[tt] Science: Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

[Premise Checker]

This is a great article! I would only have noted that our default ways 
of looking at the word and its processes go back to the Old Stone Age, 
long before the notion of experimental science took root. These ways 
were "good enough" for their time. The authors are quite right to note 
that when we believe what "science teaches" we are mostly accepting 
the credibility of scientists. The should be questioned, too, esp. 
when they might seem to have interests at stake, which they will. They 
are products of the Old Stone Age, too.

Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science
Science 18 May 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5827, pp. 996 - 997
Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg

Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from 
assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in 
young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, 
both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that 
clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and 
psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from 
other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the 
trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to 
science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where 
nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in 
common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: 
paul.bloom at yale.edu

Scientists, educators, and policy-makers have long been concerned 
about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas (1). In 
a 2005 Pew Trust poll, 42% of respondents said that they believed that 
humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the 
beginning of time, a view that denies the very existence of evolution 
(2). Even among the minority who claim to accept natural selection, 
most misunderstand it, seeing evolution as a mysterious process 
causing animals to have offspring that are better adapted to their 
environments (3). This is not the only domain where people reject 
science: Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical 
interventions; the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences; the 
existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies; and the 
legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination (4). This resistance to 
science has important social implications, because a scientifically 
ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global 
warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell 
research, and cloning (1).

Here we review evidence from developmental psychology suggesting that 
some resistance to scientific ideas is a human universal. This 
resistance stems from two general facts about children, one having to 
do with what they know and the other having to do with how they learn.

The main source of resistance concerns what children know before their 
exposure to science. Recent psychological research makes it clear that 
babies are not "blank slates"; even 1-year-olds possess a rich 
understanding of both the physical world (a "naïve physics") and the 
social world (a "naïve psychology") (5). Babies know that objects are 
solid, persist over time (even when out of sight), fall to the ground 
if unsupported, and do not move unless acted upon (6). They also 
understand that people move autonomously in response to social and 
physical events, act and react in accord with their goals, and respond 
with appropriate emotions to different situations (5, 7, 8).

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to 
understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they 
also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of 
the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. The 
problem with teaching science to children is thus "not what the 
student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual 
frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we 
are trying to teach" (9).

Children's belief that unsupported objects fall downward, for 
instance, makes it difficult for them to see the world as a sphere—if 
it were a sphere, the people and things on the other side should fall 
off. It is not until about 8 or 9 years of age that children 
demonstrate a coherent understanding of a spherical Earth (10), and 
younger children often distort the scientific understanding in 
systematic ways. Some deny that people can live all over Earth's 
surface (10), and when asked to draw Earth (11) or model it with clay 
(12), some children depict it as a sphere with a flattened top or as a 
hollow sphere that people live inside.

In some cases, there is such resistance to science education that it 
never entirely sticks, and foundational biases persist into adulthood. 
One study tested college undergraduates' intuitions about basic 
physical motions, such as the path that a ball will take when released 
from a curved tube (13). Many of the undergraduates retained a 
common-sense Aristotelian theory of object motion; they predicted that 
the ball would continue to move in a curved motion, choosing B over A 
in Fig. 1. An interesting addendum is that although education does not 
shake this bias, real-world experience can suffice. In another study, 
undergraduates were asked about the path that water would take out of 
a curved hose. This corresponded to an event that the participants had 
seen, and few believed that the water would take a curved path (14).


Fig. 1. (A and B) Alternative intuitions about the movement of a ball 
out of a curved tube [from (13)]. [View Larger Version of this Image 
(23K GIF file)]


The examples so far concern people's common-sense understanding of the 
physical world, but their intuitive psychology also contributes to 
their resistance to science. One important bias is that children 
naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, 
4-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to 
go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity called 
"promiscuous teleology" (15). Additionally, when asked about the 
origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide 
and prefer creationist explanations (16). Just as children's 
intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to 
accept that Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about 
agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes 
of evolution.

Another consequence of people's common-sense psychology is dualism, 
the belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain 
(5). This belief comes naturally to children. Preschool children will 
claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, 
typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving 
math problems. But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not 
involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a 
kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth (5, 17). 
Similarly, when told about a brain transplant from a boy to a pig, 
they believed that you would get a very smart pig, but one with pig 
beliefs and pig desires (18). For young children, then, much of mental 
life is not linked to the brain.

