Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg have a fascinating article in last week's issue of Science: “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science” (link; subscription required). They review evidence from developmental psychology and argue that children (and adults) resist scientific findings when they bring intuitions about the world with them that are contrary to scientific findings.
Children's belief that unsupported objects fall downward, for instance, makes it difficult for them to see the world as a sphere—if it were a sphere, the people and things on the other side should fall off.
They go on to argue that part of the reason for cultural differences arises from differences in what those regard as common knowledge.
Everyone uses the word “dog” to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called. Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they “believe in electricity.”
Other information is explicitly asserted. For example, Bloom and Weisberg argue out that “children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose.” If they're right, then scientific evidence that plants and animals all share a single common ancestor billions of years ago runs counter to a deep-seated intuition. Faced with that conflict between a deep-seated intuition and scientific evidence, it's little wonder that many non-scientists feel uncomfortable accepting the scientific evidence, so they say that the “believe in evolution,” marking a tentative acceptance of the evidence in a way that they would never mark the evidence for electricity.
Rarely do we have the time or the expertise to fully evaluate information that is explicitly asserted. Instead we depend on the opinions of others whom we trust or on conceptual frames we already have to evaluate the assertion. The final paragraph of the paper sums it up well:
These developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States, with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. These concepts clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals, and (in the United States) these beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence, these fields are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.
Bloom and Weisberg don't provide explicit advice on how to overcome the resistance to scientific evidence for evolution, but it seems clear that attacks on “trusted religious and political authorities” aren't likely to help. Instead, as Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney pointed out several weeks ago in their Policy Forum in Science, our messages must provide positive reasons for accepting the scientific evidence for evolution, e.g., the importance of evolution to improving human health and well-being. They must be “framed”1 in ways that appeal to deep-seated intuitions compatible with scientific evidence and that emphasize that science is trustworthy.
1A few links about framing:
Leave a comment