The Importance of Teaching Scientific Methodology in Elementary and High Schools
In my social networks timelines, daily, I come across all sorts of nonsense and stupidities that people post shamelessly. Before the advent of social networks, people were afraid to express their ideas that were not socially well accepted because they feared being ridiculed by the social groups they interacted with (relatives, friends, etc.). In social networks, people began to interact with identity groups, people who agree with their ideas. It gave them a sense of belonging.
So they lost the inhibition of expressing their ideas and opinions without being ridiculed. Or, even if they are ridiculed, they are among equals who defend them, because they think like them. With this, ideas previously considered absurd, such as flat Earth, creationism, anti-vaccine movements, white supremacy, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, among others, returned to the agenda uninhibitedly.
In the 21st century, when, according to some authors, we live in the Information Age, what we see, is misinformation being disseminated at the speed of light. Why does this happen? It’s because we human beings have an innate tendency to believe in what we want to believe and not in what the evidence reveals to us.
Several psychological mechanisms inflict cognitive biases that distort our perception of reality. And the advent of the internet catalyzed this process. The algorithms of the internet giants (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, etc.), stimulate these psychological traps to the extent that they present content to each of us according to our interests.
Such content, as a rule, reinforces our previous convictions on a particular subject (politics, science, religion, etc.). The result of this is people grouping into affinity bubbles, virtual locus of consensus. Inside the bubble, the internet user has the (false) feeling that everyone is thinking like him.
After food and shelter, the greatest need for a human being is safety. According to psychology, one of the most factors that makes a person feel insecure is the unknown. Fear of the unknown causes the brain to create answers that give it comfort. Not knowing what will happen is uncomfortable for most people.
The evolution of the human mind did not carve it to behave rationally. In response to adaptive challenges facing our ancestors, such as avoiding predators or locating food, the human mind evolved to recognize patterns and acquire stable and infallible knowledge, skills that were successful in surviving in hostile environments. Thus, the human brain has evolved as a tool that demands stability and infallibility for understanding the world.
Belief in unfalsifiable systems (which are stable and infallible) is a fundamental human motivation. The intuitive judgment makes something that seems right a good chance of structuring the judgment in a way that is considered right, even if there is evidence to the contrary.
For something to be judged as true, it is enough to seem true, without necessarily being true from the evidence. The individual first formulates the belief in something and only then develops arguments to justify it. He first believes and, after that, rationalizes what he wants to believe.
Evolutionary psychology, therefore, allows us to understand why the human mind is incompatible with scientific knowledge of a fallible character. Infallible beliefs are a psychological strategy used to develop an accurate, stable, and secure understanding of the facts. Infallible systems, because they are stable and not subject to uncertainty, have a psychological advantage over belief systems based on uncertain and provisional knowledge, such as scientific knowledge.
That is why adaptation to the way science works (rationality, falsifiability, etc.) requires psychological effort to adjust to the human cognitive structure. Rationality and skepticism are not intuitive in our learning. What is intuitive and recurrent for our brain is the search, endorsement, and transmission of belief systems gullible, infallible, and “perfect”, because they are not subject to failure. Assimilating scientific knowledge and the way it is organized and structured requires effort and learning.
People can understand and accept systems based on fallible principles, such as scientific knowledge, but simultaneously endorse infallible systems such as religion, politics, and pseudosciences. This is possible thanks to a psychological mechanism called “mental bins”, which are mental structures within which the individual constructs justifications to accommodate simultaneously incompatible beliefs.
The dissonance theory explains the cognitive mechanism by which people accommodate inconsistencies between two beliefs or between their beliefs and their behavior. It helps to understand how and why people tend to believe in things that have no tangible evidence in reality or until they have evidence contrary to what they believe in.
We humans have an innate tendency to seek, interpret, favor and recall information that confirms our beliefs or previous hypotheses, which is known as confirmation bias. Cognitive biases are related to the preponderance of superstition and prejudice and resistance to the acceptance of non-intuitive scientific knowledge.
