As I silently observe the spread of science denial, misinformation, and overall feelings of hatred on social media, I feel the urge to react, as a scientist and as a mother. Therefore, I have made up my mind, and I’m starting a weekly blog over my job as a researcher in developmental neuroscience to do something against misinformation, in a small way. I want to dedicate the first post to science denial and the relevance of science outreach, which is why I decided to take the leap and start a blog after all.
Sometimes the beliefs of others may confuse, alarm or amuse us, but as formerly fringe beliefs inch away from the fringe, we are faced with the uncomfortable reality of the threat they pose and the need to take them seriously. Popular movements centred on the rejection of established knowledge have increased over the years. Examples can be the denial of biological evolution, the fear that vaccines do more harm than good, and the rejection of human contribution to global warming and climate change. I think now more than ever scientists need to engage with the public to share their knowledge in a more direct way and avoid further spread of false beliefs. This is not always easy! On the one hand, the public can easily misunderstand science and use it to support false beliefs, while on the other hand, many in science are prone to ridicule some belief systems at the foundation of such popular movements and just avoid engagement in debates. As a result, lay people either perceive science as something distant and obscure, or embrace it without fully understanding its nature and fall often into oversimplification, which creates other misconceptions. One major step for us, as scientists, would be to try to fill the perceived gap between the public and us. We should then engage in reflective scrutiny to bridge seemingly fantastical reasoning with our own. Understanding the development and means of transmission of such movements might be crucial to put a stop to this phenomenon. One possible approach is to examine the cultural and cognitive environments associated with these movements.
But how did it all start? Well, it all started with science deniers. Generally, they are people with various motivations, going from faith to profit, or even just eccentricity. Whatever their motivation is, we might recognize these people by some clear and distinctive elements. First, the use of fake experts. Individuals who pretend to be expert in a specific field but whose views are totally inconsistent with established scientific knowledge. Second, impossible expectations of what research can deliver. An example? Scientific results have their intrinsic level of uncertainty, but this makes science deniers reject the understanding of a phenomenon that comes from it. Third, misrepresentation and logical fallacies. The opposite view is often misrepresented by deniers to make it easier to reject. And their logic, oh that’s real fun: Hitler supported antismoking campaigns; you support antismoking campaigns, then you are a nazi! Fourth, cherry picking. Many science deniers do cite empirical evidence; however, they do so in an invalid way! They tend, in fact, to select isolated papers supporting their views to challenge the general consensus in the field, and to highlight limitations in the weakest papers among those that support it to discredit the entire field. A very sad example in my field is the Lancet paper suggesting a very weak link between vaccines and autism. Of course, it doesn’t matter if the paper has been retracted or the suggested association totally rejected by extensive research, that paper came out and anti-vaxers still use it against immunization. Because there is then the final crucial element: conspiracy theories! When decades of research in the field support deniers’ opposite view, it’s not because scientists have independently investigated the phenomenon getting to the same conclusion, but it’s because all of them are part of the same super-secret conspiracy. Do you know how a scientific paper gets published? It goes through the so-called peer-review process. Scientists submit their paper to a journal, then the editor decides whether it's publishable or not (might take a month). If it passes through the editor's scrutiny, it goes to the reviewers (anonymous, independent and competitive researchers around the world), who need to verify the scientific validity of the study in terms of rationale, approach, sample size, statistical methods, conclusions and their relevance to the scientific audience and society in general. Well, I must say this process makes us sweat blood for months if not years to publish a paper, but for deniers that is our secret tool to suppress dissent. Then it just takes minutes to anyone to write a post on social media or an article on non-scientific web journals to get even more credibility than scientists do after years of efforts to get a paper done. Yes, it might take years to write a research article as we, vicious scientists, tend to care about what we do, to verify billion of times that we did it correctly, to spend all our free time reading literature to improve our work, to weigh every single word we write, to discuss it all together to be sure it’s meaningful. Nevertheless, it just takes a click to denigrate our work and spread misinformation!
I must say, I do not really care too much about the “original” science deniers, as they usually tend to know they’re wrong, but they have their own motives to spread misinformation. What I care about is other people who just believe it! Misjudgement of information is human, but it doesn’t mean that there is no solution, rather it means that there is no easy solution. Research has investigated the cognitive factors that regulate the impact of misinformation and found that it is resistant to correction. Therefore, the best way to avoid the spread of misinformation is to learn how to recognise misinformation in the first place. The elements above might then come in handy to identify deniers by their tactics. But above all, you should always, and I mean ALWAYS, verify the sources of everything you read and COMPARE DIFFERENT SOURCES. In fact, you cannot base all your knowledge about something just on one article, or articles from your same side in a debate. You need to know the counterpart and its reasoning. And please, always check the references to research papers when reading an article on a scientific matter on the web. If there are no references, it's not so "scientific" after all. There are also possible effective strategies for debunking misinformation, once exposed to it. People continue to rely on misinformation because of familiarity due to overexposure, as they hear it soooo many times. It could be also due to simplicity of that reasoning, or just ideology and personal worldview. In fact, we all have a confirmation bias that makes us accept more easily information in agreement with our own ideology or worldview. An example? The director of the NIH Evangelical Christian advocating for science. To act against misinformation, we should avoid reinforcement of the false belief by providing people with alternative explanations, the correct facts, without repeating the false belief itself. Then, to increase receptivity, scientific evidence against the false belief should be easy to understand and possibly framed according to the worldview of the audience. The best solution remains, however, a healthy scepticism, which should be fostered from a very young age.
We are at the end of this first, very long, post of mine, and all of it just to provide you the rationale for this blog. I don’t want to be one of those scientists locked up in their crystal palace, as they say. I'd like to do something against the spread of misinformation and I'd like to give my little contribution to the diffusion of scientific evidence in a more straightforward way. In particular, I want to share my experiences as a researcher in a very sensitive field as it can be developmental neuroscience, especially for new moms as I am, trying to do the best we can for our children but constantly receiving contrasting information all over the place. My attempt is to share with you, possibly in a clear and simple way, some scientific knowledge on autism, early development and neuroscience in general. Hope you will find it interesting!
P.S. I’ll always cite my references for you to check.
Pascal Diethelm, Martin McKee, Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?, European Journal of Public Health, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 2–4, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckn139
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
Weaver, K., Garcia, S. M., Schwarz, N., & Miller, D. T. (2007). Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(5), 821.
Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S., Swire, B. et al. Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18: 570. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0065-1
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612451018
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