Journal of Social Issues最新文献

Reseach indicates that healthcare providers' interpersonal biases toward marginalized patients are linked to poorer clinical judgments, strained interactions, and worse health outcomes. These biases often lead patients to disengage from care, including avoiding future visits to the same providers or clinics, and possibly seek fewer effective alternatives for treating disease. In this paper, we use the clinical and translational science (CTS) framework to review the translational work we have done on implicit bias in health care in three domains: Documenting the implicit nature of the biases that different health care providers hold toward various marginalized patient groups, examining the associations between provider bias and interactions with marginalized patients and their outcomes, and developing and testing the effectiveness of workshops that teach providers about bias and bias reduction strategies they can use when they interact with marginalized patients.

This special volume presents a set of papers on science denial and pseudoscience. I identify three key contributions. One is that social and behavioral scientists are able to able to analyze motivations and states of mind that contribute to the rejection of mainstream science and acceptance of pseudo-science and false claims. Two, the papers in this volume take a number of informal gleanings and suggestions, and subject them to rigorous and much-needed analysis. Three, the papers clarify that while some people who reject science may suffer pathologies, such as the desire for chaos or the expression of spite, most do not. Targeted interventions that accurately identify the target group are more likely to succeed than “one size fits all” approaches. That said, there is the potential tension between understanding science denial as a manifestation of pain and suffering versus understanding it as a problem of information deficit. The good news is that evidence suggests that most science deniers are not suffering pathologies, and that many people do benefit from good information, presented in engaging ways. Collectively these papers demonstrate that science rejection is a matter of both ignorance and willful rejection, and that both can be addressed, albeit most likely in different ways.

Similar to medicine and climate science, education suffers from the spread of misinformation in the United States. Learning styles are an approach that, despite being shown to be ineffective at benefiting learning, is oversold in education, continuing to be extensively implemented, institutionalized, and widely believed to benefit learning. At the same time, over a century of rigorous experimental evidence indicates the effectiveness of spaced learning efforts for enhancing memory retention, skill acquisition, and coming to new understandings in the learning process, yet spacing is undersold in US education. We suggest that research on misinformation spread, pseudoscience, and science denial in domains like vaccines and climate change is relevant to misinformation spread regarding learning styles. We further suggest that the misinformation literature could inform the development of methods for decreasing the spread of misinformation concerning learning styles while increasing the spread of accurate information about spacing's benefits. These efforts could help to accelerate the rate at which the integration of new developments across disciplines can pave the way for a better integration of rigorous experimental science and policy and practice in US education.

In this paper, I use evidence from the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) online archive to address three key questions: (1) How are activists created? (2) How do negative stereotypes affect activists? (3) How has the global decline in democracy affected collective action promoting social justice? Social scientists have addressed all of these issues with different kinds of data, often with samples from the United States that include both activists and non-activists. Instead, my colleagues and I draw on oral history interviews with long-term women's movement activists drawn from several different countries over the past two and a half decades. We encourage the use of archival materials like these to study other questions of importance to social scientists who seek to understand what stimulates and maintains activism, strategies used by activists, and the ways that changes over time in the social environment affect activists’ strategies.

Anti-science beliefs, including science denial and belief in pseudoscience, pose a serious risk to human societies. This introductory article presents an overview of the dangers of these anti-science beliefs for a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues on how they impact the behavioral and social sciences. After providing a broad overview of some of the dangers of science denial and pseudoscience, we summarize the contributions of scholars to this special issue who explore a wide range of factors that contribute to the problem and provide suggestions for how scientists can better communicate and apply their research findings in a “post-truth” world.

Insufficient US public education and misinformation from other sources contribute to climate change (CC) denial. Public US university students in the South (Study 1) and Northeast (Studies 1 and 2) were randomly assigned to watch two educational science videos on CC (experimental condition) or flu viruses (control condition). Experimental (vs. control) condition participants reported (a) less agreement with statements reflecting CC denial (immediate post-test [Studies 1 and 2] and delayed post-test [Study 2]); (b) greater agreement with statements about the existence, seriousness, and human causes of CC and hope for CC interventions (immediate post-test [Studies 1 and 2]); (c) greater intentions to support climate-friendly US policies (immediate post-test [Study 1]); and (d) less negative feelings about CC (delayed post-test [Study 2]), when controlling for gender and political leaning. Implications for effectively addressing CC education among university students with relatively easy-to-implement, time-efficient, and cost-effective interventions are discussed.

This paper examines the failure of Daubert, using analysis from case law, legal scholarship, social psychology, and the philosophy of science to map out the scope of the problem. Next, it provides a diagnostic situated within recent work in social epistemology that highlights structural challenges in the contemporary epistemic landscape. Although the problem of the misuse of science in the courtroom has many different dimensions, one underexplored facet is the courtroom as an instance of broader structural problems in the management of authority, ignorance, and expertise. Building on this analysis, the authors identify five key scientific concepts: (1) the source of scientific authority is derived from consensus within a critical community; (2) falsification, rather than confirmation, is a primary methodological commitment; (3) uncertainty and ignorance in scientific inquiry can managed, but not eliminated; (4) there is a difference between performative, disingenuous pseudoskepticism and a skeptical, critical perspective; and (5) one should be able to recognize genuine scientific expertise and should defer to that expertise. These five foundational ideas provide a conceptual footing for scientific literacy within courtrooms and a basis for educating legal professionals.