These biases stem from the way human cognition works and make our way of analyzing the world tend to be wrong in many situations. Under them, we are spontaneously led to commit every kind of logical fallacy of thought. It is not the observation of the facts that influence our behavior in the social world, but rather our construction of natural and social reality, which often leads to perceptual distortions, inaccurate judgments, illogical interpretations, and all sorts of irrationalities.
When a person believes in something, their mind works by valuing the information that confirms that belief and invalidating those that contradict it. This contributes to overconfidence in personal beliefs and via-rule maintains or strengthens these beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence.
Often, the individual justifies his beliefs by seeking evidence to confirm them, blinding his sensitivity to evidence that does not support what he already believes. That’s why pseudoscientific beliefs and fake news provoke much more emotional appeal than scientific beliefs and true news.
A study published in Science journal looked at 126,000 posts containing rumors and fake news and concluded that fake news is 70% more likely to be shared than true ones. Rumors and fake news have been shared by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. The top 1% of fake news cascades spread to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, while the truth rarely spread to more than 1,000 people.
Falsehood spread significantly further, faster, deeper, and more widely than truth across all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for fake news about politics than for fake news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. As it turns out, apparently fake news is more exciting and causes more frisson than the real ones.
In the Age of (Dis)Information, words such as fake news, post-truth, and firehosing have entered the dictionary. Paradoxically, today we are more uninformed than we have ever been since Gutenberg invented the press. Fake news, conspiracy theories, myths, and superstitions are especially compelling to us, as they allow us to explain events that would otherwise seem random or inexplicable.
Thus, we feel that we have dominion over the results that would otherwise seem out of our control. They help us relieve anxiety and restore some predictability and control over our world, making us feel better about the future.
Scientific concepts are difficult to understand for most people. For the average citizen, science is seen as an argument of authority, just like religion. For him, science is another belief in the belief system. You have the option to believe in your priest, pastor, or rabbi in the same way that you have the option of believing or not in the word of a scientist.
Because of these findings, it is urgent to educate young people for the full exercise of citizenship, which includes knowing how to differentiate fact from opinion, evidence from the clue, scientific theory from conspiracy theory. It is necessary to teach young people to prospect the truth in the sea of lies that bathes the world wide web. This is not a simple task, which common sense could imagine in a creeping analysis. That’s because you have to teach them how to act contrary to their intuition, the way their brain has evolved to think.
That’s where the scientific methodology comes in! Elementary and high schools teach science to their students. Oh, that’s great! However, they usually teach (only) the accumulated knowledge of the sciences throughout their history. I say “only” because accumulated scientific knowledge is important but insufficient. The teaching of scientific methodology, that is, of the modus operandi of science, is fundamental for children and adolescents to understand the way science works, the way it seeks the truth. And this methodology is counterintuitive as we’ve seen.
From the observation of natural (or social) phenomena, the scientist structures his hypothesis and tests it exhaustively, considering its connection with other phenomena already observed and explained. Hypotheses that are confirmed by our best tests and can be replicated by others receive knowledge status.
Unconfirmed hypotheses, for which there are counterexamples or rebuttal instances or no results that confirm it, are simply discarded. In the scientific way of thinking, the fact is always superior to the hypothesis. This means that if a fact contradicts a hypothesis, it is this one, not the one, that must be revised.
One of the characteristics of something to be considered a scientific fact is that it must necessarily be verifiable. A hypothesis is an explanation of a fact. To be accepted, a hypothesis needs to be testable and falsifiable in the face of the facts. Falsifiability is therefore an essential attribute for a given knowledge to receive the scientific seal. Karl Popper considered falsifiability as the criterion that demarcates scientific knowledge.
In this conception, any unfalsifiable knowledge would be unscientific. For a hypothesis that can be proven false, it must have elements that allow it to be confronted with reality to reach one of two possible conclusions: either the hypothesis is erroneous because it did not survive the confrontation with empirical reality data or, for now, it is not possible to falsify it.
All assertion, therefore, should be submitted to some test that confronts it with empirical reality. Scientific knowledge is therefore fallible, that is, it can be demonstrated flawed.
Another characteristic that defines the rationality of scientific thought is skepticism, understood as unbelief concerning what is known about a given theme. Skepticism is the antithesis of dogmatism, is the prudent questioning of credulity, and is essential for the construction of scientific truth.
