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May 4, 2022 · Rather, the pandemic provided a fertile environment for myriad social and technological forces to breed confusion and distrust. Those forces ignite epidemics of misinformation against pillars of society: among them our systems of justice, education, science, and democracy.
Oct 31, 2024 · A 2022 paper by Van der Linden and researchers at Jigsaw in Science Advances reported the videos helped people spot misinformation techniques and better discern trustworthy and untrustworthy content. More recently, Google created a set of three German-language videos about misinformation tactics and showed them to YouTube, Facebook, and ...
- Untrustworthy Scientists
- Resistance
- Contradictions
- Political Amplification
- Understanding Anti-Science
The first key reason people are anti-science is that they don’t see scientists as credible. This happens when scientists’ expertise is questioned, when they are deemed untrustworthy and when they appear biased. Although debate among scientists is a healthy part of the scientific process, many lay people interpret legitimate scientific debate as a s...
People also tend to reject scientific information when it conflicts with their social identities. For example, video gamers are resistant to scientific evidence for the harms of playing video games. People may also identify with social groups that reject scientific evidence and hate scientists or those who agree with scientists. For example, those ...
People often reject science because of their beliefs, attitudes and values. When scientific information contradicts what people believe is true or good, they feel uncomfortable. They resolve this discomfort by simply rejecting the science. For people who have smoked their entire lives, the evidence that smoking kills is uncomfortable because it con...
Political forces are powerful contributors to anti-science attitudes. This is because politics can trigger or amplify all four of the key reasons for being anti-science. Politics can determine which sources seem credible, exposing people with different political ideologies to different scientific information and misinformation. Politics is also an ...
All in all, these core determinants of anti-science attitudes help us understand what is driving rejection of diverse scientific theories and innovations, ranging from new vaccines to the evidence for climate change. Fortunately, by understanding these bases for being anti-science, we can also better understand how to target such sentiments and inc...
Jul 18, 2022 · Why are so many people anti-science? As experts on attitudes, persuasion and how humans are impacted by scientific innovations, our recent research showed that there are four key reasons people reject scientific information.
Jul 1, 2021 · Anyone who denies such truths (they suggest) is stupid, ignorant or fatuous. Or, as Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg said, “Even though a scientific theory is in a sense a social ...
Jul 16, 2022 · A new study looks at why some people mistrust scientific evidence, and suggests what researchers might do to address this lack of trust.
People also ask
Would blind societal trust in science be democratically undesirable?
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May 5, 2022 · Put another way, politicization, misinformation, and inequality mean that science may not be used when making policy or individual decisions. Given the insights that science can provide, less than optimal behavior can, then, have catastrophic societal consequences.
