Monday, August 12, 2019

American Psychological Association: Why don't you skeptics believe in science?

Well, they don't put it exactly that way, but it's what they mean:
The researchers surveyed nearly 700 participants from the U.S. Half were given surveys about their belief in science (e.g., “How credible is the medical data that germs are a primary cause of disease?” and “How certain are you that physicists’ theory of gravity accurately explains why objects fall when dropped?”) and their belief in climate science (e.g., “How credible is the climate science data that ocean temperatures are rising?” and “How certain are you that global warming explains many of the new weather patterns we are seeing today?”). The other half was only surveyed about their belief in climate science. All participants reported if they considered themselves politically liberal, moderate or conservative.
“As we predicted in our pre-registration, conservatives reported a greater belief in climate science if they were asked questions first about their belief in other areas of science,” said Robinson. “For climate skeptics, it likely became awkward to report on our survey that they believed in science while at the same time, denying the findings of climate science. That dissonance led many to adjust their beliefs to show greater support for the existence of climate change.” 
So they compared climate science to the theory of gravity and germ theory.  One wonders why they didn't compare it to phrenology and phlogiston.  I mean, we're talking about a field of science that poorly predicts the world, so the theory of gravity isn't really the closest analogy.

I can't wait until these APA morons are the ones deciding whether a Red Flag law applies to you or not.

4 comments:

Old NFO said...

Push poll by another name... Sigh...

SiGraybeard said...

Remember - the most downloaded paper in science is John Ioannidis' paper on why most published results are false.

There's a massive difference between predicting an object in free fall with predicting climate. The simplest difference is their own “How certain are you that global warming explains many of the new weather patterns we are seeing today?” Weather isn't climate. Climate is a long term average of weather. The definition for "long term average" for climate is on the order of 50 years so no storm, or any weather can be definitively said to be climate change and not just odd weather.

McChuck said...

Of course, the APA isn't exactly known for being scientific. At all.

Richard said...

There you go again with "morons". They are evil.

To make the test fair, they could have asked questions about phrenology or scientific race theories of yesteryear but they chose not to do that.