keep doing the exact same thing. Why should we believe you when you suggest communication strategies? So far, you have shown yourself quite inept at communicating your points, and have delivered talking points to your opponents on a silver plate. You write good books, ok, but they won’t convince the other side either. So, when are you yourself going to actually demonstrate that vaunted communication expertise you cajole everyone else to become better at?
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:38 pmYou’ve repeated this 8th highest grossing political documentary fact multiple times. This makes it cound amazing, but it ignores 3 facts:
1. The rising price of tickets which means anything more than 5 years old would need to have significantly more views to rank that high.
2. This opened on many more screens than most documentaries thus having a better chance at a high gross take (even if most of those theaters lost or made minimal money on the film.
3. It had a huge advertising budget with frequent TV commercials that was much larger than most or all of the lower grossing political documentaries.
Given the advertising and the hype, $3million isn’t much income and you seem to just want to say this to cause more fear and hype your own opinions. The real question is whether this movie will make anyone more anti-science and your review and other reviews make this seem unlikely.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:38 pmI think that we have to begin with some facts. If we really had the funding, a good good technique would be to hire someone like Dr. Frank Luntz (he who changed his mind on Global Warming) and have him “dial in” the responses of an audience to watching Expelled.
I noted a post by Maywa at Gristmill this week that shows for all of the PBS specials, the screenings of An Inconvenient Truth, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Al Gore, the fasting of Ted Glick or the demonstrations of Bill McKibben and company, the basic attitude of the American Public toward Global Warming has not changed. She references some recent Pew polls that indicate a fact that we have not made a real dent in public attitudes.
I would suggest that the same is true here. For all of the strongly worded invective from PZ and Dawkin, or the ultimately un-funny schtick of Ben Stein, I would doubt that very many people will have their opinion changed by either Expelled or Flock of the Dodos, and especially not by what we write to ourselves on our blogs.
What will happen is that most people, on both sides of the argument, will have their pre-conceptions confirmed. Nothing changes and rational choice is a myth. Ben Stein wins because he has Sunday Morning.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:53 pmSurely, there is a a large demographic for which expelled was designed. The movie was marketed directly to them and they have attended. Considering the size of that group and the resources put into marketing this film, it seems a stretch to declare it a success. I agree that the scientific community needs to do a better job marketing our worldview. In particular, it never resonates with me when Myers and Dawkins state that science led to their atheism. In my case, I became an atheist first and much later a scientist. Sometimes, I wish it was Sam Harris making the necessary arguments for atheism without linking them unnecessarily to science education. That said, I would not be happy with Francis Collins or other theists as the lone spokespeople for science. Scientists are a wonderfully diverse group and that is something that we will all get used to, or at least continue to fight about. I am glad for all the work that has been done by PZ and the NCSE to expose Expelled for what it is, and I think the generally negative reviews of the film are largely a consequence of making this information available to the reviewers. I appreciate your original objections about the role of Dawkins and Myers in the film, but think you have strayed far off the mark with the “any publicity is good publicity” frame. Rather than your condemnation, I think PZ and company deserve our sincere thanks for helping to make Expelled the failure that it is.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:26 pmExpelled has a built in audience of millions of fundamentalist Americans. Of course it made a few million. What else would we expect to happen? Fundamentalists magically stop being creationists and get up their persecution complex? Not gonna happen. Expelled making a few million is not surprising.
The fact that it made only $2.9 million is actually a bit of a relief, as I see it. I would have been disappointed, but not terribly shocked, if this movie had topped $10 million, given the fact that roughly 50% of Americans are young earth creationists.
Calling Expelled a “huge success” is irresponsible hyperbole. It’s not doing nearly as well as it could have done, and with such a small turn out, it’s reasonable to suppose the movie is doing little more than preaching to the choir–which goes on every day in churches across America. Given the size of its production and marketing costs, will the movie even turn a profit? Hard to tell at this point, but it’ll have to make quite a bit more before it does. If it doesn’t, then making creationist propaganda films will not be a very appealing idea to movie producers, and the film could actually make subsequent creationist propaganda films less likely. On top of that, Expelled’s performance so far has fallen far, far short of what its producers were expecting it to do (reports are that they were hoping for a $10 - $15 million opening), which is nice.
At this point, there just isn’t enough evidence to start saying what Expelled’s influence will be. We need to see whether it has any effects on mainstream dialog, whether it manages to reach beyond its built-in audience and start swaying people towards rejecting science, and whether it inspires any further such films. At this point, these questions can’t be answered. At this point, it’s still very possible that the film might lose money, might not change the nature of the debate in the mainstream, and might fail to reach beyond those who are already thoroughly convinced anyways–in which case, how could we call it a “success”? What would they have achieved if they were unable to do these things?
