Believing in science does not make one a scientist

I have certainly encountered the ironic phenomenon if people who believe, in the religious sense of the word, in scientific findings. Not necessarily in the scientific method - I don't think it's possible to have that kind of belief about a system which is fundamentally built upon recognising one's own errors - but in the current expertise of the day.

In the study, 270 college students were asked to rate their agreement with a series of scientific facts and nonfactual statements. Scientific facts included statements such as “A typical cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds,” while nonfactual statements included common false beliefs such as “Humans only use about 10% of their brain.” 

The researchers found that participants who were more politically liberal tended to agree more with the scientific statements, compared to participants who were more conservative. However, liberalism was also associated with a greater belief in nonfactual statements.

So a preference for scientific discoveries is not necessarily associated with a more critical attitude. But isn't that an inherent problem with deferring to experts ? If you accept that experts are the most reliable and are then given a statement that sounds like it came from an expert, it would be a bit weird if you weren't inclined to accept it. It would be inconsistent to say, "experts know better than me" and then also say "I know better than the experts".

“It is possible that whereas more conservative persons may be unduly skeptical, more liberal persons may be too open and therefore vulnerable to inaccurate information presented in a manner that appears scientific,” the researchers wrote in their study.

The study also found that liberal participants reported greater agreement with pro-truth statements, such as “It is important to me to align my opinions and my actions with true information,” which in turn was associated with their increased agreement with scientific facts.

I think it would be much more interesting to see how the groups respond to information that contradicts their existing beliefs. I haven't read the paper, but it seems that neither group had any reason to judge if they were being unduly skeptical or too open minded. You need a lot more information than the raw statement than that : you need the metadata of where it came from, how widely it's supported, the counter arguments, etc. Give them the information in context and you might be in a position to judge people's critical-mindedness, and whether they change their minds in a reasonable way or not.

But I cannot for the life of me imagine anyone actively choosing to disagree with the idea that they should align their actions with the truth - there must have been some very bizarre people in that study. Mind you, last night we were playing, "Pick Your Poison", a game where players vote on two options of horrible things they'd rather do if they were forced to choose. It's a card game where one player selects the two options, with the aim being to choose them such that there's a 50-50 split in the vote. One example was especially bizarre. At least two people genuinely thought they would rather accidentally murder their best friend than get their grandmother addicted to heroin.

People are weird and I don't understand them.

Study finds liberals are more accepting of scientific facts -- and nonfactual statements

New research provides evidence that political orientation is a predictor of belief in scientific and unscientific statements. The study, published in Psychological Reports , found that more liberal college students tend to be more accepting of both types of statements compared to their conservative counterparts.