Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- A recent study compared the public’s scientific literacy with their attitudes on GM foods.
- The results showed that “as the extremity of opposition increased, objective knowledge went down, but self-assessed knowledge went up.”
- The results also suggest that, in terms of policy efforts to boost scientific literacy, education about a given topic alone isn’t going to be enough.
In 1999, the social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a study that uncovered a darkly comical cognitive bias. It describes how, to put it crudely, dumb people tend to incorrectly believe they’re smarter than others. Why? Because they’re too stupid to realize they’re stupid. Dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, it conjures in people a sense of illusory superiority, one that calls to mind the adage “ignorance is bliss”.
Now, a new study on public opinion about genetically modified foods doesn’t quite show that ignorance is bliss, but it does suggest that ignorance is the fuel that empowers people to hold and voice strongly anti-scientific beliefs.
The findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, come from public surveys issued in France, Germany and the U.S. that measured scientific literacy and attitudes about GM foods. (Genetic engineering, by the way, involves selectively introducing genes to a crop in order to create a new crop with desired characteristics. Despite labels at the supermarket that say “No G.M.O.s”, decades of scientific research have…
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