I want to believe: Prior beliefs influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative and scientific medicine

Previous research suggests that people may develop stronger causal illusions when the existence of a causal relationship is consistent with their prior beliefs. In the present study, we hypothesized that prior pseudoscientific beliefs will influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative medicine and scientific medicine. Participants (N = 98) were exposed to an adaptation of the standard causal illusion task in which they had to judge whether two fictitious treatments, one described as conventional medicine and the other as alternative medicine, could heal the crises caused by two different syndromes. Since both treatments were completely ineffective, those believing that any of the two medicines worked were exhibiting a causal illusion. Participants also responded to the Pseudoscience Endorsement Scale (PES) and some questions about trust in alternative therapies that were taken from the Survey on the Social Perception of Science and Technology conducted by FECYT. The results replicated the causal illusion effect and extended them by revealing an interaction between the prior pseudoscientific beliefs and the scientific/pseudoscientific status of the fictitious treatment. Individuals reporting stronger pseudoscientific beliefs were more vulnerable to the illusion in both scenarios, whereas participants with low adherence to pseudoscientific beliefs seemed to be more resistant to the illusion in the alternative medicine scenario. Alternative medicine refers to a wide range of health practices not included in the healthcare system and not considered conventional or scientific medicine (World Health Organization, 2022). A common feature of alternative therapies is the lack of scientific evidence on their effectiveness, with some popular examples being homeopathy (Hawke et al., 2018; Peckham et al., 2019) and reiki (Zimpel et al., 2020). Therefore, they often can be considered pseudoscientific (i.e., practices or beliefs that are presented as scientific but are unsupported by scientific evidence; Fasce and Picó, 2019). Understanding why some people rely on alternative medicine despite this lack of evidence is relevant, since its usage can pose a threat to a person’s health (Freckelton, 2012; Hellmuth et al., 2019; Lilienfeld, 2007), either by replacing evidence-based treatments (Chang et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2018a, 2018b; Mujar et al., 2017) or by reducing their effectiveness (Awortwe et al., 2018). In this research, we will assume that people assess the effectiveness of a given treatment (whether scientific or alternative) by estimating the causal link between the treatment (potential cause) and symptom relief (outcome). To achieve this, people can resort to various information sources, but they could certainly use their own experience of covariation between the treatment and the symptoms. However, biases can occur in this process. In particular, the causal illusion is the systematic error of perceiving a causal link between unrelated events that happen to occur in time proximity (Matute et al., 2015). This cognitive bias could explain why people sometimes judge that completely ineffective treatments cause health benefits (Matute et al., 2011), particularly when both the administration of the treatment (i.e., the cause) and the relief of the symptoms (i.e., the outcome) occur with high frequency (Allan et al., 2005; Hannah and Beneteau, 2009; Musca et al., 2010; Perales et al., 2005; Vadillo et al., 2010). Although the causal illusion is subject to variations in the probability with which the potential cause and the outcome occur, and hence most theoretical analyses of the phenomenon have focused on how people acquire contingency information (e.g., Matute et al., 2019), the participant’s prior beliefs could also play a role, and this will be the focus of the current paper. In fact, influence of prior beliefs seems common in other cognitive biases that enable humans to protect their worldviews. A good example is the classical phenomenon of belief bias (Evans et al., 1983; Klauer et al., 2000; Markovits and Nantel, 1989). This consists of people’s tendency to accept the conclusion of a deductive inference based on their prior knowledge and beliefs rather than on the logical validity of the arguments. For example, the syllogism ‘All birds can fly. Eagles can fly. Therefore, eagles are birds’ is invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises, but people would often judge it as valid just because the conclusion seems in line with their previous knowledge. There is a specific form of belief bias known as ‘motivated reasoning’ (Trippas et al., 2015), in which people exhibit a strong preference or motivation to arrive at a particular conclusion when they are making an inference (Kunda, 1990). Thus, individuals draw the conclusion they want to believe from the available evidence. To do this, people tend to dismiss information that is incongruent with prior beliefs and focus excessively on evidence that supports prior conceptions, which resembles the popular confirmation bias (Oswald and Grosjean, 2004). Additionally, some evidence points out that motivated reasoning can specifically affect causal inferences (Kahan et al., 2017), particularly when people learn about cause–effect relationships from their own experience (Caddick and Rottman, 2021). Thus, if these cognitive biases show the effect of prior beliefs, it should not be surprising that causal illusions operate in a similar way. In fact, some experimental evidence suggests that this is the case. For example, Blanco et al. (2018) found that political ideology could modulate causal illusion so that the resulting inference fits previous beliefs. In particular, the results from their experiments suggest that participants developed a causal illusion selectively to favor the conclusions that they were more inclined to believe from the beginning. Thus, we predict that prior beliefs about science and pseudoscience could also bias causal inferences about treatments and their health outcomes. More specifically, we suggest that, when people attempt to assess the effectiveness of a pseudoscientific or scientific medical treatment, their causal inferences may be biased to suit their prior beliefs and attitudes about both types of treatments. In line with this idea, a recent study by Torres et al. (2020) explicitly examined the relationship between causal illusion in the laboratory and belief in pseudoscience. These authors designed a causal illusion task with a pseudoscience-framed scenario: participants had to decide whether an infusion made up of an Amazonian plant (i.e., a fictitious natural remedy that mimicked the characteristics of alternative medicine) was effective at alleviating headache. They found that participants who held stronger pseudoscientific beliefs (assessed by means of a questionnaire) showed a greater degree of causal illusion in their experiment, overestimating the ability of the herbal tea to alleviate the headache. Importantly, note that this experiment only contained one cover story, framed in a pseudoscientific scenario. We argue that the results observed by Torres et al. (2020) have two possible interpretations: the first is that people who believed in pseudoscience were more prone to causal illusion in general, regardless of the cover story of the task; the second, based on the effect observed by Blanco et al. (2018) in the context of political ideology, is that the illusion is produced to confirm previous beliefs, that is, those participants who had a positive attitude toward alternative medicine were more inclined to believe that the infusion was working to heal the headache, and causal illusion developed to favor this conclusion. Given that only one pseudoscientific scenario was used in Torres et al.’s experiment, it is impossible to distinguish between the two interpretations. Thus, further research is necessary to analyze how individual differences in pseudoscientific beliefs modulate the intensity of causal illusion, and whether this modulation interacts with the scenario so that prior beliefs are reinforced. To sum up, the present research aims to fill this gap by assessing the participants’ attitude toward pseudoscience, and then presenting an experimental task in which participants are asked to judge the effectiveness of two fictitious medical treatments: one presented as conventional/scientific, and the other one as alternative/pseudoscientific. None of these treatments were causally related to recovery. Our main hypothesis is that the intensity of the observed causal illusion will depend on the interaction between previous beliefs about pseudoscience and the current type of medicine presented. Specifically, we expect that: • Participants with less positive previous beliefs about pseudoscience will develop weaker illusions in the pseudoscientific scenario than in the scientific scenario. For those participants, the conclusion that an alternative medicine is working is not very credible according to their prior beliefs. • Participants with more positive beliefs about pseudoscience could either show the opposite pattern (so that they find more believable the conclusion that the pseudoscientific medicine works than the conclusion that the scientific medicine works), which would be consistent with the studies by Blanco et al. (2018) on political ideology, or, alternatively, they could show similar levels of (strong) causal illusion for both treatments, which would suggest that pseudoscientific beliefs are associated with stronger causal illusions in general, as has been previously suggested (Torres et al., 2020)Grant PID2021-126320NB-I00 from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish GovernmentGrant IT1696-22 from the Basque Governmen

