Fighting pseudoscience

Here is a thought-provoking article offering an explanation for why pseudoscience is so widely accepted by the general public. The basic lesson to take away from this article is one that I’ve believed for many years: people need to be taught how to think. No, not what to think, but how to think. Our senses and our untrained minds are highly fallible. Students need to be shown this fact and then they need to be trained how to overcome humans’ shortcomings. I completely agree with the writer’s assessment that science courses shouldn’t be taught as a bunch of unrelated facts. Instead, students need intensive courses on what, exactly, science is and does first. They need to know how to question and investigate. Only once future generations are schooled in basic critical thinking will pseudoscience fade away. Until then, it is here to stay … and even grow.

Indeed, to win the long-term battle against pseudoscience, scientists must look beyond the narrow battles against ID. The real war they must wage is in the classroom. Specifically, scientists need to effect a sea-change in how science is taught at the junior high, high school, and college levels. They must teach students not merely the core knowledge of their subject matter, but also an understanding of why researchers developed scientific methods in the first place, namely as an essential safeguard against human error.

To do so, they must inculcate in students a profound sense of humility regarding their own perceptions and interpretations of the world. They should teach students about optical illusions, which demonstrate that our perceptions can mislead us. They should show students how their common sense notions regarding the movements of physical objects, like the trajectory of a ball emerging from a spiral, are often incorrect. They should teach students that even highly confident eyewitness reports are frequently inaccurate. Most broadly, they must counteract what Stanford psychologist Lee Ross calls “naïve realism”-the deeply ingrained notion that what we see invariably reflects the true state of nature (Ross and Ward 1996). Scientists may well emerge victorious from the current ID battles. Given that the research evidence is overwhelmingly on their side, they certainly deserve to. Yet as Dawkins (1993) reminds us, ideas can mutate at least as readily as genes. Unless scientists institute a fundamental change in how science is taught, it may be only a matter of time before a new and even more virulent variant of Intelligent Design emerges. Then scientists will again be surprised at the public’s uncritical embrace of it, while shaking their heads in disbelief at the average American’s lack of common sense.