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I. Class Announcements
First reading assignment and paper due next class: "Falsifiability: A discourse on how to foil little green men in the head" Download from Blackboard under "Assignments" Paper One full page (doubled space) - comments , reactions, thoughts. Must be well written and include more than a summary. Bring hard copy to class. Also turn it in through "turnitin" on Blackboard. No late assignments accepted!
II. Science vs. Pseudoscience
What is science? science is not a collection of facts nor is science defined by subject matter science is a set of rules for answering questions: It involves: 1. posing a question 2. designing an experiment to answer the question 3. collecting data 4. interpreting the data Although scientists seek "truth" they don't know truth. They propose and test theories, knowing that future evidence may cause revision or even rejection of their theories.
What is Pseudoscience? Pseudoscience - a established body of knowledge that claims to be scientific but does not adhere to the basic requirements of the scientific method. The most important of its defects: - the lack of carefully controlled and thoughtfully interpreted experiments -Pseudoscience beliefs are not open to experimentation -seldom is there an acknowledgment that future evidence may lead to the rejection of the beliefs
III. Examples of Pseudoscience
1. Psychics A newsgroup in Philadelphia - tested the powers of socalled psychics. Video of 15 year old girl named Kate told "psychics" the girl had been missing since January. * No one used their psychic abilities to figure out this was a hoax. * If psychics can really find missing people, why haven't psychics caught serial killers before they kill again? Why do we need Amber Alerts to find kidnapped children? And where is Osama bin Laden?
2. UFOs and alien abductions A 2005 Gallup poll - 24% of Americans believe that aliens have visited our planet "...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery." Even if there is other intelligent life in the universe, it's very very far away! Many claims about alien abductions have come after hypnosis, or psychotherapy. Can think of people with these beliefs as sharing a cultural delusion.
Not only do people often describe the aliens similarly, they describe them to look similar to the way they have appeared in a number of TV shows and movies....
Despite the wealth of evidence against UFOs, psychics, etc., why do so many well educated people believe in them? In the 19th century it was predicted that these types of superstitions would soon disappear because of universal education. But this didn't happen. Why?
IV. Why are pseudoscientific claims so commonly believed?
1. Many beliefs are motivated by important fears and needs: Fear of death Fear of the unknown Need for hope and wonder Need to feel a sense of control over the uncontrollable realities of life and death
2. Some pseudoscience beliefs come about by the timing and spacing of events.
temporal contiguity - when two stimuli are experienced close together in time (touching a hot stove and getting burned) Temporal contiguity of 2 events can lead to superstitious beliefs: You think of Uncle Harry and a moment later he calls. People often infer a causal relationship thinking of Uncle Harry has caused him to call (or his being about to call us made us think of him). Baseball player once tapped his hat and hit a home run, student used a particular pencil and got A an on an exam.
3. False beliefs often due to people having too much trust in their personal experiences When people have an extraordinary personal experience, they are often very confident in its truth: "I saw it with my own eyes." "I know what I heard and felt." In several surveys, people who believe in the paranormal have cited personal experience as the most important reason for their belief. Personal experience got more votes than media reports, experiences of friends or relatives, and laboratory evidence.
We usually assume that what we experience is reality. Although we're generally correct, we are not always. We're at much greater risk for being wrong in trusting our reality when: a. no one else has shared our experience, and b. our conclusions are at odds with all known previous experience
The realities of perception and memory? What we perceive and remember is not only influenced by our eyes and ears, but also by what we know, what we expect, what we believe. Memories are also selective We selectively remember certain things and ignore others. This can give us the impression that something mysterious, even paranormal, is going on.
For example - False Memories...
Huge research literature examining "false memories." Loftus & Pickrell - Lost in the mall experiment 29% of the participants "remembered" the false event constructed for them
The point?
People are often confident in their memories, even when the memory is not correct. Just because we "remember" it doesn't mean it's true: We may think that this is the first time we've thought of Uncle Harry in weeks, making it seem amazing that he called just when we thought of him. But maybe we've thought of him at other moments, and don't remember.
4. People deny inconsistent evidence
People cling to beliefs when they have invested a lot of time and effort in them. Example Study of student psychotherapists - once the students had arrived at a diagnosis, they could look through an entire folder of contrary evidence without changing their minds. Instead they interpreted the evidence to fit their diagnoses. Similarly, people hang on to pseudoscience beliefs even when faced with a great deal of evidence that is inconsistent with their beliefs.
5. People misjudge probabilities
Research shows that people (even trained scientists) frequently misjudge probabilities. Sometimes we think that an event couldn't have occurred by chance because it would be SO unlikely, and therefore must be the result of psychic forces. However, we're frequently way off in our estimates of the odds:
Example - prophetic dreams: If a normal person has about 100 dreams per night and over 250 million people live in the United States. Thus, billions of dreams every night and trillions in a year. With so many dreams and so many life events that can be matched up to dreams, it would be surprising if some dreams didn't seem prophetic.
Other examples: You're reading a novel. Just as you get to the part that mentions the beauty of the monarch butterfly, you look up and see one on your window. You're sitting in an airport, thinking about the last name of an old classmate. Just then the person sitting next to you says that very name aloud in a conversation with someone else.
These events lead people to wonder if psychic forces are at work. But how unlikely are such pairings? NOT VERY! Of course - none of this shows that prophetic dreams or psychic connections can't happen. But it does demonstrate that just because these events feel improbable doesn't necessarily mean they are.
Next class
How to evaluate scientific claims. How to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.