Sunday Is Anything Can Happen Day On GigaGranadaHills.com

Quit cherry picking!

That's the basic message of this story about the human tendency to disregard scientific consensus that doesn't gel with one's personal views.

Climate change is real, vaccines are not an elaborate conspiracy, and Bigfoot doesn't exist. Deal with it.



NEW HAVEN, Conn., Sept. 18 (UPI) -- U.S. adults disagree on "scientific consensus" because they distrust experts who differ in their cultural view, researchers suggest.

Yale University law Professor Dan Kahan, University of Oklahoma political science Professor Hank Jenkins-Smith and George Washington University law Professor Donald Braman say members of the public are sharply and persistently divided on matters such as climate change in which expert scientists largely agree.

"The problem isn't that one side 'believes' science and another side 'distrusts' it," Kahan says in a statement.

Subjects were much more likely to see a scientist with elite credentials as an "expert" when he or she took a position that matched the subjects' own cultural values.


read rest of article at UPI.com

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 20, 2010 at 1:13 AM

    You know... "science" is just a belief system based on its own biases and blar blar blar blar...

    ReplyDelete

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