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SCIENCE NEEDS SUPPORTING - BUT PRE-EXISTING BELIEFS CAN MAKE THIS TROUBLESOME. TXKING/SHUTTERSTOCK

There’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. There is, however, a difference between skeptical claims without substantial evidence to back them up, and being a skeptic on vaccines or human-driven climate change.

Both are backed up by a gigantic mountain of facts, so why are certain groups of people still keen to rally against them? A new study gives a clue, linking pre-existing beliefs in spirituality, religion, and political ideas with such forms of science denial.

The study, by researchers from the Universities of Amsterdam, Kent, and the VU University in Amsterdam, explains that “religiosity, political orientation, morality, and science understanding” are the main predictors of whether or not someone accepts a scientific consensus.

Importantly, however, different ideologies are correlated with the acceptance of different types of consensus.

If you’re a climate change skeptic, for example, you’re more likely than not to be a political conservative. If you wonder if vaccines are safe or not, you probably have concerns about moral purity.

If you’re a skeptic about GM crops, it’s most likely because you don’t have much trust in science, or you lack a scientific literacy. As expected, those that are staunch religious conservatives “consistently display a low faith in science and an unwillingness to support science” across the board.

This research highlights that scientific knowledge is not always directly correlated with acceptance of it. Thanks to plenty of other “ideological antecedents” – those pre-existing belief systems – it’s a little more complicated than that.

This suggests that, for example, if you want to convince your anti-vaxxer friend that vaccines are nothing to be afraid of, it may take a little more than factual information to succeed.

This research, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, involved a pilot experiment and three subsequent studies.

The participants, from a range of ages, demographics, and with a plethora of beliefs, were asked to rank how important science is for attaining truth. They were also mandated to explain how much they agreed with a range of statements, including “HIV causes AIDS” and “Human CO2 emissions cause climate change”.

The subjects were also given a chance to make up their own federal budget. After being presented with a pie chart made up of 2015’s data, they were then asked to rearrange it however they liked – the idea being that the greater the level of funding given to science, the more they explicitly supported it.

At the same time, the research team perused through pre-existing opinion surveys in order to establish whether or not correlations between belief systems and various skepticisms could be found.

Religious orthodoxy insists that a person’s faith is the primary source of truth, not science, so it’s not surprising that plenty of studies, including this one, have found that religious conservatism is linked to an unwillingness to accept science.

Previous studies have also found that, regardless of scientific literacy levels, conservativism is linked to a disbelief in anthropogenic climate change thanks to an unwavering adherence to partisan standpoints.

This team suspects that “conservatives worry about the economic and political ramifications of climate science”, which suggests that economic arguments touting the benefits of climate advocacy may be the best way to win skeptics around.

A lack of support and understanding of science clearly makes sense for best predicting GM skepticism, but the anti-vaxxer correlation to disgust-based moral purity concerns are somewhat bemusing.

Often appearing alongside strong religious inclinations, moral purity can loosely be defined as the unwavering belief that you’re doing the “right thing”. Considering that rejecting vaccines puts lives in danger, this strikes us as curious.

Source : iflscience

For most of you, the ability to recall what your parents faces look like is no bother at all. But for some, this task is impossible. A few years ago, researchers finally described a condition in which people cannot imagine things in their "mind’s eye", called aphantasia.

Only described recently, a lot of people have grown up assuming that when people asked them to “picture” something in their mind, they were simply talking metaphorically. But now researchers are starting to unravel the truth behind aphantasia, which could affect up to one out of every 50 people (although this is a rough estimate).

One of the hardest things to determine is whether or not aphantasia is actually real, something that a recent study published in the journal Cortex set out to solve. The problem stems from the fact that I cannot know what you can or cannot see, and vice versa. This means that when people are asked to imagine things and then describe that they see, there is no objective measure. We could be seeing the same thing and describing them differently, or seeing different things and describing them the same.

To test this, the researchers devised an experiment known as binocular rivalry. Participants were given a pair of 3D glasses, where one lens shows a green circle with horizontal lines and the other lens shows a red circle with vertical lines. The binocular rivalry illusion induces a state where the images in the two eyes are incongruent and what we see fluctuates between the different images, in this case the colored circles. Before putting these on, however, the participants were asked to imagine one of the colored circles beforehand. If they can indeed picture things in their mind, then the colored circle they were asked to imagine should become the dominant image they see. Those who could not imagine things reported no effect on the binocular rivalry illusion.  

So it seems that rather than there being a specific issue with self-reporting, those with aphantasia genuinely cannot imagine things in their mind. The next obvious question then is why this is the case, and if anything could be done to help those who have it.

The most commonly accepted explanation is that when we re-run a memory in our mind's eye, we attempt to reactivate the same patterns of activity as when the memory was formed. It is thought that somehow these neurological pathways are disrupted, or that the brain simply cannot reactivate these pathways in the same way.

If researchers are able to figure out if this is indeed the case, then it could be conceivable for a treatment to be developed that could help people imagine things. On the flip side, it could also be used to treat those with over-stimulated activity patterns, which some think might play a role in addiction, as well as some forms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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