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:40 pmThanks Chris, for pointing out what ought to be obvious, Expelled matters even though it can easily be debunked. Debunking is essential and valuable, but it is only a partial response to Expelled.
Sadly, most of the science blogosphere seems to be wrapped around the axle of truth. Defending truth has put us in the position of ignoring other needs such as winning hearts and minds. And truth, by itself is only a weak approach to winning hearts and minds.
Why do we defend truth so mightily and exclusively? It seems that too many scientists view defending truth as the be-all and end-all of being a scientist. Any other task is wrong and beneath us. Who cares if we can build support for science by being persuasive, because that would be an illegitimate success.
What is the relationship between defending truth and being persuasive? Are they really at odds, as many scientists seem to believe? No. It’s possible to be accurate AND persuasive. That’s the challenge in front of us, and too few seem to recognize that. Several who have tried to point this out are getting attacked, including Matt Nisbet, Randy Olson, and you Chris (Mooney).
Why do many scientists seem to believe that truth and persuasion are at odds? That’s a tough question, and here’s my suggestion for an answer.
Most scientists cling too tightly to our preferred method (simple truth statements) because we’re afraid of the slippery slope of trying to persuade. We fear that trying to persuade means accepting that “the end justifies the means.”
But if we use the science of communication, we can be persuasive while still being accurate. If nothing else, we can select what is persuasive from a list of different simple truth statements. Or, if it’s not too scary, we can actually build persuasive materials that are also true. We can parse carefully in communication science, just like we all parse carefully within our specialties.
It’s strange that most of us can split hairs so finely in our specialties, but bluntly refuse to do so when we get outside of our specialties. It’s rooted in how we’re trained and how we get comfortable with certain approaches and tools.
To succeed as scientists, we’re forced to get really, really good at parsing ideas and data in our specialties, and it’s hard to get there. But that’s where success resides, so that’s where we all aim. It works. But what happens when we seek to go outside of that comfort zone?
Outside of our specialties, life gets challenging. Either we’re babes in the woods with little expertise, or we take the risk of using comfortable approaches in a new field where they’re relatively untested. Success may follow, but mistakes should not be a surprise.
How does this apply to anti-science outreach like Expelled? Debunking is an adequate response within scientific endeavors, but it’s only a partial response to Expelled. Relying on debunking alone is misapplying a scientific approach. To supplement debunking, we need lots of accurate and engaging outreach that speaks well to large, diverse audiences. We need more movies like Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos. And they need to be fun, not just crotchety attacks on the products of others.
Persuasion has the goal of getting people to change their minds, and simply stating the truth (like debunking Expelled) is one possible approach that may not be maximally effective. However, stating the truth is the preferred method of scientists, and dropping the method is unacceptable even if it’s persuasive. It’s a clash of goal vs. method and there’s no right answer. Overemphasis of either can turn into a major stumble.
It’s not ok to lie to persuade people that evolution is real, and scientists are justifiably worried about this risk (the worry that the end justifies the means). But we can make another important error if we cling too tightly to simple truth statements because we’re afraid of the slippery slope of trying to persuade. We can end up indirectly encouraging people to believe in intelligent design, because we’re unwilling to buckle down and learn the science of communication and use it in service of accurate persuasion.
In case you wonder why I feel capable of speaking to this…this answer comes from my experience as a trained scientist and subsequent experience as a communicator and persuader. I learned science successfully, published two papers in Science as a first author from my thesis research, and got a tenure-track professor job. Thus, I know the science side of this very well. Subsequently, I quit academia and I’ve spent the last 15 years learning how to do conservation work. I’ve learned a lot about persuasion in that time, and it was a long, hard learning process. Not unlike my science training. Others like Randy Olson have similar tales of dual training, science and persuasion. And experts like Matt Nisbet pursue the science of communication and have a lot to teach us if we’re willing to listen.
It’s interesting and ironic to see so many scientists get so worked up regarding the false battle between truth and persuasion. If you take the time to get fluent in both, I think you’ll see that there’s really no problem. We can be truthful persuaders and do a much better job of building support for science and strengthening the role of science in public policy.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:35 pmSome good points here. I’d love to see a really good well funded film come out which helped the matter.
The good news is that I think we do actually have a few additional options to go along with Dodos.
In particular, we have a series of beautiful documentaries on life, by the BBC, and David Attenborough. They include Life on Earth, The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, Life in the Freezer, The Private Life of Plants, The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals, Life in the Undergrowth and Life in Cold Blood.
