“Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms”

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/does_studying_science_make_you_a_better_person_partner/

by polskibus • 13 years ago

32 45 13 years ago

salon.com

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

They classified the undergraduate psychology major as a "science"?

guptaneil• 13 years ago

How else would you classify psychology?

paganel• 13 years ago

Not the OP, but I think for example that psychology "sins" a lot when it comes to "reproducibility" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility). Then again, I'm one who also thinks that the only true science is mathematics.

tedks4• 13 years ago

Yes, they did: see this sentence in the article:

>But science majors (including those studying biology, chemistry and psychology) judged him more harshly than non-science majors.

If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago. Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science.

jquery2• 13 years ago

Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science. By that definition, marketing research is a hard science.

What is psychology's unifying theory? Biology has evolution, physics has the standard model. Psychology has, what? Please, do enlighten me.

calibraxis• 13 years ago

Unlikely. The main problem is that calling a tradition "non-scientific" or "not hard science" also has a pejorative meaning. And there's an unfortunate mystification of science as something other than a mode of inquiry, with its limitations and advantages. Plus, people gain funding by hitching themselves to the social respectability of science.

In the case of psychology, they're studying something of great interest which happens to be far too complex for easy scientific study. (Take for example the physicist; once the object or system under study becomes too complex, it's tossed to the chemist, who in turn tosses overly complex things down the line...)

(I've heard similar analysis from some scientists. I vaguely recall Chomsky recently gave a lucid explanation in his talk "The machine, the ghost and the limits of understanding: Newton's contribution to the study of mind", as well in a couple books he wrote. For his part, he thinks linguistics is in a pre-galilean phase. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0)

lutusp2• 13 years ago

> If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago.

On the contrary, psychology is today widely recognized as scientific in name only:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-o...

But beyond the many psychology scandals presently being discussed, it's important to say that descriptions, regardless of how detailed they are, don't constitute science. For science, one must risk a testable explanation, a theory. The absence of theories, testable and tested, and on which different psychologists can agree, is what separates psychology from mainstream science.

In the crafting of the new DSM-V (about to be published), psychologists added mental conditions, and removed conditions, based on -- evidence? -- no, on votes, and secret votes at that. This is not science.

The unscientific state of psychology has led the present director of the NIMH to take note of the gradual eclipsing of psychology by neuroscience:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

A quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.

Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

> Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science.

Quite false. Few psychologists agree with each other on anything, and fewer still are willing to put forth a testable, falsifiable theory about the workings of the human mind. This is why spectacular frauds like Stapel and Hauser can play the field like a badly tuned violin -- few practitioners are qualified to recognize that it's not science.

jostmey• 13 years ago

Hell yes it does! Reason, logic, and observation all the way baby!

seivan• 13 years ago

Agree.

I wonder where most of them stand on terms like church/religion and state and marriage equality.

I've notice software engineers in general tend to be more open minded on those areas.

grepherder4• 13 years ago

On the surface, these results seems counterintuitive; science, after all, is — in the strictest sense — amoral.

Either this is just another insincere sentence thrown in to fill the article, or the author's intuition is terrible. Something along these lines: "They are engaged with something amoral, therefore they must be amoral!", genious. A farm or the act of farming is also amoral, so I guess you expect farmers to be pretty indecent. Really, it's been so many years and why do journalists still think these filler sentences help their article?

xnxn2• 13 years ago

I think you've confused amoral with immoral.

grepherder4• 13 years ago

What makes you think that? The author is the one claiming the result, which is that people who study science (which is amoral, not immoral) tend to be good people, is counterintuitive. If anyone, the author is the one in confusion.

If you thought he could've meant that people who aren't good could be amoral instead of being indecent, then you are most likely, although not absolutely wrong. Keep in mind amorality for a human is not well-defined, it is more often used to describe non-intelligent life or abstract entities. Society would consider an amoral person "immoral" in a casual sense of the word, because a person who is indifferent towards morality is per definition likely to commit immoral acts if there are no repercussions.

javert2• 13 years ago

Actually, doing science is moral, and so is farming. Both are helping you to live a better life, which is the essence of morality.

So I agree with you that the author is totally wrong, just for different reasons.

dolphenstein• 13 years ago

Plenty of science exists with questionable morals. E.g. military science

jules• 13 years ago

You're reading a meaning that isn't there. The author is not expecting scientists (or farmers) to be indecent, he is merely expecting them to be equally decent as non scientists (or non farmers). He's not surprised specifically that there is a positive correlation, he's surprised that there is a correlation at all.

grepherder4• 13 years ago

You're right, I might have misinterpreted. He didn't actually write anything else that implies he found the positive correlation counterintuitive. I don't know what the author's actual meaning was, so I still can't say for sure, but you're right, there was some cognitive bias involved in my reading. My apologies to the author.

droithomme• 13 years ago

This study is nonsense. They ask nonsensical questions such as "Do you believe in science?". They are also using this fad protocol where they have someone (nearly always an 18-21 yr old white college student) read an article then test their opinions on things before and after, and then make grandiose claims regarding what that implies. This is not science, this is pop-psychology.

spindritf• 13 years ago

> They ask nonsensical questions such as "Do you believe in science?"

Why is it nonsensical? Scientific method is a human invention, you can either believe in it, or not. The notion that a theory producing verifiable predictions is "true" is pure fiat. And then there's the whole idea that scientific discoveries, like laws of physics, are universal. Plenty of things to believe in.

