NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology is Scientific | NeoAcademic - 0 views
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The problem with human subjects data – as any psychologist like myself will tell you – is that simply asking someone a question rarely gives you the information that you think it does. When you ask someone to respond to a question, it must pass through a variety of mental filters, and these filters often cause people’s answers to differ from reality. Some of these processes are conscious and others are not
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Learning, and by extension knowledge, are no different. People don’t always know what they know. And this NSF report is a fantastic example of this in action. The goal of the NSF researchers was to assess, “Do US citizens believe astrology is scientific?” People were troubled that young people now apparently believe astrology is more scientific than in the past. But this interpretation unwisely assumes that people accurately interpret the word astrology. It assumes that they know what astrology is and recognize that they know it in order to respond authentically
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When I saw the NSF report, I was reminded of my own poor understanding of these terms. “Surely,” I said to myself, “it’s not that Americans believe astrology is scientific. Instead, they must be confusing astronomy with astrology, like I did those many years ago.” Fortunately, I had a very quick way to answer this question: Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
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MTurk is a fantastic tool available to quickly collect human subjects data. It pulls from a massive group of people looking to complete small tasks for small amounts of money. So for 5 cents per survey, I collected 100 responses to a short survey from American MTurk Workers. It asked only 3 questions:Please define astrology in 25 words or less.Do you believe astrology to be scientific? (using the same scale as the NSF study)What is your highest level of education completed? (using the same scale as the NSF study)
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Among those that correctly identified astrology as astrology, only 13.5% found it “pretty scientific” or “very scientific”. Only 1 person said it was “very scientific.” Among those that identified astrology as astronomy, the field was overwhelmingly seen as scientific, exactly as I expected. This is the true driver of the NSF report findings