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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Real Reason Many Americans Seem So Stupid (But Aren't)
http://www.alternet.org/environment/real-reason-many-americans-seem-so-stupid-arentFor many years, the US National Science Foundation, more recently with the help of the General Social Survey, has asked the public the same true or false question about evolution: "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." And for many years, the responses to this question have been dismal. In 2006, 2008, and 2010, for instance, less than half of the public correctly answered "true."
In 2012, however, the NSF and GSS conducted an experiment to try to better understand why people fare so badly on this evolution question. For half of survey respondents, the words "according to the theory of evolution" were added to the beginning of the statement above. And while only 48 percent gave the correct answer to the unaltered question, an impressive 72 percent correctly answered the new, prefaced version.
So why such a huge gap? Perhaps the original question wasn't tapping into scientific knowledge at all; rather, it was challenging the religious identity of creationists who think the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Presented with the new phrasing, however, even many creationists know what the theory of evolution states; they just deny that it is true. So are these people really "scientifically illiterate," as many in the science world might claim, or are they instead something else?
This is a vital question in the field of science communication, because at its core is the issue of whether we are dealing with mass public scientific illiteracy on the one hand (which presumably could be fixed by education), or with something much deeper and more intractable. What's more, this problem isn't confined to evolution. The issue of climate change may be very similar in this respect. Ask a polling question about climate change in one way, and you may cause conservatives to reassert their ideological identities, and reject the most important finding of climate science (that humans are causing global warming). But ask it in another way and, well, it may turn out that they know what the science says after all (even if they don't personally believe it).
Orsino
(37,428 posts)...and consistent with every other branch of science, and is therefore to be trusted and taught, is just another kind of scientific illiteracy. A mind that assigns less credibility to scientific theory than to fairy tales is emblematic of even deeper illiteracy.
ladjf
(17,320 posts)De Leonist
(225 posts)A person's mental health often has very little to do with what they know or don't know in terms of Science or any other academic field.
Rather what we see in America today is a population where around half it's total that is to some varying degree or another in constant survival mode. This leads to a very large amount of people who are too focused on their more immediate needs to prioritize things like scientific literacy.
nt
rock
(13,218 posts)yep, stupid.
Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)particularly in a partisan and divided society is that people can often have a visceral response to the question.
Read an article recently where in a poll, people were given the performance data for incandescent and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Big majority preferred the CF bulbs. But when they start loading in words like "environmentally friendly" respondents who self identified as conservative leaned (slightly) toward the incandescent bulbs because "saving the environment" sounded liberal to them.
Other polling show that people's disapproval of the ACA drops drastically when they are polled on all of the ACA's features without naming the legislation itself in the question.
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)Identity politics, based on ideological beliefs that have been cognitively entrenched and are filtered through all kinds of socio-cultural prejudices and biases.....that's what we're dealing with here.
The person who can't ever admit to being wrong about something, especially when it is something important-regardless of their IQ or their educational background-is the biggest fool of them all.
Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)It's become a "We're right and You're wrong" contest. A zero-sum game where if I'm not winning (i.e., enforcing my religious beliefs on others) then I must be losing.
nolabels
(13,133 posts)I am glad they had another scientific study of it but as a layman and mostly a loner it seems very predictable. The lazy mind or those too afraid to go against tradition have a long tradition of this type of behavior. The common characteristic of this thinking is expectation of something outside of them to change the world they see around them.
It's hard to let go of a lie when you get so attached to needing it to be true. It's those chemicals in the brain they are craving, it's a good feeling they are given that is burnished over and over again till they get to the point they need it and make it just by thinking about it. It's a crutch, it's a light forward and way of belonging to something. It's not a disease, it's the way we are wired but our society has so evolved that it is possible for our large brains to work around it and keep it in tow at the same time. That's where the lazy part comes in.
Don't try get or go through them, just go around them because everybody knows how hard it is to get a junkie to kick the habit
Gidney N Cloyd
(19,781 posts)The Magistrate
(95,237 posts)hootinholler
(26,449 posts)Same as it ever was, with apologies to The Talking Heads.
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)Arugula Latte
(50,566 posts)Morning in America, shining city on a hill, no global warming, they'll great us as liberators, etc. etc. It helps control the masses and enrich the one percent.
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)...and that they are the hardest-working, God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth patriotic people around.
Meanwhile, pay no attention as the environment is destroyed, public education is dismantled, health care is inadequate, wages are repressed as the cost of living goes higher, and the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else grows ever larger.
leftstreet
(36,078 posts)devils chaplain
(602 posts)etherealtruth
(22,165 posts)Willful ignorance is far worse than ignorance based on lack of exposure to information
Archae
(46,262 posts)People are lazy, and evolution is a difficult concept to understand properly.
Our mass media usually doesn't help, when news agencies crow about the latest "missing link."
While "missing link" is still popular, it's scientifically bogus.
But here come the creationists, "Gawd dun it!"
Simple, right?
ancianita
(35,812 posts)worldwide paradigms; 70% think through received local knowledge.
30% adopt new info through the 'openness' portals of their reality maps; 70% make new info fit their smaller received local reality maps, or they deny new info's existence.
30% expedite human evolution; 70% stagnate human evolution.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)back in 1880-1930 it was the US that was dominated by philosophies literally called Pragmatism and Progressivism, and Britain that was sending its officers to Gallipoli with Herodotus as their guidebook, declared that "war is the foundation of all the arts," scared themselves into WWI thanks to the yellow media, supported the Yishuv because they believed the British were the Lost Tribes, and invented modern creationism and flat-Earthism (though they had Chesterton to balance all that out): heck, we even have daylight savings time because some useless crank slapped a Union Jack on a pamphlet
alarimer
(16,245 posts)Americans are stupid, provincial, self-centered jackasses who think the whole world should revolve around the US.
Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)That the thing that really chaps my ass.