1.
PS409
Psychology, Science,
& Pseudoscience
Dr Brian Hughes
School of Psychology
brian.hughes@nuigalway.ie @b_m_hughes

2.
Question:
If pseudoscientific reasoning is flawed,
then why is it so popular?

3.
Why does pseudoscience prosper?
Socio-cultural explanations
Consolation
Luddism
Mysticism
“The academic left” and postmodernism
Economic explanations
Incentives of pseudoscience

4.
Socio-cultural explanations:
Mysticism
That pseudoscience benefits from
people’s apparent wish to explain life
(or at least parts of it) in terms of
concepts for which there is no clear
evidence

5.
Percentage of Irish population Number of CAM providers per
declaring a religious affiliation 10,000 population
Hughes (2006), J Rel Health

6.
4.5
r = -.57**
4.0
p = .002
CAM providers per 10,000 population
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
.5
0.0
91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98
Percentage religious
Hughes (2006), J Rel Health

7.
Why do some people prefer mysticism to science?
Comfort in things that are “tried and tested”
Change destabilizes homeostasis, threatens resources
Mysticism is adaptive in evolutionary terms
Promotes group solidarity, prosocial behavior
Hard-wired into human brain?
“Costly signaling” adaptation

8.
Adaptiveness of mysticism
(Sosis & Alcorta, 2003)
Promotes group solidarity,
enhances survival
Minimises individual distinctiveness,
emphasises unity
Fosters commitment and loyalty
Exemplifies “costly signalling”
Mysticism advertises abundance of
own resources
Deters “free-riders”

9.
Sosis (2000)

10.
Sosis & Bressler (2003)

11.
Socio-cultural explanations:
“The academic left” and postmodernism
That pseudoscience is promoted by
some academic disciplines as a protest
against the dominance of the
traditional sciences

12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa
r_Superstition shionable_Nonsense

13.
“The academic left” (Gross & Levitt, 1994)
“an influential segment of the academic community…whose doctrinal
idiosyncrasies sustain the misreadings of science…”, “unambiguously hostile
to science”, “comprised, in the main, of humanists and social scientists”
Branch of “Views science as…” Academic disciplines where
academic left branch has prospered
Postmodernism “…a social construction, no more ‘true’ than Philosophy, literary criticism,
other ways of knowing” social history, anthropology
Marxism “…a bourgeois manifestation of the capitalist Political science, economics
order”
Radical feminism “…poisoned and corrupted by an Philosophy, social anthropology,
ineradicable gender bias” women’s studies
Radical “…a ‘Western’ pursuit, inherently inaccurate Ethnicity studies, various mono-
multiculturalism by virtue of its failure to incorporate the full ethnic ‘studies’
range of cultural perspectives”
Radical “…an embodiment of the alienation from the Philosophy, sociology, cultural
environmentalism direct experience of nature that is studies, social history
accelerating us toward our ecological
doomsday”

14.
The Sokal Affair (Alan Sokal, NYU)
Sokal, A. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries:
Towards a transformative hermeneutics of
quantum gravity. Social Text, 46/47, 217-252.
• Argued that quantum theory had profound
sociopolitical implications, but that an
“emancipatory” science and mathematics
should be developed to provide intellectual
support for forward-looking political activists
Sokal, A. (1996). A physicist experiments with
cultural studies. Lingua Franca, 62-64.
• Revealed the Social Text paper to be a fraud, to
be based on nonsensical statements and factual
errors, “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning
references, grandiose quotations, and outright
nonsense…structured around the silliest
quotations I could find about mathematics and
physics”

15.
Economic explanations
That, economically, pseudoscience
presents both provider and consumer
with (apparent) benefits
that (apparently) outweigh
(apparent) costs

16.
Economic explanations
Pseudoscience provides a belief-system
akin to a “low tax economy”
Caplan (2001)
– Empiricism serves as “a tax” on
beliefs
– Taking assertions “on faith”
removes this tax
– Consumers, when free to choose,
will gravitate toward “low-tax”
options

17.
Economic explanations

18.
Economic explanations
Principle of “rational ignorance”
Downs (1957)
– Low “private error costs”
disincentivize knowledge
– Ignorance becomes economical
Principle of “rational irrationality”
Caplan (2001)
–

19.
Why does pseudoscience prosper?
Socio-cultural explanations
Consolation
Luddism
Mysticism
“The academic left” and postmodernism
Economic explanations
Incentives of pseudoscience

20.
PS409
Psychology, Science,
& Pseudoscience
Dr Brian Hughes
School of Psychology
brian.hughes@nuigalway.ie @b_m_hughes