Smart People Believe Weird Things

Matthew X profrv at nex.net.au
Fri May 14 13:03:18 PDT 1999


This as UK surveys reveal most britons regard the death of Diana as a far 
greater hirstorical event than WW2.
September 2002 issue
Smart People Believe Weird Things
Rarely does anyone weigh facts before deciding what to believe
By Michael Shermer
In April 1999, when I was on a lecture tour for my book Why People Believe 
Weird Things, the psychologist Robert Sternberg attended my presentation at 
Yale University. His response to the lecture was both enlightening and 
troubling. It is certainly entertaining to hear about other people's weird 
beliefs, Sternberg reflected, because we are confident that we would never 
be so foolish. But why do smart people fall for such things? Sternberg's 
challenge led to a second edition of my book, with a new chapter expounding 
on my answer to his question: Smart people believe weird things because 
they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and 
con, and choose the most logical and rational explanation, regardless of 
what we previously believed. Most of us, most of the time, come to our 
beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical 
evidence and logical reasoning. Rather, such variables as genetic 
predisposition, parental predilection, sibling influence, peer pressure, 
educational experience and life impressions all shape the personality 
preferences that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural 
influences, lead us to our beliefs. We then sort through the body of data 
and select those that most confirm what we already believe, and ignore or 
rationalize away those that do not.

This phenomenon, called the confirmation bias, helps to explain the 
findings published in the National Science Foundation's biennial report 
(April 2002) on the state of science understanding: 30 percent of adult 
Americans believe that UFOs are space vehicles from other civilizations; 60 
percent believe in ESP; 40 percent think that astrology is scientific; 32 
percent believe in lucky numbers; 70 percent accept magnetic therapy as 
scientific; and 88 percent accept alternative medicine.

Education by itself is no paranormal prophylactic. Although belief in ESP 
decreased from 65 percent among high school graduates to 60 percent among 
college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71 percent 
among high school graduates to 55 percent among college graduates, that 
still leaves more than half fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing 
alternative medicine, the percentages actually increase, from 89 percent 
for high school grads to 92 percent for college grads.
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The siren song of pseudoscience can be too alluring to resist.

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We can glean a deeper cause of this problem in another statistic: 70 
percent of Americans still do not understand the scientific process, 
defined in the study as comprehending probability, the experimental method 
and hypothesis testing. One solution is more and better science education, 
as indicated by the fact that 53 percent of Americans with a high level of 
science education (nine or more high school and college science/math 
courses) understand the scientific process, compared with 38 percent of 
those with a middle-level science education (six to eight such courses) and 
17 percent with a low level (five or fewer courses).
The key here is teaching how science works, not just what science has 
discovered. We recently published an article in Skeptic (Vol. 9, No. 3) 
revealing the results of a study that found no correlation between science 
knowledge (facts about the world) and paranormal beliefs. The authors, W. 
Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra and Rodney J. Vogl, concluded: "Students 
that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less 
skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. 
Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge 
to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability 
stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to 
students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think."
To attenuate these paranormal belief statistics, we need to teach that 
science is not a database of unconnected factoids but a set of methods 
designed to describe and interpret phenomena, past or present, aimed at 
building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.
For those lacking a fundamental comprehension of how science works, the 
siren song of pseudoscience becomes too alluring to resist, no matter how 
smart you are.
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Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and 
author of In Darwin's Shadow and Why People Believe Weird Things, just 
reissued.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002F4E6-8CF7-1D49-90FB809EC5880000&catID=2





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