These films are good at raising awareness of evolutionary biology, in a natural and unconfrontational context, without any mention of creationism. That is an important part of how Expelled should be countered; simply with more exposure to good science — and these documentaries are soaked in evolutionary biology, as a natural and unforced aspect to the whole wonderful tapestry.
This is not the final answer by any means. Nothing is the final answer, we need a whole range of responses. Dodos is another contribution.
On top of that, we also need an immediate response to Expelled that specifically points out its many flaws, and that could not be done with a film. There’s no way to get this immediate response into every living room, but by making information available, it does have an impact. I think that the horrible panning Expelled received from critics was assisted greatly by ready access to information from the NCSE and their “Expelled Exposed” site; and from many science bloggers. PZ Myers deserves a special vote of thanks, as do a huge number of other blogs, for giving the essential background to the topics so badly mangled by Expelled.
Production of another film, which makes evolution a bit more front and center, is a great idea.
We also need to face up to mistakes… Chris Mooney as much as anyone. In particular, when we should all have been supporting PZ Myers in his excellent work in exposing the flaws and hypocrisies in Expelled, Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet made a bad mistake in suggesting that the furor over dishonesty and incompetance by the Expelled people was just helping in the marketing of Expelled. Fortunately, the NCSE took a more sensible approach, and contributed to the furor with Expelled Exposed.
The way Chris has handled criticism over this has been very unfortunate; he generally focuses on the least rational responses and continues to ignore a host of frustrated fans who DO want to be helped and who ALSO want to help Chris. Most of the critics of Chris are also fans who have appreciated the good work he’s done on science communication in the past; and he’s yet to really engage their response to his own personal handling of Expelled.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 pm“Ben Stein is on a thousand screens, and no one in the science world can answer him on the same mass media level”
Hmm. Except perhaps for the thousands of biology teachers out there who are teaching evolution day in, day out for years on end? This ‘war’ will be won by education, not by pathetic propaganda which no-one will remember by this summer.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:56 amLet me start by saying that I’ve never taken a statistics course, but I am well aware of how numbers can be misleading. That said, consider this about “Expelled”’s box office numbers.
Gross take: $2,970,848.
I paid $9.50 for my ticket. Let’s assume a national average of $9.00 per ticket.
Number of tickets sold: 330,094
The movie opened in 1052 theaters.
Average number of tickets per theater sold: 314
The box office numbers reflect a three-day time period.
Average number of tickets sold per day per theater: 104
Let’s presume that the movie showed four times a day at each theater.
Average number of people attending each showing of “Expelled”: 26
Am I making errors in my math or my assumptions? If not, that seems like a small number of people actually seeing this film.
Of course, the real unknown in this equation is “number of people seeing this movie who hadn’t already made up their mind about the issues presented.”
J. D.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:13 pmThe most useful thing Mooney and Nisbet have done is to provide fairly compelling evidence that framing is not science. If framing provided a theoretical basis for action, things would not have gone as they have.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:15 pmWhich is to say, since it isn’t a political documentary, some very misleading information.
Try this one on for size: Expelled did far worse than the documentary “Tupac: Resurrection” did in its first week at the box office.
Tupac wound up grossing under 8 million dollars, whereas the producers of Expelled were expecting at least 13-15 million. Tupac also did far better than Expelled in its first week (over 1.5 million dollars better).
This movie is, objectively, flopping.
Check out the comparison if you don’t believe me:
April 24th, 2008 at 5:54 pmhttp://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=tupacresurrection.htm
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=expelled.htm
Chris wrote
No, you were called a creationist apologist for titling your post “Expelled a Box Office Success” and opening it with “I merely report the facts: …”, but you essentially reported one fact: The gross take over the weekend in comparison with the gross of some other documentaries. You ignored the “facts” pointed out above, in particular the number of theaters in which Expelled was shown. Ignoring that variable implicitly leads the reader to a false conclusion. And that provides an excellent example of the deceptive uses of “framing.”
One more time: If you frame your arguments to scientists so poorly, why on earth should we pay any attention to your suggestions for framing our arguments to lay people?
April 24th, 2008 at 6:08 pmThose sciborgs hate it when you are right;-)
You can barely pay average people to take polls but over at sciborgs, they are dying to help Expelled gain more controversial data.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/crash_this_poll.php#comments
April 25th, 2008 at 5:09 pmAs a non-scientist, I would like to point out that from an outsiders perspective it seems like those dismissing Mr. Stein’s picture as something that they shouldn’t be concerned with either because it didn’t actually get seen by that many people or those people who saw it will just have their anti-science notions reinforced.
