Evangeline Rose, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Kevin Omland, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Thomas Mathew, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A new statistical test lets researchers search for similarities between groups. Could this help keep new important findings out of the file drawer?
When people know it’s a full moon, they tend to use it to explain all sorts of human behaviour.
Todd Diemer/Unsplash
The ‘illumination hypothesis’ – suggests that criminals like enough light to ply their trade, but not so much as to increase their chance of apprehension.
Our predictive skills are about as reliable as a crystal ball.
Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
Information on social media can be misleading because of biases in three places – the brain, society and algorithms. Scholars are developing ways to identify and display the effects of these biases.
Some of the Facebook and Instagram ads used in 2016 election released by members of the U.S. House Intelligence committee.
AP Photo/Jon Elswick
Gordon Hull, University of North Carolina – Charlotte
A scholar asks whether democracy itself is at risk in a world where social media is creating deeply polarized groups of individuals who tend to believe everything they hear.
Reports of facts’ death have been greatly exaggerated. Effective communication jettisons the false dilemma in favor of a more holistic view of how people take in new information on contentious topics.
And don’t expect chocolate ice cream, either.
Barney Moss
Millions of Americans believe brown cows produce chocolate milk? The way the media reported this factoid raises questions about science literacy – but different ones than you may think.
‘I don’t want to see it.’
'Monkeys' via www.shutterstock.com
Quirks of human psychology can pose problems for science communicators trying to cover controversial topics. Recognizing what cognitive science knows about how we deal with new information could help.
We like to think that our political views are well reasoned and backed by evidence. But research shows how easily we all succumb to cognitive biases to justify our own deeply held views.
Like wearing psychological blinders.
Horse image via www.shutterstock.com.
It’s human nature to notice or search out information that supports what you already believe and discount or avoid data to the contrary. The problem comes in when you don’t recognize this bias is in play.
Do you ever feel like this? It’s not helping you get smarter…
Chris Hope
We now have access to an Internet containing a vast store of information much bigger than any individual brain can carry - and that’s not always a good thing.
Our tendency to see what we want to see is the biggest threat to cosmology.
NASA/wikimedia
Confirmation bias, the psychological effect that makes people unconsciously interpret information to confirm their beliefs, is a big threat to cosmology.
The apparent seesaw in health journalism causes science fatigue in the public mind.
David/Flickr
The media constantly bombards us with the latest research on a plethora of topics without much nuance on its quality or relevance. So how can we trust science if it can’t seem to make up its own mind?
Our understanding of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) – flashes of gamma rays from explosions in distant galaxies – since they were discovered more than 50 years ago may not be as solid as first thought. Research…