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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @10:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @10:39AM (#787322)

    I'm not sure about nuclear power. The ignorant are clearly opposed but there are plenty of ignorant people that are adamantly for nuclear power yet they don't know the details. It's kind of like little knowledge is dangerous scenario, except in nuclear power little knowledge is a wide swath of the population. And trying to explain it, is like explaining rocket science.

    For example, I often see people claiming "just make thorium reactors" and there would be no waste and/or risks. In fact, they are basically the same wastes and risks but try explaining that to people that don't know anything about nuclear fuel cycle or reactor design and its inherent problems. Anyway, any nuclear power is sooo much better in terms of risk profile than fossil fuels (think long term damage and risks) but you can't really explain that to people that close their heads to reality. And knowing a little (they often think a lot) tends to make experts.