Why do people believe in things when the body of scientific evidence shows otherwise

[technodad]

This is not intended to be an attack on any denomination of belief. The aim of this thread is to try to understand why people choose to believe things, when there are far more likely explanations and why people choose to not trust the scientific opinion.

I am not particularly thinking about a discussion about religion because clearly "faith", some old books and preaching make a difference there (although, please discuss religion if it is relevant). I am thinking more about things like:

• People don't believe global is happening when the vast majority of the scientific community can provide evidence that it is.

• People believe in ghosts when their existance violates all the laws of physics and pretty much all "ghost events" (if not absolutely all) can be explained without mystery.

• People don't get their kids vaccinated (e.g. MMR), when it is clear that not vaccinating is orders of magnitude more dangerous than vaccinating.

• People think that palm reading, tea leaf reading, etc actually works...

• People believe in "alternative" medicines work, when every "alternative" medicine that actually works is now simple called "medicine"!

The rules are as follows:

1. You can say what ever you like, and I don't care if you insult me.

2. If you post something, you may have someone say something that challenges your deeply held beliefs, so please only post if this is acceptable to you.

3. No one is allowed to complain about anyone being horrible, or arrogant, based upon the fact that people will only post here if they are up for a debate (see 2).

4. There is no 4.

Do you mean it the other way around?

So why aren't they prescribed? Teas are categorically alternative - not medicines.

The 'Echinacea' research seems to have some issues, but if further research demonstrates its use that is good.

As for prescriptions, do we know for a fact that the NHS are not allowed to use these things in medicines?

Also is everything that works on prescription? I don't know how this is decided, but presumably when you read that X leads to a 4% reduction in diabetes then Y might lead to a 23% reduction or Z might be safer. Anyone have any solid information on the process?

Regardless of the details of the process a proven cure is medicine by definition. If you know that waving a crystal over your head or sucking a frog cures cancer, but it can't be tested because the crystals (or frogs) are shy about being looked at then that is alternative medicine.

As for "of course ghosts don't exist, it's not science" I doubt that is an exact quote. I have posted several times explaining why if there is zero evidence for something then it it irrational to just 'decide' to believe it exists.

Even the people who disagree with me do not live their lives randomly believing in things because they'd have all died long ago when they decided to believe they could fly or breathe underwater.

I was on a thread here the other week in which three people said they don't believe in climate change. I was genuinely surprised, and still don't understand how anyone could defend that viewpoint. I have several scientific-type friends who research various aspects of climate change and to me, it's almost irrefutable.

The only reason I can think of why people would want to deny the consensus regarding climate change is that it's a whole lot easier to say 'load of cobblers' than it is to take the thing seriously and change our lifestyles accordingly. The people I know who really know about this are actually pretty pessimistic about the future, not because it's completely impossible to avert the worst effects of climate change, but because averting such effects would mean radically more change than most people are willing to make, and more than any government is willing to back (because it'd make them lose the next election). It is a depressing outlook, and so yes, it'd be so much easier just to ignore it and say 'load of cobblers.' Some truths demand a response, that's the thing. If we aren't prepared to respond, ignore the truth (as we currently understand it within the consensus of scientific research.)

BOB

Cote - there are centuries of studies purposefully funded and done to create a racial hierarchy (as well as one for sex and gender, hierarchy of disabilities, and so on). Studies are still funded today with people trying create more evidence that social order is because of evolution and criminality is genetic. Anyone with an inch of understanding in history and social awareness can understand that these are not only bollocks but actively harmful. These aren't rags, these are University and academic communities funding, doing, and public displaying this information that continues this history. Science is not neutral, it is done and often bent by people to show the world as they see it.

If we cannot recognise the problems within the scientific community, if we handwave away their crimes as tabloid reporting and individuals, then how are we going to get things to improve. We can hardly get the academic communities to recognise it's debts and crimes as it is without suggesting that the wrongs they have done is only misreporting. While undereducation has a lot to answer for, the mistrust in academic circles is not entirely unjustified. Academic journals need to be as critically analysed for bias as tabloids and government reports.

Scientific racism has been largely discredited for almost a century. That particular claim re black people's brain size was discredited by a scientific study (as in, proper measurements and large sample size) in 1830s.

So yes, if someone is making the same claim now, I would conclude that he is a bigot who gets his "information" from dubious rags or bigot friends. What I would NOT conclude is that humankind can't count on science to understand the world.

