Following the Covid pandemic on Twitter is a maddening experience and I, for my sanity, have been weaning myself off engaging with numerous Covid deniers who, despite their claims to be “scientific”, are anything but.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Stuart Richie’s excellent book, Science Fictions, a book about bias and malpractice in science that should be required reading for all undergraduates. I don’t think students really understand the underlying culture of science and they need to do so.
What emerges from interacting with Covid deniers on Twitter and from reading Richie’s book is that an awful lot of scientists bring a huge amount of unconscious emotional baggage to their work, and the idea of the disinterested scientist, making completely objective judgments about data, is a myth.
Instead, many highly successful scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, not to mention interlopers who have suddenly become experts on viral biology and epidemiology, is that motivated reasoning is almost the norm. People believe what they want to believe and then engage in elaborate post-hoc rationalisation to justify their original biased feelings. Sometimes this is due to a natural tendency towards contrarianism, other times it’s a a cynical exercise in making money, but most often I think it’s due to smart people’s deep-seated need to prove that they are cleverer than everyone else – it’s the “best boy/girl in the class syndrome”. In short, it’s usually about ego.
It’s no surprise to me that many of the Covid deniers on Twitter are actually quite successful people, albeit not in epidemiology or public health policy. Indeed, many of them, despite their impressive track record in other areas, often engage in highly simplistic black-box thinking and focus on correlations between variables rather than real depth of understanding. BUt that’s never the point. It’s all about demonstrating how clever they are.
We need to teach our students about the human side of science: the biases, the underlying psychology (e.g. the Hawthorne Effect which many education researchers ignore), and also about systemic problems like publication bias.
This won’t fix the problem of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias but it will at least create an awareness amongst students that science is not necessarily the dispassionate activity that many claim it is and that those who constantly claim to be acting “scientifically” are probably the very people who are most in the grip of motivated reasoning.
I think students would enjoy a module like this.
Tales from Academia 