'Resistance to science' has early roots
Stem cells, global warming, evolution, vaccination - why do some scientific ideas push political and societal hot buttons? Proving that scientists can study practically anything, a pair of psychologists considered "resistance to science" as a subject in its own right. And they found deep roots, childhood ones, to some of the contention that increasingly crowds public discourse on science issues.
Original article or
Resistance to science is nothing new, of course. The Catholic Church condemned the astronomer (a poor one by all accounts) Giordano Bruno to death in 1600. Galileo famously received home imprisonment in the same era. In the U.S., the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," a battle over a Tennessee law that forbid the teaching of human origins, was the "Trial of the Century" long before O.J. Simpson ever took the stand.
Today, we don't toss scientists on bonfires, of course. We have congressional hearings. Last year, climate scientists Ray Bradley, Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes, answered questions about their research funding from a congressional committee. Fights over evolution led to 2005's redo of Scopes Trial issues in a court case involving the Dover, Pa., school system. And stem-cell research has fueled prolonged political fights, figuring in the last three national elections and a recent vote by Congress to expand the number of human embryonic stem cell lines available for federal research funding, which faces a veto threat from President Bush.
"Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas," note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. "This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning," the psychologists say.
In the last three decades, studies of children show that they quickly pick up an intuitive understanding of how the world works, say the researchers. For example, babies know that objects fall and are real and solid (even though physics experiments show they are mostly made of atoms containing empty space.) "These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn," the review says.
"To be scientifically educated means you have to pick up a lot of counter-intuitive beliefs," says Bloom, whose research centers on how children develop their ideas about the world. It's perfectly rational for people to rely on intuitive beliefs about the world, i.e. that objects fall down, rather than learning Einstein's theory of gravity, he adds. "Life is too short." The conflict comes when intuition conflicts with scientific evidence.
Kids often have a lot of trouble understanding that the Earth is a sphere, the review notes, because common sense suggests things should fall off a ball. And college students surveyed believe that a ball shot from a curled hose continues to travel in a curved path after its exit, although a demonstration can correct this belief.
One intuition that causes trouble for science is "promiscuous teleology," a natural tendency in children to see a purpose and design in everything, part of normal development in making sense of the world. For this reason, children in studies prefer creationist explanations for animals and people, studies show too.
"A lot of scientific ideas are fundamentally at odds with religious ones," Bloom says. "Every religion in existence adopts dualism," a belief that draws a distinction between the mind (i.e. the soul) and the brain, he notes, a finding completely at odds with the basic evidence from neuroscience that the brain itself generates all our thoughts and feelings. The belief that thoughts and being arise from something besides a bunch of brain cells zapping one another explains much of the debate over the moral worth of stem cells, Bloom contends.
An added childhood source of resistance is how we learn to defer to authority, the review suggests. Again it makes perfect sense to defer to those we trust in childhood, i.e. "don't cross the street," "don't stick your hand in the light socket," or "leave the dog alone." But in adulthood, who we decide to trust has a powerful effect on how we view science, says Bloom. This goes both ways, he notes. Many people who accept that natural selection and evolution are reasonable explanations for where species come from, can't explain the concepts, polls show. This "scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true," says the review.
Similarly, when trusted religious or political leaders endorse an idea, people who view them as trustworthy will hew to their views, as demonstrated in a 2003 study in which, "participants were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it."
So, there you have it. Resistance to science springs from a clash of experimental or observational evidence with childhood intuition about the world, coupled with what political or religious community we embrace.
For scientists, the review suggests they need to show how they use evidence and observations to demonstrate their conclusions, in contrast to religious and political leaders. Scientists, who have struggled mightily to distrust childhood intuition, must understand that their way of seeing things - based on experimentation, observation and debate - is unnatural, Bloom adds. "We have to understand the idea that that supernatural or religious ideas are not the product of stupidity or malice, but are in fact, normal human nature."
Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research. For past articles, visit this index page.
Original article or
Resistance to science is nothing new, of course. The Catholic Church condemned the astronomer (a poor one by all accounts) Giordano Bruno to death in 1600. Galileo famously received home imprisonment in the same era. In the U.S., the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," a battle over a Tennessee law that forbid the teaching of human origins, was the "Trial of the Century" long before O.J. Simpson ever took the stand.
Today, we don't toss scientists on bonfires, of course. We have congressional hearings. Last year, climate scientists Ray Bradley, Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes, answered questions about their research funding from a congressional committee. Fights over evolution led to 2005's redo of Scopes Trial issues in a court case involving the Dover, Pa., school system. And stem-cell research has fueled prolonged political fights, figuring in the last three national elections and a recent vote by Congress to expand the number of human embryonic stem cell lines available for federal research funding, which faces a veto threat from President Bush.
"Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas," note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. "This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning," the psychologists say.
In the last three decades, studies of children show that they quickly pick up an intuitive understanding of how the world works, say the researchers. For example, babies know that objects fall and are real and solid (even though physics experiments show they are mostly made of atoms containing empty space.) "These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn," the review says.
"To be scientifically educated means you have to pick up a lot of counter-intuitive beliefs," says Bloom, whose research centers on how children develop their ideas about the world. It's perfectly rational for people to rely on intuitive beliefs about the world, i.e. that objects fall down, rather than learning Einstein's theory of gravity, he adds. "Life is too short." The conflict comes when intuition conflicts with scientific evidence.
Kids often have a lot of trouble understanding that the Earth is a sphere, the review notes, because common sense suggests things should fall off a ball. And college students surveyed believe that a ball shot from a curled hose continues to travel in a curved path after its exit, although a demonstration can correct this belief.
One intuition that causes trouble for science is "promiscuous teleology," a natural tendency in children to see a purpose and design in everything, part of normal development in making sense of the world. For this reason, children in studies prefer creationist explanations for animals and people, studies show too.
"A lot of scientific ideas are fundamentally at odds with religious ones," Bloom says. "Every religion in existence adopts dualism," a belief that draws a distinction between the mind (i.e. the soul) and the brain, he notes, a finding completely at odds with the basic evidence from neuroscience that the brain itself generates all our thoughts and feelings. The belief that thoughts and being arise from something besides a bunch of brain cells zapping one another explains much of the debate over the moral worth of stem cells, Bloom contends.
An added childhood source of resistance is how we learn to defer to authority, the review suggests. Again it makes perfect sense to defer to those we trust in childhood, i.e. "don't cross the street," "don't stick your hand in the light socket," or "leave the dog alone." But in adulthood, who we decide to trust has a powerful effect on how we view science, says Bloom. This goes both ways, he notes. Many people who accept that natural selection and evolution are reasonable explanations for where species come from, can't explain the concepts, polls show. This "scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true," says the review.
Similarly, when trusted religious or political leaders endorse an idea, people who view them as trustworthy will hew to their views, as demonstrated in a 2003 study in which, "participants were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it."
So, there you have it. Resistance to science springs from a clash of experimental or observational evidence with childhood intuition about the world, coupled with what political or religious community we embrace.
For scientists, the review suggests they need to show how they use evidence and observations to demonstrate their conclusions, in contrast to religious and political leaders. Scientists, who have struggled mightily to distrust childhood intuition, must understand that their way of seeing things - based on experimentation, observation and debate - is unnatural, Bloom adds. "We have to understand the idea that that supernatural or religious ideas are not the product of stupidity or malice, but are in fact, normal human nature."
Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research. For past articles, visit this index page.