I expect some research is funded hoping to find something to justify discrimination and such. Christians keep trying to prove prayer works for example :), But the nice thing about science is that in the long run that doesn't work.

Even if they fake the results eventually others do the same research and spot the lie.

BOB, as I understand it, the problem is not so much that rogue researchers falsify results and then good uns come along and put the record straight, it's more that the whole process of research is a bit miry from the outset. A friend of mine left pharmaceutical research because she was sick of being a pawn in the big pharma companies' capitalist game; the research that was being carried out was all to do with developing drugs to get the pharma companies more money, and it wasn't in the best interests of patients at all. She felt compromised morally so left to do something less ethically crap. Her reaction is not unusual (although most people in that world would be more likely to live with the moral crapness.)

The results she was churning out were scientifically valid, verifiable etc - but of course the answers you get depend entirely on the questions you ask, and in many areas of research, we are asking the questions we are being paid to ask, not the best ones for the wellbeing of people. That's partly why I'm slightly critical of some branches of research (archaeology is another, bit that's another story.)

"the research that was being carried out was all to do with developing drugs to get the pharma companies more money"

And? Why is that surprising?

"it wasn't in the best interests of patients at all"

Because the drugs they developed were not free? As long as the drugs work, how are they not in patients' interests?

Cote the drugs aren't always in the patients best interests they are in the pharmaceutical companies best interests.

They aren't interested in how well they perform, or if alternatives which don't benefit them finacially are more effective or if the side effects can cause more harm, just in their profits.

All research should be transparent in it's financial backing, methodically sound and all RCTs good, bad or inconclusive should be published and open to scrutinty and used for the good of medical advancement.

Sorry but I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.

"drugs aren't always in the patients best interests they are in the pharmaceutical companies best interests"

Their interests are best served by finding a highly effective drug that will benefit the highest number of people, to maximise their sales. Many pharma companies make this effort, which is why we have multiple drugs to choose from. That all looks pretty beneficial to the patient.

"They aren't interested in how well they perform... or if the side effects can cause more harm"

Of course, they are. More effective drugs get sold more and make higher reverts for their companies. Drugs with more side effects get sold less.

"or if alternatives which don't benefit them finacially are more effective"

Where there is an effective alternative, there is nothing stopping you from using it. It is not pharma companies' fault that they seek to make profits, and if they didn't, nobody else would sink multi-millions into developing a new drugs.

I think you are oversimplifying the Climate change deniers Holo. They are not all in a self induced state of denial. They would say that climate change is a natural occurrence. And they would be right. They believe a completely different set of scientific results which state that human contribution to climate change is minimal.

Diane, I take your point, but even if there is compelling scientific evidence to suggest that climate change us not linked to human activity, if it has equally been shown that we as a human race can do enough between us to stop its effects from damaging the world, why would we choose not to? In other words, is saying that climate change is a natural occurrence simply a way of dodging responsibility?

Also, going back to research methodology, how is it possible to determine that the changes to the earth's climate are not the result of human activity? Obviously you can look at patterns going back millennia, yes, but the thing is, since the Victorian period we are doing scientific things that have never been done before. We are doing things to the environment that have never been done before in the history of the planet. We have no 'control group' to test these changes against, no precedents to go by. I'm starting to sound like a stuck record, but since the Industrial Revolution it's all been about 'progress' and power and money. We simply haven't cared enough or thought enough about what we've been doing to the world.

Holo, I am with you. I believe that we are royally messing with the climate. I also agree that we are really quite good at changing our environment and ourselves for the best, despite the mistakes we make along the way.

The thing is, as the climate change movement has used science to back up it's claims, the opposition has begun to do the same.

As a poster upthread pointed out, without spending years studying and researching, we are reliant on the interpretation and reporting of others. All this can be bought or used for nefarious reasons. It is not the pure, logical, rational environment that some people think it is.

I wouldn't say that Harvard University was a dubious rag or a bigotted friend, and yet they're still back the 2009 dissertation that people who are Hispanic and Latin@ are far less intelligent than their White American counterparts. This study was approved, got through Harvard ethnics board, funded, and signed off on by multiple academics. Scientific racism is very much alive and flourishing, it is not a relic of the past.

