Do you friends have such an experience, bombarded by the information of the family group, click to see that it is the parents who are forwarding various "strange health knowledge".
Sometimes, in order to dispel rumors, the light is to launch a "debate game", and the heavy is directly kicked out of the group chat by the parents
Alas, it is obviously pseudoscience, why is it so difficult to convince them?!!
Today, let's take a look at the "backfire" effect in science communication, and after reading it, you may understand why we don't actually know what we think we know.
What if the science we know about the science disseminated is more contextual than universal? Or, more bluntly, what if the results of science communication experiments are not widely applicable in contexts other than those in which they are conducted?
A great scientific experiment means you try something, then publish your findings and methods, and then wait for someone else to repeat it and prove that your findings are valid.
Back in 1989, the scientific community was thrilled by the prospect of cold nuclear fusion, a nuclear reaction that occurs at room temperature, which almost meant unlimited cheap energy!
But when hundreds of scientists who wanted to participate in the experiment discovered that no one could replicate Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons' experiments, the two scientists went from being superstars in the science media to being "embarrassed" by the science media.
If the vast majority of science communication theories are difficult to replicate, how should we view the gold standard for all the science communication theories we have studied? Let's start with this research project.
The study was done in collaboration with more than 270 psychology researchers who came together to try to replicate the results of 100 key psychological studies. The studies were published in three advanced psychology journals (Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning. Memory, and Cognition））。
The researchers matched different experiments with different teams in an attempt to get the best match they could get. They tested it as close to the original experiment as possible.
They followed the steps taken by the scientists who originally published the findings, recruited subjects, tested them, and analyzed the statistics. What did they find? They found that only 40 percent of them could be copied, which was actually 39 out of 100.
Source pexls
The implications of this work are profound because it has potential implications for many social science studies, including science communication studies, that are rarely replicated.
But that's the nature of the social sciences. Research is rarely repeated, not only because repeating other studies doesn't really reward you, but in fact you may be punished with an inexplicable punishment for it — often not being published because your research is considered "not new."
This means that much of the research we hold of as the gold standard may actually only apply to current and local circumstances and contexts, rather than universally.
Can you hear the collective voice?
As is known, more in-depth studies of the Repeatability Project examined other research priorities and uncovered more questions. It is worth mentioning a 1999 study called "Stereotypical Susceptibility: Identity Significance and Its Transformation in Quantitative Manifestations". The study found that:
...... Compared to the control group with inactive status, Asian women performed better on math tests when their racial identity was activated, but worse at activating gender identity... When a particular social identity is significant at the implicit level, the effect has changed in the direction predicted by the stereotype.
In short, if Asian women are viewed from an Asian perspective (linked to the stereotype of being good at math), they perform better on math tests than those who look at Asian women from a female perspective (stereotyped as having low mathematical skills).
This seems obviously worth a try — especially since it's often cited in textbooks. So the study recruited two different teams, one in Georgia and one in California. They repeated the test, but found different results.
Teams from Georgia found similar results, but teams from California found they couldn't replicate them. How should we view these findings? Does it reinforce the so-called replication crisis or does it indicate that it is only intermittent?
This, of course, has spawned many defensive studies in the field of psychology, trying to argue why the results of the study are not a crisis if they cannot be replicated.
Others delve deeper into the questions of context and context and how they affect research. For example, Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues who studied the findings of the reproducibility project said many studies failed because it was difficult to reconstruct exactly the same conditions as the original study at another time and place.
The strangest man in the world
This leads to the second study. A key figure in this study is Joe Henrich, who has been conducting research in South America since the 1990s.
An anthropologist at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), instead of doing the typical observational work like most anthropologists, he decided to do a behavioral experiment. He used a game called Prisoner's Dilemma to examine how the Machiguenga of Peru, whom he studied, would react to this.
In the game, there are two players who remain anonymous. The player gets a sum of money, let's say $200. He is told that he must give some money to Player Two. Player two can choose to accept or reject money. But the key to the game is that if player two refuses to accept the money, they won't get it.
When experimenting with the game in North America, player one usually comes up with a five-to-five split. However, if player two's dividend is less than 50%, even if neither of them gets the money, he or she usually chooses to refuse to accept the money to punish player one.
But among the Machiguaga, player one offers much lower amounts, while player two almost never refuses, no matter how small. Don't the Maquiguagas know that they are violating some of the principles of basic economic and psychological theories?
Further studies conducted in Africa and South-East Asia found that the results were still different. For example, in a society that places a high priority on giving gifts to gain favor, a player might give two 60% or more of the money. Player two will still refuse. In North America, this is often a difficult phenomenon to observe.
A 2008 survey of six top psychology journals found that between 2003 and 2007, about 96 percent of subjects tested for psychological research were Westerners, about 70 percent of whom were from the United States. To put it another way, 96 percent of these studies came from countries that accounted for only 12 percent of the world's population.
