Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.
“Psychology of Pseudoscience”
While teaching a course on research methods at the United States Air Force Academy, I concluded that the course needed a bigger emphasis on broad scientific reasoning skills.
So I incorporated material about the difference between science – the systematic process of evidence-based inquiry – and pseudoscience, which is the promotion of unreliable scientific claims as if they are more reliable than other explanations.
I wanted to understand why people promote claims that conflict with science. I jumped at the opportunity to develop this type of course at SUNY Cortland.
We look at some of the common scientific reasoning failures that pseudoscience exploits. These include hand-picking anecdotes to support a belief, developing a set of beliefs that explain every possible outcome, promoting irrelevant research, ignoring contradictory information and believing in unsubstantiated conpiracies.
We particularly highlight motivated reasoning, the tendency for people to process information in a way that helps them confirm what they already want to believe. For example, someone might accept scientific consensus about cancer treatments but question it with regard to vaccines – even though both are supported by strong scientific evidence and expert...
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