That if the Earth is flat, that if the vaccine is to inoculate us with a microchip, that if WiFi causes cancer, that the Earth is flat... all these anti-scientific beliefs are not essentially ignorance (we are all quite ignorant about it).
The most important thing is the call confirmation bias, which was coined by the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason after writing an experiment in this regard published in 1960.
Everyday religions
We believe the things that the people who are part of our "tribe" believe because we do not seek truth as much as social acceptance. Unlike many other animal species, for humans there is no greater punishment than being rejected or excluded from the group.
Furthermore, people treat facts as more relevant when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against your opinions, you don't necessarily deny the facts, but you assume that those facts are less relevant or worthy of being considered on a moral level.
This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that has been published on the topic, and which was presented at a symposium as part of the annual convention of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology in San Antonio.
The results suggest that simply focusing on evidence and data is not enough to change someone's opinion on a particular issue. We are tough as hell. Other things persuade us.
This is what it also points out Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland), which describe how 'think like a lawyer', in the sense that people carefully select the pieces of information they should pay attention to 'in order to reach conclusions that they want to be true'. As it abounds in it Derren Brown in his book ÉOnce upon a time... an alternative history of happiness:
Likewise, we act under this influence whenever we focus on the annoying habits of someone we don't like, rather than on the pleasant ones. The confirmation tendency provides us daily with all the necessary evidence to stick to the script and so that our life continues along the same lines and seems true.
Of course, it also influences that we are ignoring science, and we do not understand the epistemological foundations on which scientific knowledge is based. In the following video I explain what liberal science is and why it is not based on consensus as we popularly understand it:
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The news
People who reject scientific claims do so not so much out of ignorance as out of confirmation bias.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.