Ridiculing the Experts Who Just Might Save Us: Why Is This Happening?

Years ago, when I was teaching a course on nonverbal communication, I read a research report on a topic relevant to that class. It had just been published. So that day, instead of starting with the lecture I had planned, I told the students all about the new study.  It is a small thing, I know, but I was proud of myself. I thought the students would appreciate having access to the most up-to-date findings in the field.  Maybe some of them did. But one of the students was indignant, and she let me know it. The new findings contradicted what she had just read in the textbook I assigned for the course. She thought she should be able to rely on the textbook to tell her the truth about nonverbal communication.  At first, I was stunned. That’s not how science works. We do research to improve on our understanding of humans and of the world. We figure out what we got wrong previously, and why. Now I realize I need to be a better teacher of the process and philosophy of scientific knowledge, and I am grateful to her. Misunderstanding of Scientific Knowledge The matter of distrusting scientific information, and the people who have spent a lifetime in their field of work earning their status as experts, is no longer just an intellectual curiosity. We are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., infections are increasing at a frightening rate. The accumulated science of infectious diseases, as well as the latest research on this particular coronavirus, may offer some of t...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Ethics & Morality Memory and Perception Minding the Media Policy and Advocacy anti-intellectualism coronavirus COVID-19 Fox News Masks Misinformation pandemic Source Type: blogs