As someone with a relationship to politics and government, I’m pretty darned concerned when I see this sort of head in the sand attitude that ignores the future effects of Expelled and its ilk. Primarily that it will be used by many on the ID/Creationist movement in churches and school districts where they hold sway to influence the opinions of young adults who haven’t yet made up their mind as to whether science or religion holds sway.
Given that we’re in a day and age where science textbooks come with warning labels, I can’t understand the inability to see the threat clearly and accept that the fight has to be undertaken against it with every available tool.
April 26th, 2008 at 7:39 amSmart tactics might be optimally supported by an understanding about the cognitive and social psychological features that tend to reinforce the truth claims of belief against other kinds of truth claims.
Probably the most cost effective approaches, accounting for both resource and cognitive costs, will aim to convince those whose beliefs are the most subject to being changed to a ‘better’ (more correct) belief.
This requires much better listening, analysis and targeting. This seems to me to be much more about teaching and teachability than it is about mastery of the ’science’ of propaganda.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:59 amAnonymoose makes a good point. I am actually less concerned how this docu-mercial does at the box office than how it will do when released as a DVD.
Just like the viral emails that continue to be forwarded onto multitudes despite the fact that the contents have been debunked over and over, I fear that Expelled will live on long after sites like ExpelledExposed have gone by the wayside.
Unless we can come up with movies presenting evolution with a compelling narrative, we will not win the information war. It is not enough to debunk the creationists. We have got to give people a definable reason to believe in (trust in) evolution.
A book that did the most to really imprint the reality of evolution for me was the book “The Song of the Dodo” by David Quammen. Quammen not only laid out the arguments for evolution, he spun a really interesting tale. To this day, I remember his line, “There were so many mosquitoes, even God couldn’t count them!”
April 26th, 2008 at 10:21 amJust out of curiosity, who bankrolled this project? It smells kinda mooneyish to me.
April 26th, 2008 at 1:20 pmIt doesn’t seem to me that individual distribution of “Flock of Dodos” DVDs is any way to counteract “Expelled”–Chris is suggesting we need to use mass media, but then he suggests something that is merely individual peer-to-peer communication on a tiny scale, that already performed worse at the box office and has no built-in distribution mechanism comparable to evangelical churches.
I think he exaggerates the significance of “Expelled,” which may be viewed by as many as a million U.S. theatergoers. That’s insignificant by comparison to television. A good popular television show promoting science would reach a much larger audience. Reality TV, anybody?
But there’s still the problem that audiences may not be receptive–which seems to me more a failure of the education system and the nature of American culture more than a failure of scientists’ use of mass media.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:12 pmA commentator wrote that their are biology teachers that can counteract this and another wrote about the warning labels on textbooks. Let me submit that it is precisely the the problem of the poor teaching of the biology teachers and the textbooks that we have this problem. I was in the pre-med track in college and walked out of a biology class in which the lecturer (tenured prof) stated that the viceroy butterfly “knew” it needed to look more like a monarch for protection. Of course, my textbooks had the same faked photos covered in teh book “Of Moths and Men” My TAs displayed an utter contempt to the lab animals, torturing them. Well, that’s a lure to learn! My daughter, a published scientist, reports the same with additions. Her teachers at the local school professed their nonbelief in “evolution” in science class. Furthermore, she went to what is considered the premiere public math and science academy in the nation and even there the teachers were not able to convince some dissenting students. Either the teachers didn’t work very hard at it or didn’t care.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:32 amWhen my children were growing up and goofed up and gave weak excuses, I would say “So you are lazy or stupid - which is it?” I lay the same challange to you guys. Stop weeping in your beer and clean up your act!
bsci: You’ve repeated this 8th highest grossing political documentary fact multiple times. This makes it cound amazing, but it ignores 3 facts:
1. The rising price of tickets which means anything more than 5 years old would need to have significantly more views to rank that high.
You can adjust the boxofficemojo.com for inflation if you’re a paying member. At the-numbers.com the default view is inflation-adjusted, and it doesn’t show Expelled anywhere in the top 25 of documentaries generally. (No subcategory for “political documentary”, though, so not precisely parallel.)
Documentary grosses @ the-numbers.com
April 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pmI’m a little concerned that evolution is more religious that science.
I see that in comments like the one from Naniboujou when he said:
May 1st, 2008 at 11:31 am“Unless we can come up with movies presenting evolution with a compelling narrative, we will not win the information war. It is not enough to debunk the creationists. We have got to give people a definable reason to believe in (trust in) evolution.”