The strong intuitive pull of dualism makes it difficult for people to 
accept what Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" (19): 
Dualism is mistaken—mental life emerges from physical processes. 
People resist the astonishing hypothesis in ways that can have 
considerable social implications. For one thing, debates about the 
moral status of embryos, fetuses, stem cells, and nonhuman animals are 
sometimes framed in terms of whether or not these entities possess 
immaterial souls (20, 21). What's more, certain proposals about the 
role of evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in 
criminal trials assume a strong form of dualism (22). It has been 
argued, for instance, that if one could show that a person's brain is 
involved in an act, then the person himself or herself is not 
responsible, an excuse dubbed "my brain made me do it" (23). These 
assumptions about moral status and personal responsibility reflect a 
profound resistance to findings from psychology and neuroscience.

The main reason why people resist certain scientific findings, then, 
is that many of these findings are unnatural and unintuitive. But this 
does not explain cultural differences in resistance to science. There 
are substantial differences, for example, in how quickly children from 
different countries come to learn that Earth is a sphere (10). There 
is also variation across countries in the extent of adult resistance 
to science, including the finding that Americans are more resistant to 
evolutionary theory than are citizens of most other countries (24).

Part of the explanation for such cultural differences lies in how 
children and adults process different types of information. Some 
culture-specific information is not associated with any particular 
source; it is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this type of 
information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical 
example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to 
refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are 
called (25). Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. 
Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is 
not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in 
electricity." Hence, even children and adults with little scientific 
background believe that these invisible entities really exist (26).

Other information, however, is explicitly asserted, not tacitly 
assumed. Such asserted information is associated with certain sources. 
A child might note that science teachers make surprising claims about 
the origin of human beings, for instance, whereas their parents do 
not. Furthermore, the tentative status of this information is 
sometimes explicitly marked; people will assert that they "believe in 
evolution."

When faced with this kind of asserted information, one can 
occasionally evaluate its truth directly. But in some domains, 
including much of science, direct evaluation is difficult or 
impossible. Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits 
of string theory, the role of mercury in the etiology of autism, or 
the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the 
asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim's source. If the 
source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often 
without really understanding it. Consider, for example, that many 
Americans who claim to believe in natural selection are unable to 
accurately describe how natural selection works (3). This suggests 
that their belief is not necessarily rooted in an appreciation of the 
evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous 
subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people 
who say it is true.

Science is not special here; the same process of deference holds for 
certain religious, moral, and political beliefs as well. In an 
illustrative recent study, participants were asked their opinion about 
a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either 
Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed 
that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, 
the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, 
whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it 
(27). Additionally, many of the specific moral intuitions held by 
members of a society appear to be the consequence, not of personal 
moral contemplation, but of deference to the views of the community 
(28).

Adults thus rely on the trustworthiness of the source when deciding 
which asserted claims to believe. Do children do the same? Recent 
studies suggest that they do; children, like adults, have at least 
some capacity to assess the trustworthiness of their information 
sources. Four- and five-year-olds, for instance, know that adults know 
things that other children do not (like the meaning of the word 
"hypochondriac") (29), and when given conflicting information from a 
child and from an adult, they prefer to learn from the adult (30). 
They know that adults have different areas of expertise: Doctors know 
how to fix broken arms, and mechanics know how to fix flat tires (31, 
32). They prefer to learn from a knowledgeable speaker than from an 
ignorant one (29, 33), and they prefer a confident source to a 
tentative one (34). Finally, when 5-year-olds hear about a competition 
whose outcome was unclear, they are more likely to believe a person 
who claimed that he had lost the race (a statement that goes against 
his self-interest) than a person who claimed that he had won the race 
(a statement that goes with his self-interest). In a limited sense, 
then, they are capable of cynicism (35).

These developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise 
in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, 
intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood 
if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will 
be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is 
rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as 
reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United 
States, with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and 
evolutionary biology. These concepts clash with intuitive beliefs 
about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of 
humans and other animals, and (in the United States) these beliefs are 
particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted 
religious and political authorities (24). Hence, these fields are 
among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the 
strongest.

References and Notes

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version of this manuscript. Neither author received any funding for the 
preparation of this article.