Last year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report entitled "Under the Microscope," in which he criticized the National Science Foundation's (NSF) choices to fund any research he couldn't immediately understand as important. Coburn's report stands out for its willful ignorance. It caricatures research in a way only possible for someone unwilling to read a single page of the science he attacks. The report is also boring: knowledge-phobic descriptions of supposedly useless (but actually important) science are old among politicians, and are becoming repetitive as a growing sector of the American public develops a terrifying aversion to scientific evidence. Coburn in this case is playing the cheapest possible note to a polarized crowd.
Coburn's report is wrong and infuriating: that much has been discussed by others elsewhere. What I think is woefully missing from the conversation is what scientists should do about it. The consensus as I've experienced as a researcher is that (1) ignorant political attacks will not affect our ability to get work done, (2) that it is not our job to help the public understand our work, and that such outreach is unscientific, because it requires us to mischaracterize research. I think both claims are wrong, and potentially dangerous to the future of science.
First, political attacks now more than ever present a huge risk to science. It's true that Coburn follows a long line of politicians passing judgment over research they refuse to comprehend: Senator William Proxmire's similarly uninformed Golden Fleece award dates back to the '70s. Over the decades, political criticism has annoyed scientists, but rarely affected their work or funding; researchers often take this history to mean that such attacks should be shrugged off instead of worried over. But these are different times: the last decade has seen a tidal shift towards regressive anti-scientism. Belief in evolution is a strong litmus test for the public's understanding of science, and the percentage of Americans who roundly reject its premise (instead claiming that God created humans in our present form) is higher now (51%) than it was in 1982 (44%). In fact, rejection of science is becoming a surreal badge of authenticity among politicians such as Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry.
All this makes for a dangerous time for scientific progress, and particularly for behavioral and social sciences (in essence, the "human sciences" that focus on people's experience and actions) including my own field, psychology. This is because human sciences focus on topics -- social networks, emotion, memory, decision-making, race relations -- that, to the lay public, sound less scientific than cellular structure or electromagnetic force. People often feel as though they understand their minds (but not physics) already, and that the study of people and cultures can't tell them anything new. Although this belief couldn't be farther from the truth (more on this later), it is a real and frightening risk to the human sciences. Indeed, following his report, Coburn proposed completely eliminating NSF's funding for human sciences, citing just this type of thinking: "...do any of these social studies represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie as astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, and oceanography?" This opinion was echoed by Mo Brooks, the chair of a Congressional panel considering such cuts, who explicitly claimed that the human sciences have yet to prove their worth.
This perception could hardly miss the mark more. The human sciences' rigorous study of cognition and behavior often produces results that run completely counter to most people's intuitions. In fact, a broad message emerging from the last 50 years of psychological research is that many of our most critical mental operations--moral judgments, preferences, and the like--are not only driven by forces outside of our awareness, but also that we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge these forces. Instead, we come up with stories explaining our behaviors, leaving their true sources hiding à la Donald Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.
Nor is this insight purely academic. The human sciences' findings about the sources of our behavior can overwrite useless and often damaging assumptions and change policy. Here are two brief examples:
1. Insights from psychology can reform social programs: Oftentimes, social programs labor under misguided intuitions about the psychological sources of healthy behavior. Consider conformity, which has gotten a bad rap for over a century. The party line is that conformists are weak, and that their combined lack of backbone leads to everything from witch-hunts to financial bubbles to teenage smoking. Groups such as D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the long-running lesson program led by police officers, emphasizes that resisting peer pressure is critical to living drug- and violence-free lives. Youth voting campaigns have also appropriated this intuition, and encourage their audiences to buck the sorry trends set by their peers. These strategies frame healthy behavior as an individualistic step away from the crowd -- and they rarely work. Instead, research by social psychologist Robert Cialdini, political scientist Alan Gerber, and others shows that a more efficient strategy is to frame positive behaviors such as voting and responsible use of energy as something that others are doing, and harness the power of conformity to encourage such behaviors. This insight suggests critical changes to several large-scale programs. D.A.R.E., for example, receives huge amounts of government funding, and--more importantly--has reached tens of millions of children in the U.S. alone, despite little evidence that it does any good, and some evidence that it does some harm. Simple changes inspired by the human sciences could vastly improve the efficacy of such programs.
