Social Science Space

Readers of Social Science Space may recall that Dr. Jeremy Devine suddenly became the best-know psychiatry resident North America when […]

In the United States, government health agencies consider chronic fatigue syndrome as “a serious, chronic, complex, and multisystem disease,” rather than a psychological condition. That view is is not held everywhere.

No matter how exquisite the details, it is important to separate fact from folklore – which should not require cross examination.

David Canter considers the tragic implications of people not understanding what they are told by politicians and experts.

I’ve spent my adult life in and around social science. Academically through studying psychology and linguistics (alongside philosophy), professionally through […]

We expect to see confirmation bias play an active role in the politics, where there is a satisfying emotional payoff from assuming the worst of the other side. We do not expect the same phenomenon among highly educated professionals, especially in their seemingly well researched publications. And yet …

The author of a new book on the response to the coronavirus tries first to understand how apparently sane people could think it made sense to implement damaging policies, and secondly asks how the public might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.

It’s tempting to blame bots and trolls for spreading misinformation. But really it’s our own fault for sharing so widely. Research has confirmed that lies spread faster than truth – mainly because lies are not bound to the same rules as truth.

Ever since the coronavirus spread across the world, suspicions have proliferated about what is really going on. Questions arose about […]

As scholars who research how to counter science misinformation and conspiracy theories, we believe there is also value in exposing the rhetorical techniques used in the viral video Plandemic. There are seven distinctive traits of conspiratorial thinking. Plandemic offers textbook examples of them all.

The answer for the kind of panicked flurry in reasoning we’re seeing during the COVID-19 pandemic may lie in a field of critical thinking called vice epistemology. This theory argues our thinking habits and intellectual character traits cause poor reasoning.

It’s also common to encounter people who are misinformed but don’t know it yet. It’s one thing to double-check your own information, but what’s the best way to talk to someone else about what they think is true – but which is not true?