The scientific method works in such a way that the search for confirmation is discouraged, redirecting the researcher’s attention so that he also sees evidence that contradicts his expectations. From this efficient strategy, the scientific method inhibits the occurrence of confirmation bias, preventing the scientist from falling into the circular and vicious trap of confirming what he already believes in.
It is also important to understand the concept of infallible belief systems. It is fundamental to understand people’s tendency to believe what they want to believe. Infallible beliefs are those that, by their nature or argumentative structure, are not capable of being proven false, that is, they do not have the attribute of falsifiability and, therefore, are not considered scientific. For example, religious beliefs.
Learning science implies having the notion of how scientific knowledge is structured and differentiated from other belief systems. The tendency to a stable understanding of the world is at the heart of the human psyche and is incompatible with the transient and fallible character of science.
The need for stable forecasting and control is one of the barriers for people to incorporate scientific knowledge. One of the central issues of this subject concerns the uncertainty of what we know. Assimilating uncertainty is a fundamental but also difficult exercise, due to the way our cognition gives order and meaning to the world through the mechanism of standardism.
Intuitive thinking is inherent in our way of apprehending the world and, given its inflexible character, has a high degree of incompatibility with the way scientific knowledge is structured.
Spreading and inculcating in people skeptic-rational thinking is not something important in itself, it is fundamental to human survival on Earth. Scientific denialism is literally destroying the planet! The denial of science influences public and private policies, enabling, and often favoring, anthropic global warming, fires in forests and deforestation, air, water, and land pollution, depletion of natural resources, among other calamities.
Some scientists believe that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction event of life in the planet’s history. As the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and there have only been five recorded mass extinction events, it is concluded that this is a very rare event, and has always been caused by natural disasters. Now, for the first time, it is being caused by the proliferation of a species that has become endemic on the planet.
This species is consuming the planet’s natural resources at a speed never seen before and changing the environment and climate at an unprecedented rate. The name of this species is Homo sapiens, which in Latin means “wise man”. I don’t think it’s very wise to destroy your abode when you know it’s the only one available.
The way science seeks the truth of facts demands a flexible and rational thought of the world, which is incompatible with the functioning of human cognition. A scientific posture of understanding the world is neither innate nor easily acquired. That’s because evolution has clothed us with a cognitive mechanism that is inflexible in most situations and that deals poorly with uncertainty and drives us away from it.
Unfalsifiable systems provide us with greater psychological comfort, as they are logically more attractive since they adjust more easily to the demand for uncertainty removal and the search for precision. The way the human psyche builds the world’s apprehension and the way science seeks to understand the universe are opposites.
On the one hand is standardism, which motivates us to seek stable knowledge, in which the predictions of understanding the world are safe and right. On the other hand, there is the uncertain and provisional character that scientific knowledge possesses.
Human psychology shows that we are beliefs machines. That, before critically analyzing a belief, we believe or disbelieve it automatically and only later seek to rationalize it to justify it. Dealing with uncertainty is one of the greatest difficulties of our psyche. That’s why pseudoscientific beliefs and superstitions are so seductive and endorsed by millions of people.
Science is the most efficient enterprise to overcome the limitation inherent to human psychology to apprehend the phatic reality. The scientific method is not perfect, but it is the best we have to reach the truth about the universe in which we are all inserted.
What characterizes the scientific initiative is not the search for confirmation of the understanding we have about the world, but exactly the opposite: the search for the falsification of such knowledge. Solely confirmatory research is pseudoscientific practice. The best exercise we can do in knowing reality is to always remind ourselves that what we believe may be wrong.
Minds trained to believe and endorse infallible belief systems are minds in which creativity has been inhibited. Curiosity is fundamental to finding increasingly accurate answers, based on the constant review of what is known.
Teaching young people the scientific method characteristics and its differentiation from non-scientific thought, as well as disseminating how science builds a sense of reality, is fundamental to inform short-sighted citizens concerning the world’s understanding. The experience lived by a skeptical and rational view of the world should be achieved by all people in the most diverse dimensions of their lives. I don’t want to believe; I want to know!