Alex3917• 13 years ago

Science doesn't mean scientific method, and even if you were talking about the scientific method, what exactly does it mean to believe in it? Absolutely nothing. It's like asking "What do hindus believe?" and expecting to get an answer that isn't dumb.

erichocean• 13 years ago

The notion that a theory producing verifiable predictions is "true" is pure fiat.

In which case, so is the meaning of the word "true".

Not sure where you're going here, overloading the word "belief" doesn't help in this case, it obscures.

Wintamute5• 13 years ago

I'm finding the (published and peer reviewed) "claims" of these post doctoral researchers somewhat more plausible than your comment on the internet I'm afraid, which I'm sorry to say is coming across as pretty weak.

gemlog• 13 years ago

Actually, this is a very good question.

The vast majority of people have not done the experiments themselves. We actually do 'take it on faith' about a lot of things, like the earth is spherical, the earth travels around the sun, how gravity behaves etc. etc.

We also think people from former times were idiots for believing the Sun went around the Earth -- even though both would appear identical to casual observation.

We take it on faith from others in an appeal to authority. I, personally, have done very few basic experiments and my numbers differed wildly from the expected number (I suck at experiments).

Science, natural philosophy, has completely divorced itself from the whole of philosophy and any other kind of thinking.

Science is able to describe my friend's physical attributes in some detail, but science can not describe our friendship -- the faith and trust that goes into it doesn't fall within the purview of science, but it's nevertheless a reality that we all deal with.

Equations are simply abstractions to model the real, physical world. When our mental shorthand substitutes those models for the real thing in our thinking we get into problems.

Wintamute5• 13 years ago

> We also think people from former times were idiots for believing the Sun went around the Earth

Erm, I don't think they were "idiots". And I'd say you're pretty safe to totally dismiss the opinion of somebody that does. Our understanding of the world, and the mental tools that we've developed to aid our understanding have developed in step. To call our forebears idiots for a misapprehension is to fail to comprehend the continuum of our advancement.

> We take it on faith from others in an appeal to authority.

You're certainly free to "take it on faith", but I wouldn't recommend it. Learn about science as much as you're able, and if possible try and understand things from first principles. You might find it rewarding to leave your "faith" at the door and get even a glimmer of the self-supporting system of tested knowledge that science provides.

> Equations are simply abstractions to model the real, physical world.

Equations and models maybe be abstractions but there's nothing simple about it, and they are capable representing profound truths related to the nature of the physical world. Those truths let us directly affect the real world in practical ways.

I'm sorry but I find your statements a little wishy-washy!

bcoates• 13 years ago

From the description of the study, you could also argue thinking about science makes you more likely to take texts at face value (a willingness to make the mental leap from reading a story about John to judging John's actions) and encourages Manichean black-and-white thinking (moving closer to the 100 of absolute condemnation)

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

"Do you believe in science?"

What kind of question is that? Nature follows its laws whether we have an opinion about it or not. Science is just the study of these laws. The question itself makes no sense.

Wintamute5• 13 years ago

Do you honestly read that question as asking if you believe in science in the same way as, for example, you can believe in reincarnation or God? A sentence can have more than one reading and generally a good approach is to discern the meaning as intended by the author rather than picking one that doesn't make any sense. Obviously It's asking whether you believe in science as a fundamentally important part of modern society, whether you believe in the worth of the scientific method and rationalism etc.

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

> Obviously it's asking whether you believe in science as a fundamentally important part of modern society

Well, the answer to that is indeed so obvious that if that's what the author was intending, I can hardly believe he's asking it.

trotsky• 13 years ago

Exactly how convinced are we that college students that report that they don't really "believe in science" are being honest?

A1kmm• 13 years ago

> were recruited and received course credit for participation

I think it is ironic that a research into morality was conducting by coercing student participants into the research. In academic courses, it is common for students and lecturers to benchmark students (and award final grades) based the rank of students ordered by marks, and so giving students marks for something is also punishing students who don't get the marks.

Getting research participation by threatening a punishment such as a loss of rank in the class for those who don't participate is coercive, and it casts both the researchers and UCSD (and its human ethics committee) in bad light.

Coercive research is also less likely to be accurate - in this case, it brings up the alternative explanation that the science words prompted students to think about their courses, which might be the sole reason they are participating in the study, putting them into exam mentality so they give the answers they think they are 'supposed' to give.

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

Correlation is not causation.

C'mon people..

Wintamute5• 13 years ago

Care to point out exactly where and how you think these post doctorate researchers have got correlation and causation confused? Because at the moment your comment is looking fairly absurd.

eksith2• 13 years ago

How does an observed, measured, calculated and critically considered process of understanding everything around you considered "belief"? That's like saying, I believe in wine making. No, it's a process of making wine. Science is the process of understanding the universe.

One of the pet peeves when people say "believe in science".

Aside from that, are we sure that it's "causing" people to become more moral or is it that science itself encourages reflection and critical thinking that can develop into a moral compass? You're less likely to be rash, disorganized or deleterious to people around you if you also have to be a good scientist, which by definition involves a fair amount of observation and self-dicipline.

It's harder to be an ass when you perceive yourself to be one. Unless you're sociopathic to begin with.

bostonpete• 13 years ago

> One of the pet peeves when people say "believe in science".

The phrase "believe in" can also mean "have faith in".

The majority of scientific discoveries are not something that most people can observe, measure, calculate, etc -- either because they don't have the ability or the time to do so. In order to trust scientific finding, people have to have faith in the science that's been performed by others.

eksith2• 13 years ago

So they trust the wine makers that their label is as good as they say it is when they taste it. I guess that makes sense.

“Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms”

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