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Nature Nurture? Is that too obvious?

Placebo effect?

how about paradigms and their implicit effects on our lives. kinda broad though. maybe a specific paradigm, like the psychological perspective of racism or something.

Psychology the Psuedoscience

Neurologists, clinical psychologists and other academics are concerned about the increasing amount of what they consider pseudoscience promoted in psychotherapy and popular psychology, and also about what they see as pseudoscientific therapies such as neuro-linguistic programming, EMDR, rebirthing, reparenting, and Primal Therapy being adopted by government and professional bodies and by the public.

Pseudoscientific thinking has been explained in terms of psychology and social psychology. The human proclivity for seeking confirmation rather than refutation (confirmation bias), the tendency to hold comforting beliefs, and the tendency to overgeneralize have been proposed as reasons for the common adherence to pseudoscientific thinking. According to Beyerstein (1991), humans are prone to associations based on resemblances only, and often prone to misattribution in cause-effect thinking.

Lindeman argues that social motives (i.e., “to comprehend self and the world, to have a sense of control over outcomes, to belong, to find the world benevolent and to maintain one’s self-esteem”) are often “more easily” fulfilled by pseudoscience than by scientific information. Furthermore, pseudoscientific explanations are generally not analyzed rationally, but instead experientially. Operating within a different set of rules compared to rational thinking, experiential thinking regards an explanation as valid if the explanation is “personally functional, satisficing and sufficient”, offering a description of the world that may be more personal than can be provided by science and reducing the amount of potential work involved in understanding complex events and outcomes.

Sigurrós wrote:
Placebo effect?

Ohh i love this one.

Why Is Pseudoscience Dangerous?
The growth and influence of pseudoscience in Russia has become serious. Many pseudoscientific devices and schemes have gained influence within governmental organizations. A special Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences against pseudoscience has had some effect in addressing the problem.

Edward Kruglyakov

The end of the twentieth century was marked by a boom of astrology, mysticism, and occultism in many countries. In the USSR (during the last years of its existence) and then in Russia the situation was even worse in a sense. The system’s collapse and the wreck of old ideals-along with the absence of new ones-caused many people to hope for some kind of miracle. The mass media contributed to this tendency. Through their irresponsibility, pseudoscience has filled newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV.

And this is what is happening in the USA today.