Through a collaboration with two researchers at the University of British Columbia, Steven M. Working with Ara Norenzayan, J. Steven J Heine and Ara Norenzayan, the team began to conduct a broader study of different cultures, finding that there was a group of people who were particularly unusual when compared to the large populations of the world.
The cognition, behavior, and motivation of this group of people are almost always at one end of the human bell curve. They even titled the research paper "The Weirdest Man in the World."
As you might have guessed, the "strangest people" are North Americans (WEIRD is also an acronym for white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). They are at the heart of global social science experiments.
Admittedly, many countries are not as different from North Americans as they admit, but the impact of the study is very worrying for science communicators working in regions such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the Pacific. But testing is expensive and time-consuming, while downloading research papers is cheap and relatively fast. So what should be done for individuals?
The cola and mantos effect
In isolation, the results of these two research projects are quite staggering, but when you mix them together, they are like the effects of putting a Mantos into a Coke bottle that all science communicators have tried at some point.
Add Mantos to Coke Source: See watermark
Science communicators really have to start asking themselves how much of the gold standard of science communication applies not only to different times and places, but also to different cultures.
This is how people react: when they see facts that show that they are wrong in some way, they stand firmer in their truth.
The main implication of the backfire effect principle is that correcting "fake news" is not only meaningless, but actually makes things worse.
Much of the research work on the principle of the backfire effect was done by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, who published a highly cited paper in 2010 titled "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." It has become a fairly well-established principle and has had a major impact on how we communicate scientific facts to those who have their own view of truth.
For many science communicators, it's even a bit like a mantra: If people disagree on issues like climate change, baby vaccines, or genetic technology, you can't change their minds.
After all, we know that these people have alternative beliefs and alternative facts that support their own worldview, and they will believe in those beliefs and defend them in the face of any counter-evidence.
As Daniel Engber's online publication Slate writes, "... The United States seems to have shed its rational anchor and is rapidly sliding into a 'post-fact era'. He also quoted Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, one of the first to lament that the internet was making us dumber.
Back in 2007, he argued that the Internet was clearly to blame for the disaster, as the online community acted as an echo chamber for those who shared their faith.
But there's a big problem here. Because it fits what we want to believe, do we take this study and many other similar studies? Does it really confirm our own perceptions of "other people" who are different from us and who don't believe what we believe?
If you tell people one thing, they're likely to believe the opposite, is it really that simple?
In fact, are we as at fault in choosing what we want to believe as we are in those we criticize for believing what we don't believe? The two researchers, Tom Wood and Ethan Porter, repeated the Nyhan and Leffler study and found that the backfire effect may not be as common.
Daniel Ember presents a conundrum:
What if research in this area, like many other fields in the social sciences, tends to produce false-positive results?
Do you want to deny this possibility? Are you going to say that this doesn't match your own experience? Or do you want someone to prove it before you accept it?
Wood and Porter recruited more than 10,000 subjects to correct information about the misleading claims of politicians from two major U.S. political parties on 36 different topics. In fact, they even used the same footage and participants as the 2010 Nyhan and Leffler study.
They found that there was a backfire effect on only one issue, namely the misconception of weapons of mass destruction. Even so, no backfire effect was found when corrections were modified in simpler terms.
What they found was that in all statements, giving people corrective information actually kept their beliefs away from misinformation. They also found that there is an effect between a person's political ideology and the way they perceive the rhetoric of different politicians, as in the original study, but they found that the effect was not large.
In the United States, for example, there is 85 percent correction level among liberals, 96 percent among moderates, and 83 percent among conservatives. Their conclusion is simple: This backfire effect is not as common as existing studies.
They're not the only researchers who are more concerned about the psychological biases we might have about studying people's psychological biases.
In 2014, Andy Guess and Alex Coppock of Columbia University examined a classic 1979 study on the death penalty and found that adding facts to a discussion added to the divide.
They tested 683 subjects recruited via the internet for their initial study, and then further tested how different types of evidence influenced the views of another 1,170 subjects on the issue of minimum wage, and another 2,122 on gun control.
Yes, you guessed it, none of these studies have found that people become more stubborn when confronted with refuting information.
Instead, they found what Coppock called "gorgeous parallel updates." This means that both sides that take different positions on any issue will adjust their beliefs to better adapt to the facts, rather than the other way around. The backfire effect is only an exception, not a universal phenomenon, and should be seen as a "truth hypothesis" because it makes people feel right, not that it really is.
See here you get it? The family group to dispel rumors, the task is heavy and the road is long, as long as you persevere, show your parents more official reliable news, it will definitely have an effect.
END
This article is reproduced from/Bring Science Home
Source:Science of Science Communication
Editor-in-charge/Konishi said
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