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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Are Humans Hard-wired to Reject Science? — Sightline Daily - Northwest News that Matters

Are Humans Hard-wired to Reject Science? — Sightline Daily - Northwest News that Matters: "As Felicity Barringer reports at NYT’s Green blog, scientific evidence reinforces something that communicators have long understood as a guiding rule of our craft: “[Humans] are hard-wired to respond to external or internal information with emotion and instinct first and cognition second. With emotion and instinct more and reason less.”

In other words, (this is not the scientific way of putting it, either, BTW) we react to information with our heart or gut more than our brains. Of course, this impacts responses to our messages about policy solutions and new technologies.

For example, reporting another story for the Times, Barringer ran into opposition to smart meter technology from an unlikely mix of Tea Party conservatives and left-leaning individualists in California, many of whom are convinced that the meters’ “radio frequency radiation” poses a health threat."

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