Resistance to Science is Common Sense Gone Awry

Why do some people resist scientific findings so strongly? The answer, suggest Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, lies in the tendency of many scientific concepts to contradict the common-sense intutions of our childhood.

Coupled with this often-instinctive skepticism is a process of maturation in which credulity in the authority of our parents is replaced by credulity in public figures -- some of whom, unfortunately, think that climate change is a hoax and that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth together just a few millennia past.

"This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning," the psychologists say. [...]

For scientists, the review suggests they need to show how they use evidence and observations to demonstrate their conclusions, in contrast to religious and political leaders. Scientists, who have struggled mightily to distrust childhood intuition, must understand that their way of seeing things — based on experimentation, observation and debate
— is unnatural, Bloom adds. "We have to understand the idea that that supernatural or religious ideas are not the product of stupidity or malice, but are in fact, normal human nature."

'Resistance to science' has early roots [USA Today]