I want to believe

Rad ne sadrži sažetak

I want to believe

Rad ne sadrži sažetak

The Mulder Effect: I Want to Believe...in STEAM

The balance that Mulder and Scully discover in their partnership on The X-Files represents the balance we find in STEAM: trust in science with the ability to question, imagine, and dream

I Want To Believe: Kant, The X Files, And Cosmopolitical Unity

Kant’s final chapter of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, puts forth certain observations concerning the characteristics of human beings. In order for these observations to have rational validity as a proposed ‘human nature,’ however, Kant admits that it is necessary to compare between humans and another species of rational animal. Thus in an effort not to succumb to a naively anthropocentric thesis of nature, Kant still falls victim to his own anthropocentric privileging of rationality as a strictly human capacity—at least terrestrially speaking. While Kant fails to recognize any other earthly species as a rational animal, he nevertheless speculates as to the possible existence of an extraterrestrial species of rational animal, with which we might compare ourselves in order to construct a more rationally objective anthropology. In the conclusion of his final volume, Kant’s alien speculations help lead him to espouse a cosmopolitical order. Our focus here will be to examine the popular television series The X-Files in order to illuminate certain resonances between the show’s use of the alien and Kant’s cosmopolitanism

I Want to Believe, But I Can\u27t Tom O\u27Day

This Thesis is an overview of the processes and practices that I employed for transferring abstract ideas into concrete visual forms, while I was in the graduate program at the University of New Orleans. The description is accompanied by images of the works; they follow in the order they made

Conspiração e vida nua. The X-Files, I want to believe: mundo possível ou mundo presente?