Science is not and has never been neutral. It shouldn't be "counted on" to understand the world without critical analysis any more than any other source of information that humans observe, analyse, and produce. Just because it labelled as science and supported by the scientific community doesn't make it right or reliable in and of itself. Critical analysis that includes the wider context in which research is done and funded is vital to having an accurate picture of academic and the world.

Do you have a link to a 2009 Harvard study that concludes Hispanics as a race are less intelligent than Caucasians?

There are too many strands to this thread

By the way, I don't think anyone is saying that it is not possible for some scientists to receive funding from biased sources and produce biased results (and thereby damaging their credibity, presumably) but the body of scientific evidence In the thread title is made up of hundreds if not thousands of studies on each issue. There are meta-analyses that sort out the outliers that could be the "bought" research you speak of.

Take homeopathy. Study after study after study has shown that it works no better than placebo, on a wide variety of conditions and with myriad "remedies". There is an unclaimed USD 1mn prize for whoever proves homeopathy works with a scientific study. And yet, there are loads of people who somehow believe that homeopathy works. How? Why?

That is the OP's question and it is a valid one, regardless of whether there is some research out there that claims the contrary, with funding from biased parties.

Thing is, Cote, I'm not sure if it's that easy to work out where funding for research comes from. If there were a great big disclaimer at the top of every paper published saying 'This research comes to you courtesy of Shell UK' or whatever, it'd be easy to factor that in to how we interpret the results of the research. But...it doesn't, does it? We don't know where the funding for most research comes from, and of course there are lots of sources of income that we might thoroughly approve of (legacies to support women in science, for example.)

I don't know much about homeopathy, so won't comment on that. Milkhell is right; there are too many strands to this thread!

Because they want to believe.
The notion that there is life after death is a nice one. We'd all love it to be true; even sceptics would love it to be true.
People like to feel - and to be seen as - special. A stock phrase for mediums/psychics is "You're very psychic yourself. You should develop it" and variations thereof. It's meaningless flattery of course but the punters lap it up bless them.

Believers complain that sceptics see themselves as superior/more intelligent than believers, seemingly without considering that it is THEM - the believers - who see themselves as superior and somehow more evolved/spiritually developed.

The point was that we don't have to find out about the funding of each study. There are so many hundreds of studies on each subject that some outliers don't matter to the general direction of the body of evidence the thread title refers to.

Peer review, repeat experiments to reproduce results etc allow us to distinguish and disregard outliers.

Well I think the problem with pharma companies is that they need to get the drug approved so they sometimes present the data selectively. Was it the great cholesterol con that showed how the evidence around a beta blocker showed that they reduced mortality from certain things but had no impact on overall mortality? The company surpressed the latter information, so they weren't exactly lying- if you took the drugs you were less likely to have a heart attack than if you didn't but you were as likely to die of something as the control group.

1. you smell of poo

2. 1. with knobs on

3. no one has insulted me yet

4. why is there no 4, does it smell of poo too?

It was major global news, but I don't have it to hand any longer. It was crap science to anyone who knows the history and the bias behind IQ tests and so on, but it's held up as science and as part of the "body of evidence" about humanity. Hell, IQ tests are still held up as science with the body of evidence that shows their biased and unreliable nature.

And I used White American specifically, it was a study of the American population and even Harvard (which while I wouldn't call it a biased funding source even though it does have a history and current problem with racism) is aware that most Caucasians are not White, that using the term to mean White erases dozens of ethnic groups, and that it originating in meaning White by those wanting to make scientific racism sound more scientific along with the terms Mongloid and Negroid and create a second origin of a pure race outside of Africa. It's continual use to mean White supports scientific racism (as would using Mongloid and Negroid as racial terms).

Trying to erase the systematic problems of bias within science to "some" is like trying to erase institutional racism to "some" people or institutional sexism to just "some". If people within the same biased system see the same evidence, they will likely get the same biased result regardless of how often observations are repeated. We have major bodies of evidence that have been used to support the systems of oppression in society - many branches formed to do so - because they were done in a biased society. Any of their bodies of evidence must be analysed critically with that in mind, not taken as an absolute reflection of reality just because they were done in the name of science.

No worries, TheSpork. I found it for you:

That "study" you are talking about was one guy's doctoral dissertation. It wasn't a scientific study with a statistically significant number of subjects, proper measurements etc.

One man cooking up a theory for his academic dissertation does not mean all scientific method and process are corrupt and can't be trusted. Very far from it.