While hanging with my large and boisterous family on the Massachusetts shore this week, the conversation turned to people’s resistance to scientific information. Now this is not actually all that surprising, because my extended family includes an unusual number of individuals who either are or were practicing scientists. Indeed, the gathering over the week involves several psychologists, a research dietician, a sociologist, two young budding researchers (one studying mood disorders, the other conducting research in a business school), a physician, and a historian.
Discussions emerged about issues of barefoot running (see previous post) and athletes’ use of steroids (this trumped our usual Yankees versus Red Sox debate for a while). Niece Julianna then posed the following question: Why are people so resistant to scientific evidence on some issues? Indeed, why does their resistance often approach the first-grade tactic of putting fingers in the ears and singing “I can’t hear you?” Several family members noted that when they have suggested, in the course of an argument, that the scientific evidence be consulted they get responses like: “I don’t care, I just know this is right.”
Of course, scientists haven’t left a topic like that alone. There is a body of research about why individuals reject even what the scientific community views as fundamental facts. An interesting article by Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg provides a useful review. They begin by noting the prevalence of erroneous beliefs, including the curious finding from a Gallup poll that one-fifth of Americans believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Bloom and Weisberg suggest that a primary reason “people resist certain scientific findings, then, is that many of these findings are unnatural and unintuitive.” Further, science involves asserted information (so we believe that Abraham Lincoln was a U. S. president, even though we can’t validate that information personally). There are few scientific findings we can validate directly – e.g., whether vaccines cause autism, whether natural selection operates, or whether repressed memories exist.
In sum, the data Bloom and Weisberg review suggest that people resist science when:
- Scientific claims clash with intuitive expectations
- Scientific claims are contested within society
- A non-scientific alternative explanation exists that is based in common sense and is championed by people who are believed to be trustworthy and reliable.
A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology provides additional explanation. In a series of experiments, Gerald Munro found that when presented with scientific information that contradicts one’s beliefs, people invoke the “impotence of science” hypothesis; that is, they argue that it’s a topic that science can’t effectively study.
When people have very strong beliefs about a topic, research has shown that scientific evidence that is inconsistent with the beliefs has little impact in changing them. But even more problematic, Munro’s research suggests that this inconsistency between beliefs and scientific conclusions actually reduces people’s overall faith in science.
All this provides interesting challenges for proponents of evidence-based living. We need not only to get scientific information out to the public, but we also need a much better understanding of how beliefs create resistance to information that might improve people’s lives.
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