What Motivates People to Question Science?

From the safety of eating genetically modified organisms to whether mask-wearing reduces the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, battle lines are drawn around scientific issues once resolved outside of politics. Positions reflect less about familiarity with the scientific topic than they do about core beliefs and worldviews, leading to what psychologists call a motivated view of science. In Chapter 6, “What Motivates People to Question Science?,” the authors explain that even when individuals attempt to be rational and make decisions justified with evidence, motivations can bias their reasoning. Forming one’s views on science through the prism of social groups is also problematic. The notion that junk science is whatever is inconsistent with your social group’s preferences reinforces a negative perception that science, as a whole, is untrustworthy. The authors explain that when individuals crowdsource their views on science by polling their social group, rather than evaluating science claims on their own merit, they do not always make scientifically sound decisions. The chapter provides suggestions for what individuals can do to avoid motivated views of science and what science communicators can do to convey science to a skeptical audience.

Pseudoscience as media effect

The popularity of the anti-vax movement in the United States and elsewhere is the cause of new lethal epidemics of diseases that are fully preventable by modern medicine [Benecke and DeYoung, 2019]. Creationism creeps into science classrooms with the aim of undermining the teaching of evolution through legal obligations or school boards’ decisions to present both sides of a debate largely foreign to the scientific community [Taylor, 2017]. And one simply has to turn on the TV and watch so-called science channels to be bombarded with aliens, ghosts, cryptids and miracles as though they are undisputable facts [Prothero, 2012]. Deprecated by its detractors, scientific proof is assimilated to become one opinion among others, if not a mere speculation. Worse, scientific data that challenge partisan positions or economic interests are dismissed as ‘junk science’ and their proponents as ‘shills’ [Oreskes and Conway, 2010]. By echoing such statements, some members of the media, often willing accomplices in conflating denial and scepticism, amplify manufactured controversies and cast growing doubt upon scientific credibility.

Psychological Assessments in Legal Contexts: Are Courts Keeping “Junk Science” Out of the Courtroom?

In this article, we report the results of a two-part investigation of psychological assessments by psychologists in legal contexts. The first part involves a systematic review of the 364 psychological assessment tools psychologists report having used in legal cases across 22 surveys of experienced forensic mental health practitioners, focusing on legal standards and scientific and psychometric theory. The second part is a legal analysis of admissibility challenges with regard to psychological assessments. Results from the first part reveal that, consistent with their roots in psychological science, nearly all of the assessment tools used by psychologists and offered as expert evidence in legal settings have been subjected to empirical testing (90%). However, we were able to clearly identify only about 67% as generally accepted in the field and only about 40% have generally favorable reviews of their psychometric and technical properties in authorities such as the Mental Measurements Yearbook. Furthermore, there is a weak relationship between general acceptance and favorability of tools’ psychometric properties. Results from the second part show that legal challenges to the admission of this evidence are infrequent: Legal challenges to the assessment evidence for any reason occurred in only 5.1% of cases in the sample (a little more than half of these involved challenges to validity). When challenges were raised, they succeeded only about a third of the time. Challenges to the most scientifically suspect tools are almost nonexistent. Attorneys rarely challenge psychological expert assessment evidence, and when they do, judges often fail to exercise the scrutiny required by law.