5 ms·

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

32 points by polskibus 14y ago

auctiontheory 14y ago
They classified the undergraduate psychology major as a "science"?
- guptaneil 14y ago
  How else would you classify psychology?
  - paganel 14y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility). Then again, I'm one who also thinks that the only true science is mathematics.
    - ArtB 14y ago
      > the only true science is mathematics Not to hate, but I hate it went "purists" restrict a words definition to the point that it is useless. Math is the only science that has no use, ever, for lab coats or experiments or physical objects and benefits people only in the most indirect ways. Really, math is -IMHO- closer to philosophy. It is about developing logical and consistent models, but in math they are just easier to verify their consistency.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > ... I'm one who also thinks that the only true science is mathematics. I happen to agree philosophically, but I have been in a number of debates on this topic in which the empirical nature of science, and the requirement for perpetual falsifiability of scientific theories by new evidence, was used to argue that mathematics isn't really science as strictly defined. After due consideration, I have been forced to the conclusion that, if perpetual falsifiability and an empirical basis are required for science, then mathematics is in a category all its own. Having said that, I still regard mathematics as the purest "science": http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/
- tedks 14y 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.
  - jquery 14y 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.
    - ajb 14y ago
      A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
      - jquery 14y ago
        You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
        emini_guy 14y ago
        >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.
jostmey 14y ago
Hell yes it does! Reason, logic, and observation all the way baby!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- seivan 14y 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.
eksith 14y 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 14y 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.
  - eksith 14y 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.
grepherder 14y 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?
- xnxn 14y ago
  I think you've confused amoral with immoral.
  - grepherder 14y 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.
    - xnxn 14y ago
      I see, I completely misinterpreted your comment. Apologies!
      - grepherder 14y ago
        Actually, you were right to correct me to begin with, see the other reply.
- 14y ago
droithomme 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- Wintamute 14y 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 14y 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.
bcoates 14y 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)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Xcelerate 14y 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.
- Wintamute 14y 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.
  - Xcelerate 14y 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.
    - Wintamute 14y ago
      Its obvious to me too, but I'm pretty sure there are some fairly deep layers of anti-science sentiment in some demographics. Also I think its possible to be extremely in favour of science and its mode of thought, and conversely perhaps more wary.
trotsky 14y ago
Exactly how convinced are we that college students that report that they don't really "believe in science" are being honest?
A1kmm 14y 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 14y ago
Correlation is not causation. C'mon people..
- Wintamute 14y 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.

32 points by polskibus 14y ago

auctiontheory 14y ago

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

guptaneil 14y ago
How else would you classify psychology?
- paganel 14y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility). Then again, I'm one who also thinks that the only true science is mathematics.
  - ArtB 14y ago
    > the only true science is mathematics Not to hate, but I hate it went "purists" restrict a words definition to the point that it is useless. Math is the only science that has no use, ever, for lab coats or experiments or physical objects and benefits people only in the most indirect ways. Really, math is -IMHO- closer to philosophy. It is about developing logical and consistent models, but in math they are just easier to verify their consistency.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > ... I'm one who also thinks that the only true science is mathematics. I happen to agree philosophically, but I have been in a number of debates on this topic in which the empirical nature of science, and the requirement for perpetual falsifiability of scientific theories by new evidence, was used to argue that mathematics isn't really science as strictly defined. After due consideration, I have been forced to the conclusion that, if perpetual falsifiability and an empirical basis are required for science, then mathematics is in a category all its own. Having said that, I still regard mathematics as the purest "science": http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/
tedks 14y 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.
- jquery 14y 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.
  - ajb 14y ago
    A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
    - jquery 14y ago
      You're mixing terms. Nobody is saying psychology doesn't use scientific methods. They are arguing it is not a hard science. The hard science version of psychology is called neuroscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations.
      - emini_guy 14y ago
        >Psychology gave up its efforts to become a hard science when it gave up trying to explain behavior from its roots in the brain, and moved into the realm of observing behavior and reporting correlations. Well, that's was astronomy was doing all the time before Newton. Does it mean it was not a hard science? Psychology is doing the best it can do. It may simply never be a hard science. It is not now to most people, myself included. I think it is not a hard science because the human nature is too complex to be investigated in a simple manner. Psychologists are aware of it and they refuse to use simplistic models. Neuroscience is much simpler. It studies the brain, not the human personality that can have many layers.

jostmey 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
seivan 14y 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.

eksith 14y 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 14y 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.
- eksith 14y 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.

grepherder 14y 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?

xnxn 14y ago
I think you've confused amoral with immoral.
- grepherder 14y 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.
  - xnxn 14y ago
    I see, I completely misinterpreted your comment. Apologies!
    - grepherder 14y ago
      Actually, you were right to correct me to begin with, see the other reply.
14y ago

droithomme 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
Wintamute 14y 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 14y 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.

bcoates 14y 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)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Xcelerate 14y 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.

Wintamute 14y 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.
- Xcelerate 14y 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.
  - Wintamute 14y ago
    Its obvious to me too, but I'm pretty sure there are some fairly deep layers of anti-science sentiment in some demographics. Also I think its possible to be extremely in favour of science and its mode of thought, and conversely perhaps more wary.

trotsky 14y ago

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

A1kmm 14y 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 14y ago

Correlation is not causation. C'mon people..

Wintamute 14y 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.