Monday, April 25, 2011

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science


How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.
    Mon Apr. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger(PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology./.../

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