Learning Objectives

• Better understand ‘weird’ beliefs

• Use skeptical and scientific thinking to evaluate claims in your daily life

• Communicate with people whose beliefs differ from yours

• List three defining features of science

• Define systematic empiricism

• Explain what it means for knowledge to be publicly verifiable

• Name hallmarks of pseudoscience

• Describe how trust in science can leave you vulnerable

• Describe how we can distinguish between protoscience and pseudoscience

• List violations of the falsifiability criterion

• Explain how the ‘memory wars’ illustrate science working as it should

• Give examples of logical fallacies, like appeals to nature and appeals to emotion

What Counts as ‘Weird’?

• definition: of strange or extraordinary character; odd

• second definition: caused by witchcraft or the supernatural; magical

• not necessarily irrational

• conspiracies do happen

Mandela Effect

• people consistently make the same false errors for some images

How Can We Think Like Scientists?

Learning Styles

• idea popularized in the late 80s and early 90s

• 16-item questionnaire

• 76% of educators reported ‘currently using’ methods based on learning styles in 2014 but students do not learn better when material is in their preferred format

• saw pairs of words or pictures

• judgment of learning

  • asked how likely they were to remember them later

• participants expected to remember their preferred format better

• picture superiority effect

  • both ‘verbalizers’ and ‘visualizers’ actually recalled more pictures than words

• ‘There’s evidence that people do try to treat tasks in accordance with what they believe to be their learning style, but it doesn’t help them,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. In 2015, he reviewed the literature on learning styles and concluded that “learning styles theories have not panned out.”

Why We Need Psychological Science

• science is both a body of knowledge and a process, with three key features:

  • uses systematic empiricism

  • produces public knowledge

  • examines solvable problems

Systematic Empiricism

• relies on observation and measurement (empiricism)

• tests a theory about the world (systematic)

Public Knowledge

• results are peer-reviewed

• findings are published in journals (no ‘special access’)

• experiments are replicated

• repeated by other scientists to see if they get the same results

Solvable Problems

• answerable with currently available techniques

• technological advances can ‘upgrade’ a mystery (unsolvable) to a problem (solvable)

• the advent of staining techniques allowed Santiago Ramón y Cajal to discover the neuron

Separating The Pseudo From Science

• pseudoscience

  • claims to be scientific but lacks one or more of the three features of science

• phrenology

  • measured bumps on the skull that supposedly reflected abilities and traits (e.g., wit)

  • never agreed on ‘number’ of mental organs

Hallmarks of Pseudoscience

• Lacks specific measurement

• Appeals to the need for secrecy

• Uses misleading scientific-sounding language

• Reverses burden of proof

• Fakes scientific credentials

• Cherry picks results

• Cites questionable or retracted studies

Dangers of Misplaced Trust

• participants read about a fictional ‘Valza virus’ that was created in a lab:

  • non-scientific condition

    • cited an activist group

  • scientific condition

    • cited a professor

• then participants indicated whether the article should be shared with other students (yes/no)

• rated how much they believed it (e.g., I believe that the information in the article is probably true)

• and completed a trust in science scale

• false claims that refer to ‘research’ and ‘professors’ convince people who trust science

What Makes A Problem ‘Solvable’

• three key features of science

  • use systematic empiricism

  • produces public knowledge

  • examines solvable problems

• Falsifiability criterion

  • a testable theory is one that can be falsified

  • it tells us not only what should happen, but what should not happen

  • this rule helps us distinguish between protoscience (a new and undeveloped science) and pseudoscience

  • this rule is violated when:

    • invoking supernatural explanations

    • making vague claims

    • using multiple ‘outs’ to dismiss disconfirming evidence

There’s Still Room For Heated Debate in Science

• one good example

  • ‘repressed’ memories

    • traumatic memories can supposedly be stored unconsciously and blocked from conscious recall

    • then ‘recovered’ under hypnosis or through guided imagery

  • ‘Memory Wars’

    • in fact, memories of trauma are often remembered all too well

    • supposedly repressed memories of child abuse reflect:

      • nondisclosure

      • childhood amnesia

      • brain injuries that occur during traumatic experiences

      • ordinary forgetting

  • Malpractice cases

    • in the 80s and 90s, patients sued clinicians who helped them ‘recover’ memories of child abuse, incest, and satanic rituals and later realized they were false

  • Public perception lags behind

    • hypnosis creates false memories, and ‘repressed’ memories can be explained by ordinary forgetting and reinterpretation

    • but over 59% of people still believe in the concept of repressed memories

Pseudoscience Often Commits Logical Fallicies

• ad hominem

  • attacks source rather than argument

• argument from ignorance

  • argues that something is true simply because we don’t know that it’s not

• appeals to nature

  • argue that natural is good (and man-made is bad)

  • common strategy in ‘wellness’ industry and alternative medicine

  • natural isn’t always better

    • snake venom

    • tobacco

    • arsenic

    • asbestos

  • man inventions that improved public health

    • plumbing

    • antibiotics

    • anesthesia

    • vaccines

• appeals to emotion

  • evoke feelings rather than provide evidence

  • common strategy in advertising and political propaganda, but also public health campaigns

  • ex: cigarettes ad where girl pays with her teeth she has to pull out