The denial of the effectiveness of vaccination has led to the fact that many seemingly conquered diseases are beginning to return. Denying the connection between HIV and AIDS in South Africa has resulted in 300 preventable deaths. How scientific ignorance threatens each of us and what to do about it? Scientists answer.
Obviously, the problem cannot simply be ignored, but what solution can science itself offer? Common sense dictates that more education and scientific literacy should be done. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that this approach is often counterproductive and only reinforces existing prejudices. The fact is that when a person is faced with facts that threaten his vision of the world, this only strengthens his beliefs (1). One of the first experiments to demonstrate this effect was conducted in 1975, when believing teenagers were presented with evidence (spurious) that Jesus did not rise from the dead. But this only strengthened their faith. When American Republicans are shown evidence of the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they are even more convinced that these weapons were there after all. When opponents of vaccination are shown that vaccines do not cause autism, they are even more afraid to give them to their children.
The futility of a frontal attack
There is some irony in the fact that the fight against scientific ignorance ignores scientific research about the nature of this ignorance. It cannot be defeated without removing the underlying causes – personal beliefs and ideologies, because of which a person denies scientific facts.
How to bypass this protection? As early as the 1960s, psychologists formulated the “vaccination theory”. By analogy with a vaccine against a disease, when a weakened form of a virus is injected into the body to develop immunity, the “vaccination against ignorance” consists in telling people about various pseudoscientific theories and myths and explaining what the mistakes are.
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- “The less we know, the more we can learn”
Take for example the myth that vaccines cause autism. The source was an article in the Lancet, the results of the study on which it was based were later found to be falsified and the article was retracted. And yet the myth proved surprisingly tenacious. Indeed, some children showed symptoms of autism around the same time they were being vaccinated. In this case, opponents of vaccines make a logical error “after that, therefore, because of that” (from Latin: “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”). While many studies have convincingly demonstrated the absence of a causal relationship between vaccination and autism.
The opposite method
Studies have shown that the method of learning through the analysis of typical mistakes is often more effective than ordinary lectures. For example, in one experiment freshmen in the physics department were given several online courses on Newton’s first and second law (2). Some of the courses were in the form of regular lectures, while others talked about how these laws can be misunderstood and what can be done to avoid these mistakes. Courses of the second type turned out to be more effective, especially for weak students.
In some educational institutions, this method is already actively used and certain topics are taught by the “contrary” method, showing the errors of pseudoscientific theories. For example, recently at the University of Queensland (Australia) they organized an online course that looks at the psychological reasons why people ignore scientific consensus and deny the reality of global climate change.
1. D. Muller et al. «Saying the wrong thing: improving learning with multimedia by including misconceptions». Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2008, № 24.
2. D. Bedford «Agnotology as a teaching tool: learning climate science by studying misinformation». Journal of Geography, online publication dated July 27, 2010.