Month: May 2017

From NPR News

Story by Andrew Shtulman

In an interview on Meet the Press in January, Kellyanne Conway introduced a new phrase into popular discourse: “alternative facts.”

Conway, a senior adviser to President Trump, was asked to defend the claim that Trump’s inauguration drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” She denied that it was a falsehood (despite photographic evidence to the contrary), claiming instead that the White House had based its conclusion on “alternative facts.”

The notion of alternative facts was roundly mocked on social media. One viral post depicted the cover of a fake children’s book — The Little Golden Book of Alternative Facts — on which a bird was labeled “butterfly,” a chair “table,” and a dog “cat.” Alternative facts like these are absurd, and no one would endorse them (hence, the mockery).

But there are many alternative facts that are just as absurd from an empirical point of view but widely endorsed nonetheless: that dinosaurs once coexisted with humans; that humans appeared on Earth in their current form; that the sun revolves around the Earth; that vaccines cause autism; that genetically modified foods are dangerous to eat; that humans are not responsible for climate change. Such misconceptions have been documented for decades by the Gallup Organization and the National Science Foundation, and they abound not just in the U.S., but also in Asia and in Europe.

Alternative facts about political issues, like the size of inauguration crowds or the birthplace of Barack Obama, receive significant media attention and public ire, but alternative facts about science do not.

Alternative facts about science are commonplace; they are a well-established and long-accepted backdrop for public discourse about scientific issues.

Why are we outraged by alternative facts in politics but complacent about alternative facts in science? There are likely several reasons, but chief among them is that alternative facts in politics defy common sense, whereas alternative facts in science are completely sensible. They accord with prior beliefs about how the world works, and they are consistent with what we observe in everyday life. It’s the real facts in science that defy common sense.

Psychologists have been studying how humans perceive and understand the natural world for several decades, and they have discovered that much of this knowledge is organized into coherent networks of cause-effect beliefs, or intuitive theories. Psychologists call these theories intuitive because they are our first attempt to understand the phenomena around us, before we learn scientific theories of those same phenomena. They call them theories because they function similarly to scientific theories, allowing us to explain past events, intervene on present events and predict future events.

Intuitive theories are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they allow us to make sense of phenomena we might otherwise find perplexing: sinking, floating, burning, freezing, growing, dying. On the other hand, they prevent us from learning more accurate theories of the world, blinding us to counter-evidence and counter-instruction. In my book Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong, I describe several intuitive theories of the physical world and several intuitive theories of the biological world that not only impede our ability to learn science but also make us susceptible to scientific misconceptions — or, in today’s parlance, alternative facts about science.

Consider these two widely endorsed misconceptions: that humans are not responsible for climate change (endorsed by around 50 percent of Americans) and that genetically modified foods are dangerous to eat (endorsed by around 60 percent of Americans). The first misconception is a byproduct of our intuitive theories of geology and the second is a byproduct of our intuitive theories of inheritance.

We balk at the idea that humans are changing the Earth’s climate because we view the Earth as static and inert, not active and dynamic, and we view geological events as brief and isolated, not ongoing and interconnected. Climate, in particular, is viewed as synonymous with weather, and climate change is viewed as synonymous with hotter weather. Our acceptance of climate change is thus no more stable than the weather itself. On hot days, we are concerned about climate change and willing to take steps to curb it, but on cold days, we may forget that climate change is even happening, let alone that humans have the ability to affect it.

Full column here.

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From The Guardian:

Study: to beat science denial, inoculate against misinformers’ tricks

After receiving misinformation from the anti-vaccine movement, including its founder Andrew Wakefield, immunization rates plummeted in a community of Somali immigrants in Minnesota, causing a measles outbreak among their children. It’s a disturbing trend on the rise in America that shows the importance of immunization and the dangerous power of misinformation.

A new paper published in PLOS One by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker tests the power of inoculation; not against disease, but against the sort of misinformation that created the conditions leading to Minnesota measles outbreak. Inoculation theory suggests that exposing people to the tricks used to spread misinformation can equip them with the tools to recognize and reject such bogus claims.

The study focused specifically on misinformation about climate change. The scientists wanted to determine if inoculation could boost peoples’ resistance to false balance in the media, and efforts to cast doubt on the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

The two issues are connected – in climate stories, journalists will often present arguments by climate scientists and climate deniers with equal weight, creating the perception of a 50/50 split when in reality, 97% of experts are on one side, as elegantly illustrated by John Oliver in this clip with over 7 million views from his HBO program Last Week Tonight :

In one experiment, before showing people a media story with this sort of climate false balance, the study authors first provided a group with information about the 97% expert consensus, and delivered an “inoculation” explaining the misleading effects of false balance media coverage.

They found that in the group that was only exposed to the false balance story, average perceived consensus, acceptance of human-caused global warming, trust in climate scientists, and support for climate policy all fell. When subjects were first inoculated against false balance and told about the expert consensus, these factors instead all increased. The authors concluded:

In sum, the effect of false-balance media coverage had the greatest effect on perceived consensus among the various climate attitudes measured. However, a consensus message presented with the false-balance message was effective in increasing perceived consensus, thus neutralizing the negative influence of the misinformation. In addition, we found that an inoculation message was effective in neutralizing the effect of misinformation on perceived consensus.

In a second experiment, they exposed participants to consensus misinformation via the infamous Oregon Petition, explained in the video below, and again inoculated one group against the misinformation

The inoculation this time consisted of a mixture of text and a figure of a tobacco ad with the text “20,679 Physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating’” to show participants a similar previous example of the fake experts technique employed in the Oregon Petition.

As in the first experiment, exposure to only the misinformation decreased participant perception of the expert consensus, acceptance of human-caused global warming, and support for climate policies. However, exposure to the inoculation offset the effects of the misinformation.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

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