El presente artículo problematiza, en general, la conspiración como una estructura política y narrativa fundamental de la Modernidad. A través de un análisis fílmico de la serie The X-Files, I want to believe, planteamos como objetivo revelar como el tópico de la conspiración, en un nivel superficial, es un articulador de la trama de la serie, pero en un nivel profundo y amplio entendemos la conspiración como una estrategia articuladora de la vida moderna y, en este marco, del control biopolítico. Así entonces, el artículo muestra cómo la estructura argumentativa de la serie propone tramas y personajes a través de los cuales el poder gubernamental interviene los cuerpos y el espacio, quita y permite la vida, distorsiona la realidad, informa y desinforma. Todo es parte de una estrategia global de confabulación y ocultamiento de la verdad. En conclusión, la serie de televisión permite observar los regímenes de hipervisibilidad e intervención de la máquina gubernamental actual y es, en esta medida, un punto de entrada para reconocer problemas sociales y políticos de total actualidad.This article problematizes, in general, the conspiracy as a fundamental political and narrative structure of Modernity. Through a film analysis of the series The X-Files, I want to believe, we propose to reveal how the topic of the conspiracy, on a superficial level, is an articulator of the plot of the series, but at a deep and broad level, we understand conspiracy as an articulating strategy of modern life and, in this context, of bio-political control. Thus, the article shows how the argumentative structure of the series proposes plots and characters through which governmental power intervenes in bodies and space, removes and allows life, distorts reality, informs and misinforms. Everything is part of a global strategy of conspiracy and concealment of the truth. In conclusion, the television series allows us to observe the hypervisibility and intervention regimes of the current government machine and is, to this extent, a point of entry to recognize current social and political problems.Este artigo problematiza, em geral, a conspiração como uma estrutura política e narrativa fundamental da Modernidade. Por meio de uma análise fílmica da série The X-Files, I want to believe, propomos como objetivo revelar como o tópico da conspiração, num nível superficial, é um articulador da trama da série, mas, num nível profundo e amplo, entendemos a conspiração como uma estratégia articuladora da vida modera e, nesse contexto, do controle biopolítico. Assim, o artigo mostra como a estrutura argumentativa da série apresenta tramas e personagens pelos quais o poder governamental intervém os corpos e o espaço, tira e permite a vida, distorce a realidade, informa e desinforma. Tudo faz parte de uma estratégia global de confabulação e ocultamento da verdade. Em conclusão, a série de televisão permite observar os regimes de hipervisibilidade e intervenção da máquina governamental atual e é, nessa medida, um ponto de entrada para reconhecer problemas sociais e políticos de total atualidade.https://revistas.udem.edu.co/index.php/anagramas/article/view/189

I want to believe they really care: how complaining customers want to be treated by frontline employees

Purpose – Using a realist perspective, this paper investigates how complaining customers want to be treated by frontline employees in personal complaint handling encounters. For this purpose, an exploratory research study using the qualitative laddering interviewing technique was regarded as appropriate as it allows researchers to gain a deeper insight into an underdeveloped research subject. Following realist thinking and terminology, the exploratory study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the so-called micro structures of complaining customers. Design/Methodology/Approach – A semi-standardized qualitative technique called laddering was used to reveal the cognitive structures of complaining customers. In total, laddering interviews with 40 respondents with complaining experience were conducted. Findings – The research shows that the most important attributes for complaining customers are the contact employees’ authenticity, competence, and active listening skills. These concepts are linked with several consequences and values such as “Justice”, “Well-Being”, and “Security”. Research limitations/implications – Due to the exploratory nature of the study in general and the scope and size of its sample in particular, the findings are tentative in nature. As the study involved students from one university, the results cannot be generalized beyond this group even though in this case the student sample is likely to represent the general buying public. Practical implications – If companies know what complaining customers expect, frontline employees may be trained to adapt their behaviour to their customers’ underlying expectations, which should have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. For this purpose, the paper gives several suggestions to managers to improve active complaint handling and management. Originality/value – Our findings enrich the existing limited stock of knowledge on complaint satisfaction by developing a deeper understanding of the attributes that complaining customers expect from frontline employees, as well as the underlying logic for these expectations. Revealing the important role of employee authenticity adds to our knowledge on complaint satisfaction. Another strong contribution of this paper lies in the finding that all the identified concepts must not been seen in strict isolation, as in previous research, but have to be understood as a network of interrelated concepts: The attributes of frontline employees have several important consequences for customers (e.g. the feeling of being taken seriously), which are then linked to consumers’ personal values and basic motivations (e.g. perceptions of justice)

I want to believe there is a girl here under the table

Written in non-linear fragments, my thesis is what Audre Lorde in her novel Zami calls a "biomythography" - the weaving together of myth, history and biography in epic narrative form, a style of composition that represents all the ways in which we perceive the world. Using repetition and shifting memories, I draw from my bicultural upbringing in Offenbach, a city in Germany populated mostly by migrants, as well as my experience of working in art and culture internationally, travelling and living in different countries. Interrogating objects, buildings, family photographs, books and movies, and listening to the silences of the unvoiced, I upset and play with experiences of othering, assumptions and expectations about identity and ask questions about home, belonging and migration, mother tongue and translation. I draw inspiration from Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's use of texts, documents and images to explore dislocation and memory, as well as authors who engage language, translation and belonging such as Mikhail Shishkin, Yoko Tawada, Gloria Anzaldua and Mohammed Khair-Eddine

Feminist Press Author Reveals Identity

In 1972 I was appointed Associate Dean for Student Affairs at the Harvard Medical School, the first woman in the school\u27s history to hold a position in the ranks of high administration. I took this job because I want to believe that women physicians and medical students can make real contributions to the women\u27s health movement, and because I know that we need the support, good sense and good politics of other feminists, working together to revolutionize our understanding of health and health care. I hoped to make connections between the two groups and to be a voice for change in the administration of the school. Now, three years later, I believe that I should no longer tolerate the pretense of that job