On dissonance by any other name

The linked blog post is in turn based on this article (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010), which discusses why attempts to change people's political misperceptions and misunderstandings often don't work, and can in some cases backfire. The blog post relates the same processes to the teaching of science.

There is a certain sense of reinventing the wheel, here, and I'm interested that there is no reference to a vast and venerable literature on cognitive dissonance (here is a page of mine on that) which goes back to the 1950's. On the other hand, it is worthy of note that if you follow up the first external link from my page you come to a .pdf file of a textbook chapter on cognitive dissonance, with a note to say that it is on the web because it is no longer included in the latest versions of the textbook, so the whole thing may be a matter of fashion.

Incidentally, the epigraph to the substantive article is attributed to Mark Twain, as such things often are; I think the correct ascription is to Henry Wheeler Shaw writing as Josh Billings:

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.

(Josh Billings' Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom, 1874)

Nyhan B & Reifler J (2010). "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions" Political Behavior, 32 (2), 303-330 DOI: 10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2

On another threshold concept, rediscovered

Threshold concepts are not only like portals, they are also like buses. You wait ages for one, and then three come along together.

I've been editing the video of our joint presentation on them at a Study Day last month (here) so I am sensitised to keep finding (or rediscovering) them.

Today I was listening in the car to a Radio 4 (of course) programme in which "Matthew Taylor discovers what the latest scientific research can tell us about the human need for religion". In the programme, he interviewed anthropologist David Sloan Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral Chicago; U Chicago Press, 2002) who drew the distinction between "practical" (survival oriented) beliefs and "factual" (accurate/truthful) ones, and averred* that in the real world practical beliefs win every time. And in order to practise as an anthropologist, you need to adopt the perspective of the practicality/utility of a belief rather than its factual accuracy. That is a threshold concept. It is a dizzying prospect. But a moment's thought shows how it opens up the way into a new and potentially fruitful understanding of other people's beliefs.

I was only struck by this because I am sensitised to look for TCs at the moment. I myself made a similar point about the nature of myth in ch. 6 of Atherton (1989). I make no great claim for this insight. I was merely making a point in passing about what I meant by "working myth". And interestingly, I suspect that most of my (very few!) readers, thought, "OK, so what?" and plodded on to more interesting and relevant stuff.

So, the idea needed a context in order to become a TC. It is the interaction between the discipline and the TC which gives the latter the potential to transform understandings. Drop an explosive idea into a tank of inert gas, and nothing happens. Drop it into oxygen and all hell breaks loose.

More precisely it is to do with how closely-coupled is the contextual system. A TC in the form of a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962) --when accepted--overturns the consensus of "normal science". Generally speaking a similar bomb in the humanities splutters into oblivion enveloped by tenuously connected fluffy fibres of unconnected meanderings......

Which poses the question of how the humanities were hi-jacked by "Theory" Assuming the contention is correct (I'm not convinced, but I have to admit that it is more fun than scholarship)...

*  I've been waiting for years for a chance to use that word!

Atherton J S (1989) Interpreting residential life: values to practise London; Tavistock

On bad science in education

Do read this disconcerting account of a medical scientist's attempt to get someone from an educational awarding body to explain the presence of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo in an Edexcel Level 3 qualification in Health and Social Care. (The reference to Alan Sokal in the heading banner makes a tenuous link to the previous post.)

In brief the argument is that "it's not true and it doesn't work so you should not be teaching it." I have a great deal of sympathy with that argument, and it has particular potency in relation to alternative medicine (assuming that the positivist account is the only legitimate one). But go beyond the "health" component and start looking at "social care", and you will find very little which is demonstrably "effective" or "true". The corpus of "knowledge" in this area consists largely of best guesses and conformity with current values in the services, and not always shared by the population at large. It's not that there is a conspiracy to foist principles of "valuing diversity" or "empowerment" on any one; it is just that in the "care" arena no-one knows how to test and research the ideas. And it is not for want of trying.

(It's exactly the same in teaching—viz the egregious rubbish about "learning styles", and even "e-learning" which has been puffed over the past few years.) Until you have agreed and uncontested criteria of "effectiveness" or "truth", you can't aspire to a gold standard of what works.

The issue may not be about what is to be taught; after all, complementary medicine is out there and is big business, so it cannot be ignored. And social care has to work on some basis, even if we don't know which. Perhaps it ought to be about the stance which is taken towards it; why, for example, do many people—both practitioners and patients—believe that CAM works, even if the research (I know—they contest the methodology) says that it doesn't? They are not all charlatans and dupes, after all. The placebo effect is much more complex than is often portrayed, for example.

But—to come back to Edexcel Level 3 awards—can learners at that level (perhaps more significantly at that typical age) actually sustain that distanced stance. Must the wave of uncertainty collapse for them into true/false, right/wrong etc.? Some research suggests that it must.

Oh dear.