2. Behavioral research can improve education: Motivating children is among educators' most important jobs. Our culture approaches this job through the intuition that behavior is best motivated through reinforcement. We pay people for work, give children prizes for high test scores, and honor charitable donors, with the assumption being that these external validations will make people try harder and enjoy their work more. Although most of us wouldn't want to stop being paid, my colleagues Mark Lepper and Carol Dweck at Stanford describe ways in which particular forms of praise can backfire. Lepper showed that praise in the form of rewards can "overjustify" otherwise enjoyable activities: if I like math and you pay me for doing it, I will eventually conclude (perhaps implicitly) that I am only doing it for external rewards, and as a result will enjoy it less. Dweck showed that certain forms of praise can further induce a problematic "fixed mindset:" the idea that intelligence is fixed at birth rather than something that can be developed. If you tell me that I am good at math, I may start to believe that aptitude at math is a stable trait, and that my innate ability means that math will always come easily to me. When I face new challenges -- say, moving from arithmetic to algebra -- I might read my initial difficulties as a threatening sign about my innate abilities. Instead of piquing my interests, more difficult work may cause me to decide that I am no longer a "math person," and give up on the subject. Dweck has developed simple methods for encouraging people to adopt healthier ways of thinking, for example by praising children for effort, rather than skill or ability, which produce clear benefits in children's' long term motivation to learn, but they must be understood in order to be effectively put into use. Although she and others understand the potential value of such human-science inspired policy, the vast majority of our educational system has yet to absorb any of these insights.
Part of the fault lies with us, the researchers. Psychologists have told me time and again that it is not our job to communicate the relevance of our work to the public, and that such communication requires watering down our findings or dangerously prioritizing pop appeal over deeper truth-seeking. I disagree. Such communication is our job, inasmuch as professionals hoping to be funded by the public should be able to broadly explain the importance of their work. This is even more vital for the human sciences, which run an especially high risk of being misunderstood.
More importantly, human sciences, in many cases, require the public's understanding before they can actually change our lives for the better. People do not need to believe in propulsion physics for NASA to launch shuttles; people do not need to understand drug action for their medicine to be effective. But the human sciences' best bet at improving lives comes from changing people's behavior, and for that to happen those people have to understand the importance and clarity of these fields' findings. To move beyond ignorant, harmful dismissals of evidence like Rick Perry's failed abstinence education programs, and replace them with workable ways to improve health and society, the public must first believe that psychology and its sister fields can provide such improvements. Stoking that belief is among our most important work as researchers in the human sciences.
I am not completely sure that the worst prediction about the intellectual decay in this country will come true, but I prefer to take my data from election results, and the next election will, for sure, be interesting.
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The reason is pretty simple: religion is the domain of happy, joy, purpose, community. Science is the domain of how jets fly and what makes a GPS tick. Fun stuff for the minority of human beings.
Science cannot compete with that. The rational mind is powerless before emotion; because everything you DO is because you want to do it, and want is the domain of emotion.
So the short answer is y'all better stick some emotion into science, and I don't mean stupid stuff like polar bears falling from the sky. Yeah, it does work on some people but it really doesn't look very scientific. Almost as emotional and considerably more scientific is showing real polar bears struggling for existence. But how many people really care about polar bears, when in fact you are more likely to be eaten by one? Pick something else! Cute baby seals! Penguins! Oh, they are indeed doing that. Happy Feet was good; Happy Feet 2 dipped below my tolerance for absurdity so I haven't seen it. Krill don't talk. At all.
In my lab alone, we work tirelessly to learn the genetic basis behind heart disease - which takes half a million people away from their loved ones far too soon every year. And when I say tirelessly, I mean it. There isn't a person on our staff who puts in less than 60 hours a week, seven days a week, even on holidays, because our cell cultures need to be taken care of daily. We don't do it for big fat paychecks (trust me) or for glory, because the primary investigator we work under is the one taking home the big bucks and winning the prizes. We do it because when we have a success in the lab - we save thousands of lives.
When you say we don't have any "emotion" in our science, you are slapping every scientist working under an NIH grant (about 325,000 of us) right in the face.
You are oversimplifying the difference between science and religion
It was quite a revelation and opened a door to the study of geology and geography that continues these many decades later. I still believe in God but now I read the words differently -- the Earth was already here, not only that, the bible plainly states that the EARTH brought forth every living thing and makes no claims as to how long it took. Oh, sure, King James' translators do make that claim, but not apparently the original words.
