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posted by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Eat-the-fish,-Mr.-Burns dept.

The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:

who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least

The paper's key finding is that:

the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.

Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:

the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.

It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as

Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
  
Where would you like to see this study done next?


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  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:06PM

    by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:06PM (#787059)

    While this post is leaning towards a conspiracy theory, the basic point is true. That is,the reasons you have an opinion on something might not be the reasons that other people assume you have, or the reasons they regard as important themselves.

    To take a less "conspiratorial" example, I might say to someone that I don't like a certain restaurant. Then the person I am talking to immediately starts droning on about how good the food is there really, and I must fail to appreciate what good food is etc etc. When all the time the reason I don't like it is because it is too noisy, something they regard as of no importance whatsoever, or even a positive point because they find it "vibrant".

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