Definitely Bizarre Thinking

[dieseltaylor]

This is frankly amazing and comes from the "Economist"

They first asked 201 people stopped in public in New York and New England to answer questions after reading one of three short stories. In all three, a man called David was involved in a car accident and suffered serious injuries. In one, he recovered fully. In another, he died. In the third, his entire brain was destroyed except for one part that kept him breathing. Although he was technically alive, he would never again wake up.

After reading one of these stories, chosen at random, each participant was asked to rate David’s mental capacities, including whether he could influence the outcome of events, know right from wrong, remember incidents from his life, be aware of his environment, possess a personality and have emotions. Participants used a seven-point scale to make these ratings, where 3 indicated that they strongly agreed that he could do such things, 0 indicated that they neither agreed nor disagreed, and -3 indicated that they strongly disagreed.

The results, reported in Cognition, were that the fully recovered David rated an average of 1.77 and the dead David -0.29. That score for the dead David was surprising enough, suggesting as it did a considerable amount of mental acuity in the dead. What was extraordinary, though, was the result for the vegetative David: -1.73. In the view of the average New Yorker or New Englander, the vegetative David was more dead than the version who was dead.

Anyway why was there this apparent madness?

The researchers’ first hypothesis to explain this weird observation was that participants were seeing less mind in the vegetative than in the dead because they were focusing on the inert body of the individual hooked up to a life-support system.

To investigate that, they ran a follow-up experiment which had two different descriptions of the dead David. One said he had simply passed away. The other directed the participant’s attention to the corpse. It read, “After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground.” No ambiguity there. In this follow-up study participants were also asked to rate how religious they were.

Once again, the vegetative David was seen to have less mind than the David who had “passed away”. This was equally true, regardless of how religious a participant said he was. However, ratings of the dead David’s mind in the story in which his corpse was embalmed and buried varied with the participant’s religiosity.

Irreligious participants gave the buried corpse about the same mental ratings as the vegetative patient (-1.51 and -1.64 respectively). Religious participants, however, continued to ascribe less mind to the irretrievably unconscious David than they did to his buried corpse (-1.57 and 0.59).

That those who believe in an afterlife ascribe mental acuity to the dead is hardly surprising. That those who do not are inclined to do so unless heavily prompted not to is curious indeed.

I find it incredibly depressing. However there is some reassurance that at least in Europe we are less religious. I do wonder how this would go in a Budhist or Muslim country.

[gunnergoz]

When it comes to the religious in America, nothing at all surprises me. Apart, perhaps, from any sign of ability to think independently.

[Magpie_Oz]

hmmm, I draw from it, if you want to do a survey don't do it on the streets of new York or New England

[dieseltaylor]

I guess most of us here hope to be rational in our beliefs and will consider things carefully but I was wondering how riddled with bumf society is and looked at astrology which is soo much more than horoscopes : 0

http://aer.aas.org/resource/1/aerscz/v10/i1/p010101_s1?view=fulltext&display=print

A survey of the science knowledge and attitudes toward science of nearly 10000 undergraduates at a large public university over a 20-year period included several questions addressing student beliefs in astrology and other forms of pseudoscience. The results from our data reveal that a large majority of students (78%) considered astrology “very” or “sort of” scientific. Only 52% of science majors said that astrology is “not at all” scientific. We find that students’ science literacy, as defined by the National Science Foundation in its surveys of the general public, does not strongly correlate with an understanding that astrology is pseudoscientific, and therefore belief in astrology is likely not a valid indicator of scientific illiteracy.

Education is wonderful. A study from a UK university analysing data from an EU survey of beliefs in various "sciences" showed that 57% though astrology somewhat scientific but only 24% believed that of horoscopes!

The religious, the less educated, and those used to authority figures scored higher for

astrology.

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~nallum/AllumandStoneman2011.pdf

Is there a case for banning atrological bumf rather like we clamp done on people offering miracle cures, or misleading adverts? Or are States better off with a bread and circuses approach?

I was reading "Innumeracy" [ great littel book] and the author was marvelling that with Reagan the most powerful man in the world believed in astrology - kind of scary.

And of course claims for Hitler's belief.

http://www.astrology.co.uk/news/worldwar2.htm

[Magpie_Oz]

What is wrong with Astrology?