Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.
My feeling on the issue is that for a lot of people this sort of thinking is just not needed, at least not on the level to do actual academic research. I don’t think its inherent to who they are but just a reflection of the skills they have needed to develop throughout their lives. There is no pressure to develop a rigorous scrutiny of information if there is no consequences to getting the wrong answer. They can survive and thrive well without it. None of their peers are checking them. They might even do better without those skills, more resources to use developing the skills that matter to their lives.
A person who pursues stem as a career has something to lose if they get the wrong answer. Or other areas like journalism ect, I don’t want to imply its only stem people.
just my 2c
I agree. The vast majority of our society at this point believe in thousands of relatively, objectively factually false things, in all realms of thinking.
There is a lot of psychological and sociological research on why this happens, and basically it boils down to most people have built a significant amount of their own idea of themselves, their personality around things which if shown to be incorrect would cause them massive cognitive dissonance, so they often ignore it or explain it as fine with basically rhetorical bullshit.
The other main element is that many, many curious people who want to learn are either misled by fraudsters and con artists when they are ignorant and do not have the background knowledge to critically asses what they are being told, and the most common and agreed upon thing: Research and Education take time and money that people do not have.
There is a reason why, historically, after calamities lead to social collapse, you often get either an explosion of cults and superstition, or just a general lack of written records, indicating that practically everyone was too busy working or migrating to do anything intellectual.