College Fix
Key Takeaways
- A recent study disputes the notion that conservatives are
inherently more rigid in their beliefs, suggesting both conservatives
and progressives exhibit similar psychological traits.
- The
study, involving collaboration among professors, aimed to address biases
in the social sciences' examination of political ideology and
emphasized fair testing of the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis.
- Findings
indicate that while conservatives can be rigid, this is only sometimes
and to a minor degree, and political extremity at both ends correlates
with less evidence-based belief updating.
- The research
highlights the importance of ideological diversity in academia,
suggesting that the lack of varied viewpoints may influence how
political ideologies are studied.
Read more
Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Snopes and the Associated Press have been given power over social media
to define truth but they are often wrong and the consequences are grave.
Before the 2016 election, people freely chose their sources for
information, had discussions about the veracity and accuracy of those
sources if they chose to question them, and then formed opinions based
on those discussions. Now, however, this choice and discussion is
quickly fading away and is being replaced by a seeming ministry of truth
made up of ostensibly objective media outlets like Politifact, Snopes, and the Associated Press.
For years, Snopes has been debunking articles and giving them
questionable ratings because of their content, but this was never a big
deal because readers like ours are smart enough to question Snopes and
read the facts for themselves to make up their own minds.
While our readers are still smart enough to check multiple sources
and keep us honest, the power of Snopes and the rest of the “fact
checkers” has grown immensely and ominously. Now, Snopes, the AP, and
Politifact have woven themselves into the fabric of social media and
have become the be all end all of “truth.” As a result of this new cozy
relationship, they have the power to silence anyone they deem to be
false—facts and reality be damned.
What’s more, if these new arbiters of online truth do deem content to
be “false,” whether it is or not, the victims have zero recourse to
challenge them and will see social media reach—no matter if it took
years to build up—throttled and subsequently turned off.
But they are doing a service to weed out fake news, right? While
Snopes and the like certainly do debunk many fake stories, the idea of
solely relying on them for the truth is chilling.
Read more
Tom Stafford
Research Digest
We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than
everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct
opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person. No
psychologist would be surprised that people who are convinced their
beliefs are superior think they are better informed than others, but
this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actually
better informed on the topics for which they are convinced their opinion
is superior? This is what Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi set out to
check in a series of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The researchers distinguish “belief superiority” from “belief
confidence” (thinking your opinion is correct). Belief superiority is
relative – it is when you think your opinion is more correct than other
people’s; the top end of their belief superiority scale is to indicate
that your belief is “Totally correct (mine is the only correct view)”.
The pair set out to find people who felt their beliefs on a variety
of controversial political issues (things like terrorism and civil
liberties, or wealth redistribution) were superior, and to check – using
multiple choice quizzes – how well they were informed on the topics
about which they held these superiority beliefs.
Across five studies Hall and Raimi found that those people with the
highest belief superiority also tended to have the largest gap between
their perceived and actual knowledge – the belief superior consistently
suffered from the illusion that they were better informed than they
were. As you might expect, those with the lowest belief superiority
tended to underestimate how much they knew.
Read more
Henry Bauer
scimedskeptic.wordpress.com
o be certain about things is reassuring. It allows feelings of safety, security.
For knowledge, for understanding the world, humankind seems to have
turned at first to what could be inferred from the spirits of things —
the spirits associated with or inherent in everything: in mountains, in
trees, in bodies of water. The spirits could be understood, at least
partly, because they were similar to people in having emotions and
desires.
Eventually — quite recently, only a few thousand years ago — the
plurality and hierarchies of spirits and gods yielded to monotheistic
religions in most parts of the world. Even more recently, and only in the most powerfully developed countries, religion yielded to science.
That is to say, traditional religion yielded to scientism, the religion of science.
Even the monotheistic gods have emotions and desires, but science
doesn't. So knowledge became entirely impersonal, at least in principle.
Nowadays, then, for real certainty we look to science.
"Scientific" stands for unquestionably true. Science is the gatekeeper
of truth. "Science" and "scientific" are mediators of being certain,
being sure about something.
Consequently, a great deal of arguing to-and-fro has to do with whether something is scientific:
- Does it emerge from use of the scientific method?
- Is it reproducible?
- Is it falsifiable?
And if a claim doesn't satisfy those criteria or equivalent ones then
it's dismissed as not scientific, or as pseudo-science, or as just plain
not to be believed.
That's an indirect way of judging believability, and arguments about
whether something is scientific can be and have been highly abstract,
complicated, and sophisticated as technical philosophical discourse
tends to be.
Instead, why not go directly at the issues of certainty and truth and
just ask, what does it take to be justifiably and reliably certain about
something?
Read more
