Why do people believe in bullshit?

Its now becoming more and more of a rarity that I am able to leave my house without some form of mind-numbing drivel presenting itself to me in one form or another. I walk through my local high street past a Chinese medicine store (pictured to the left) that claims it has an effective cure for baldness, something  that the international medical community has been kept in the dark about apparently. I go on Facebook and see endless streams of Facebook pages claiming that vaccinations were created by (seemingly) satan himself. Even friends of mine or other students at my university surprise me with tales of ghost sightings, psychic dreams, possessions by the devil during church services, and the "facts" behind astrology. And whenever I come across these claims I always think one thing. What drivel. What pure, meaningless drivel.  I even once opened a Jamaican newspaper known as The Gleaner that had an article about crystals as a method of fortune telling, explained in a positive light as if it were true. But what causes people to believe such things? I mean there is no evidence that the position of the planets has any effect on our lives in any way, and yet almost every newspaper I have come across throughout my life has had a horoscope page with some vague hokum about the planets alignment foretelling our daily lives. Well in my opinion it comes down to 3 main reasons. 

1. The popularity of pseudoscience-based social media pages:

Facebook as well as other social media sites contains a ridiculous number of pages with ever increasing fan bases, that of which post many claims rarely backed up with any reliable evidence.

 For example, pages such as Food Babe and Dr Oz have hundreds of thousands of followers, all of these followers being able to see the many outlandish ideas posted by these pages. Ideas that are mostly made up of evidence lacking conjecture. And because of the number of fans these pages have accumulated due to the attractive images used, and the wide use of health-based terminology such as "cleanse", "toxin", as well as complicated chemical formulae that the common person will not be able to understand or be able to verify as true, any information posted is spread across the globe turning ridiculous, biased, and mostly falsifiable information into common knowledge among the masses.

 2. The lack of scientific mind sets:

As a zoology student, I have had the scientific method drilled into my head (figuratively of course-calm down conspiracy nuts) and will now rarely take any information I discover at face value, unless it is accompanied by substantial evidence to back it up. However not everyone has had a scientific background, and do not require as much evidence before making a decision. For example, say a person discovers he/she has cancer and has to go through intense chemotherapy to cure it. Chemotherapy can cause nausea, intense pain as well as a range of other incredibly uncomfortable symptoms, but someone with a scientific mind set realises it is the best treatment method due to the meticulous peer reviewed research that has lead to its creation. However, someone without a scientific mind set may not realise that chemotherapy is the best choice of treatment and may wish to avoid the dire side affects that come with it, choosing to look for much more pleasant alternative medicines; medicines that have not been studied, tested and peer reviewed by the scientific community. Scenarios similar to this one have caused many, including Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to die unnecessarily when scientifically tested treatments were available. 

If someone does not feel the need, or naturally does't even consider the idea, to study science-based evidence before making a decision, they are likely to become victims of the misinformation that runs rife in our society. 

3. The prolific human characteristic to believe the most exciting and unbelievable explanation:

Conspiracy theorists and their outlandish theories fill our media from time to time. Whether they be discussing how the moon landing was faked, how the blowing up of the twin towers was actually orchestrated by the american government, or that aeroplanes give off mind altering chemical trails while in flight, there will always be many who believe them with a passion. And that is because people want to believe things. 

People want to believe that aliens have visited our planet because it would be freaking awesome if it were true. They want to believe their parents are sitting in heaven, rather than rotting in the ground because it makes them feel better, and they want to believe that unlike the many ordinary and dull members of the human race, they themselves have psychic abilities and are therefore unique in some way. When it comes to intense belief, scientific reason is ignored by billions all over the world because scientific inquiry can discover evidence proving their core beliefs to be absolutely meaningless. Completely wrong. And this does not sit well with people. Just look at every religion in existence. There is no evidence for any of them, and yet look how many there are, and how many followers they have.

Evidence-lacking drivel presently fills our society more than ever, and I'd say the only way of combatting it is by increasing scientific thinking. Horoscopes should be removed from newspapers, and it should be more greatly explained to people why they have no validity whatsoever. No magazine or tv show should ever be allowed to release information that they claim to be true, that can be proven to be false in any way. And religious ideology should be kept as far apart from science as possible (In what way is teaching Noah's Ark in science class useful to anyone). If everyones first thought when being told an unbelievable piece of information was "What evidence is there to back up this claim",our world would be a much more logical and straight thinking place. Maybe then pseudoscience would disappear, less people would die from deadly illnesses after using useless treatments, new age healing would go the way of the dodo, and my university friend would stop trying to convince me that she saw the ghost of a long dead woman standing in her bedroom.

-Thomas Glen

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