Shoshin, the Japanese Zen Buddhist word for “beginner’s mind” is an important attitude in life to develop open-mindedness, discernment, and the path of personal growth. One such thing that gets in the way of this is ego, pride, overconfidence, identity, and dogma.
While in an ideal and logical reality, educating the public based on scientific consensus should lead to increase in agreements and some practices, actual reality has given us mixed results with this approach. Researchers from Portland State University published a recent study in Science Advances of why that is.
For their study, they examined attitudes about eight issues with scientific consensus but also anti-consensus views persists. These issues include: climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, the big bang, evolution, vaccination, homeopathic medicine, and COVID-19.
They found that, in general, as people’s attitudes on an issue diverge more from scientific consensus, their assessments of their own knowledge of that issue increases, but their actual knowledge decreases. For instance, the more someone disagrees with the COVID-19 vaccine, the more they believe their ideas about it, but when in fact, their factual knowledge wanes more.
Further more, the more their attitudes are tied with an identity, such as political or religious, the more likely this pattern is seen. This brings the authors to acknowledge the effects of social norms overriding personal views. For instance, many Japanese wore COVID-19 protective masks to conform to a societal norm, rather than for its protective effects.
While blindly following consensus without question is not recommended, neither is ignoring important scientific facts for the sake of beliefs and identity preservation, both scenarios can create dangerous situations and hardships for communities.
“The challenge then becomes finding appropriate ways to convince anti-consensus individuals that they probably aren’t as knowledgeable as they think they are,” state author Nicholas Light.
Therefore, have “beginner’s mind”.
N Light et al. Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038
