We have nothing to fear but...

It's become increasingly apparent to me, over the seven years I've written here at Skeptophilia, that most of the time people think with their guts and not with their brains.

Even the most cerebral folks can find themselves swayed by their emotions.  I like to think of myself as logical and rational, but many's the time I've had to stop, and turn slowly and deliberately away from my instinctive, knee-jerk reaction, and say, "Okay, wait.  Think about this for a minute."

Which is why I found the results of a survey done by Chapman University, released last month, so simultaneously fascinating and alarming.  The survey asked the question "what are you most afraid of?", and asked respondents to elaborate on that fear -- the specifics, causes, and any subcategories that might be applicable.  It also asked what things they believed in for which they had no concrete evidence.

Here are a few of the most interesting results:

46.6% believe places can be haunted by spirits
39.6% believe that Atlantis, or something like it, once existed
27% believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth in our ancient past
24.7% say aliens have come to Earth in modern times
13.5% believe that Bigfoot is real

But it's when you get to the conspiracy theories that things get really strange. Here are the percentages of people who believe the government is covering up information about...

9/11 (54.3%)
the assassination of JFK (49.6%)
aliens (42.6%)
global warming (42.1%)
plans for a one-world government (32.9%)
President Obama's birth certificate (30.2%)
the origin of HIV (30.2%)
Antonin Scalia's death (27.8%)
the moon landing (24.2%)

I suppose I should find it heartening that at least 4 in 10 Americans think the government is covering up the evidence for global warming, because at the moment, they kind of are.  But that optimism is tempered by the fact that 5 in 10 still have their knickers in a twist about JFK, and 3 in 10 think that HIV is some kind of government plot.

For fuck's sake.

Of course, it's clear where at least some of this comes from; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Connected to History Channel is probably responsible for the majority of the Atlantis and extraterrestrial visitation bullshit, and belief in ghosts and spirit survival have been with us for as long as humanity has considered such things.  President Trump certainly bears most of the responsibility for the Obama birth certificate nonsense, and Breitbart is the origin of the claim that there was anything more to Scalia's death than an overweight 79-year-old dying of a heart attack.

Oh, but I forgot to mention: 19.1% of respondents believe in telekinesis, and 14.1% think that astrology and other types of fortune telling are accurate and scientifically supported.  Although now that I come to think about it, if someone had asked me to estimate the last one, I'd probably have guessed that it was higher, so I suppose that's something to be glad about.

The scary part of all of this goes back to what I started with; that people are much more likely to be swayed, even on important topics, by their emotions and not by their brains.  Some of the beliefs that the survey investigated are harmless enough; I doubt anyone ever came to grief by believing in Bigfoot, for example.  But freaking out over a one-world government -- a major concern of a third of the respondents -- could certainly affect the way people vote.

But on a deeper level, it's troubling that so many people admit to deep-seated beliefs that fly in the face of the evidence.  Believing in Atlantis may not be a big deal, in the grand scheme of things.  But the fact that someone -- in fact, 4 out of every 10 someones -- is willing to accept a counterfactual proposal in the complete absence of evidence indicates their susceptibility to falling for other, more insidious ideas.

So we're back to where we often land; it's imperative that we teach children how to evaluate evidence and think critically.  It's also important to ask, "Why do you believe that?"  It's not easy to pry people away from loony claims to which they have subscribed based on emotion and gut reaction -- but it's pretty important, especially considering how many loony claims are out there and how important it is for people to base their conclusions on the facts.

Intransigence

If there's one thing I find discouraging, it's how resistant crazy beliefs are to eradication.

You'd think that as we know more about how the universe actually works through science, the remaining spaces would become smaller and smaller, forcing woo-woos to cede ever greater amount of territory to the rationalists.  The parts we can't explain would be all they'd have left to fill up with wacky claims.

"Crap of the gaps," is kind of how I think of it.

In practice, of course, this isn't true.  Crazy ideas like astrology are as popular as ever.  And if we needed further evidence of this rather dismal tendency, we got it this week with the release of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.

In this survey, they looked at a representative sampling of 2,500 Americans, and asked them whether they believed in a variety of claims.  You want to feel depressed?  Consider the following:

• The percentage of Americans who believe in Atlantis (63%) exceeds the percentage who think that vaccines are safe and effective (53%).
• The belief that "Satan causes most of the evil in the world" is held by a greater number of people (46%) than is belief in anthropogenic climate change (33%).
• More people believe that UFOs are alien spaceships (41%) than believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (27%).
• People are far more likely to believe in ghosts and hauntings (54%) than evolution (31%).
• Almost exactly the same percentage of people believe in Bigfoot as believe in the Big Bang (21%).

There are a lot of reasons for this, of course.  One has only to turn on the This Really Isn't History Channel or Imaginary Animal Planet or the Discovery of Things That Don't Exist Channel to see one of them.  When shows like Ancient Aliens get a longer run than shows like Cosmos, we have a problem as a culture.

Glitzy, hyped woo-woo -- Monster Quest and Ghost Hunters and Finding Bigfoot and The Unexplained -- has soared in popularity.  To be fair, it's not that I don't see the draw; I love a good scary story, myself, and still consider The X Files to be the pinnacle of television to date.

But The X Files was marketed as fiction, for fuck's sake.  This stuff is being broadcast with the premise that it's true.  And because we don't really put a premium on critical thinking, in public schools or pretty much anywhere else, lots of people are just swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, that's not all.  There's also some more insidious forces at work, ones that really aren't about the profit motive.  You only have to consider the influence of evangelical religion to understand why evolution and the antiquity of the Earth and the Big Bang scored so low.  And for the vaccines thing, look at Jenny McCarthy (Not Directly!  Always Use Eye Protection!)  Why so many people consider an actress a more credible source of information on medical science than an actual medical researcher is a minor mystery.  We still tend, as a society, to buy into the whole "cult of ignorance" -- that the scientists are out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals, who could just as well be evil as be good, and that we're better off trusting good ol' boys who talk plain English.

Or, as the case may be, Playboy models who are college dropouts.

I live in hope that we're still making progress, even despite Chapman University's rather discouraging findings.  After all, if I didn't think humans were educable, my raison d'être for being both a science writer and a science teacher would be gone.  And as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world who would exploit your ignorance."

But the poll results indicate that we still have a long, long way to go in fighting intransigence.