Smart People Believe Weird Things

Shermer, Michael

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0902-35

Cited by 63 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…Schermer 26 stated, ''Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart [sic] reasons.'' Because of the increasing complexity of cases and the cognitive load required to take care of them, EPs must rely on heuristics to care for many patients.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiles in Patient Safety: Confirmation Bias in Emergency Medicine

Pines

2006

Academic Emergency Medicine

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Confirmation bias is a pitfall in emergency care and may lead to inaccurate diagnoses and inappropriate treatments and care plans. Because of the increasing severity and volume of emergency care, emergency physicians often must rely on heuristics, such as rule-out protocols, as a guide to diagnosing and treating patients. The use of heuristics or protocols can be potentially misleading if the initial diagnostic impression is incorrect. To minimize cognitive dissonance, clinicians may accentuate confirmatory data and ignore nonconfirmatory data. Clinicians should recognize confirmation bias as a potential pitfall in medical decision making in the emergency department. Reliance on the scientific method, Bayesian reasoning, metacognition, and cognitive forcing strategies may serve to improve diagnostic accuracy and improve patient care.ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE 2006; 13:90-94 ª

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiles in Patient Safety: Confirmation Bias in Emergency Medicine

Pines

2006

Academic Emergency Medicine

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“…Shermer (2006) describes how people congregated and lit candles around the rainbow-colored Virgin Mary shape that appeared on the window of an office building in Clearwater, FL, in 1996. A naïve construal of this behavior is that the devout simply (factually) believed Mary appeared.…”

Section: The R-prop View: Religious Enactmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do religious “beliefs” respond to evidence?

Leeuwen

2017

Philosophical Explorations

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Some examples suggest that religious credences (or "beliefs") respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton's (1990) theory of make-believe.

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“…Nevertheless, the reason that many alleged scienti c anomalies-"Bigfoot," reincarnation, alien abductions, telepathy, faith healing, and so on-are so tantalizing is because they y in the face of laws or precedents that most presume hold in practically all other places and times. 2 In uential writers from across the academic spectrum suspect that paranormal beliefs are symptomatic of more fundamental and potentially harmful lapses in perceptual capacities, critical thinking abilities, evidential reasoning, and, more generally, the educational system (e.g., Friedlander 1995;Gilovich 1991;Kurtz 1991;Paulos 1988Paulos , 1991Sagan 1995;Shermer 1997). They cite cases of cults whose members fail to see through powerful recruitment and thought control techniques, with promises of supernormal powers and enlightenment (Hassan 1988;Miller 1987;Singer 1995); families split by the uncritical acceptance of therapistinduced false memories of abuse and molestation (Baker 1992;Spanos 1996); and the widespread popularity of faith healers and practitioners of dubious healing arts who sometimes harm patients directly with their untested remedies, or indirectly by dissuading clients from more appropriate treatments (Barrett and Jarvis 1993;Buckman and Sabbagh 1995;Randi 1987).…”

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confidence: 99%