There's quite a lot more but the point is that ADVOCATES frame the discussion in such a way that science and religion come into conflict unnecessarily, persuading people that they must choose one or the other. I choose both.
My mentor on this topic delved into Hebrew and discovered that the word that became "day" actually describes the division between periods of time. Apparently Hebrew has no concept of "day" as we do in English, a 24 hour period of repeating time. A more accurate rendering would be "epoch".
As the sun wasn't created until the third "day" they most definitely are not 24 hour solar days.
Your mileage may vary :-)
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You ARE being manipulated every day! Science not only can explain how and why, but that very same science is what is now facilitating new successes in marketing -- making some people VERY rich.
Where did "black hair on teenagers and only one eye visible" come from? Suddenly every teenage girl at high school looks like an escapee from a Tim Burton movie. Goth. Emo.
Science not only creates these things but can explain them; but it must be entertaining and relevant. Your PhD's are not usually going to succeed writing that stuff and the tech writers aren't always going to get it right. But that's how it has to be done.
What made it *interesting* was its claims -- nearly all people lie all the time. That's obvious right here on Huffpo comments of course, but it is so widespread that one must wonder whether this is deliberate or each person really does think he or she is telling the truth.
It also revealed that many persuasive strategies fail from the beginning. Most parents know that to forbid something to a teenager is almost to guarantee it; so the dire warnings on cigarette packages actually achieve a similar result.
My father did not want me to grow up to be an alcoholic. To ensure that, as a teenager he invited me to a shot of rum. It was horrible and I've never touched liquor since. He failed to mention that almost no one drinks it straight at room temperature.
In other words *I* made the decision based on my own observations. You want the public to accept your sciences? It must be made interesting, accessible and relevant. Quite frankly, irrelevant science does NOT need to be done at public expense.
My Navy career came at a time when the Navy decided leaders could be made, not born. This is only partly true IMO but the efforts to train leaders is not wasted on anyone. I am particularly fond of the Myers-Briggs MBTI. So far as it goes it has been quite useful and helps me understand why some situations just don't work, especially communications across the ESFJ -- INTP divide or any other equivalent divide.
The phenomenon was popularized in "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and the opening chapter was so spot-on accurate, and obvious, that I wondered how and why anyone could think otherwise. But the "E" types (MBTI) really do tend toward "nurture" rather than "nature" and "you can be anything you want to be." No. I will never be Arnold. My body is not made that way. But he will never have my mind.
When Climategate broke, I decided this was something that needed study. Until then I did not much concern myself; just as scientists dismiss the public, I tend to dismiss scientists until something suddenly appears on the horizon that is widely useful, such as GPS navigators, or the internet!
It was quite difficult and took more than a year to get basic science for me to understand the claims. This should not have been that difficult. It was made difficult because it was contaminated by advocacy rather than pure science. Too many people were trying to prove a theory rather than discover the truth.
That kind of thinking also pertains to the public, but needlessly so -- widely read journals do exist, National Geographic being an example, also Scientific American. A bit higher on the scientific scale, less publicly digestible, is Science News -- but even that maintains a level of concise reporting that preserves interest, reveals enticing bits of research on a wide variety of topics, often just conclusions -- but adequately cited for interested persons to do more.
interesting that th cases cited show that the latest research is what traditionally was done in villages and yet some moderns had critisized cultures fro conformity and lack of overt praise, from fathers in particular
i remember americans on TV years ago saying thta their father didnt say a word to them as they grew up but they felt his presence
is politicians fear of social science like the vatican's fear of the sun not revolving around the earth?
if people obey science then will thay obey or need politicains [ legislation] if they dont obey science will there be legislation to force them to obey?
and how many studies can people or journalist be aware of ; there are 100s of scientific journals; Newscientist website Sciencedaily website etc report dozens of studies daily
e.g. there are 600 studies [ published a few just presented at conferences 340 peer reviewed and published] about transcendental meditation (TM) Dr Dillbeck et al have gathered them the full technical writeup into 7 volumes ,many pages
so as a practical matter people have to rely on intuition on instinct on good judgement on memory etc at every instant of the day
every university needs a interdisciplinary studies department or college. one event therin would be scientists meeting journalists or the journalism department.
maybe in high school a daily class of synopsis of a dozen studies published that day ?