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There are many theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.

The list includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, astrology, psychoanalysis, personality types, etc.

Questions:

  • What attracts people to such theories? Do any cognitive biases make people believe them easily? Which part of pseudosciences acts as a stimulus that triggers this cognitive bias?

  • If there's a cognitive bias behind people believing in pseudoscience, knowing that a majority of the population does that – is there any term for such a phenomenon in social psychology?

  • A majority of the population believes in some kind of pseudoscience. Does this signify an evolutionary aspect of our minds – that people are still evolving into better species that might one day believe in proper science? Pseudoscience seems to be older than science; correct me if I am wrong here.

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Bharadwaj Srigiriraju
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    note the irony of your last question. You make a teleological statement about evolution -- a common mistake of pseudoscience ;). – Artem Kaznatcheev Aug 16 '12 at 20:47
  • Oh, there is a term for it!! Thanks for pointing that out. Even a greater irony is that I subscribed to this pseudoscience without even knowing it exists!! LOL – Bharadwaj Srigiriraju Aug 17 '12 at 10:36
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    @forbidden-overseer: some do help and work for people and there are gaps in science. There is an element of art to life that has real outcomes and can not always be organized in thought. – Greg McNulty Feb 13 '14 at 04:58
  • What pseudoscience actually works for is very limited. It rarely works reliably for its claimed functions, and sometimes sets them back considerably. – Nick Stauner Feb 13 '14 at 06:54
  • For the same reasons they subscribe to scientific theories, mostly. – Gala Mar 06 '14 at 10:39
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    There's more than one answer, but regarding medical quackery, I wonder if the placebo effect plays a role. Placebos have a demonstratable benefit over doing nothing, and when actual treatment is unavailable or prohibitively expensive, belief in chicken noodle soup is perfectly rational. When you tell someone that the soup does nothing, you are taking away the benefit of the soup. I'm assuming here that people are unconsciously aware of their self-deception, and we're getting into pascal's wager territory here, so feel free to downvote. – James Apr 12 '14 at 22:14
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    In my experience, a combination of personal constructs and confirmation bias. – Sebaileyus Hope Mar 06 '17 at 23:26
  • Probably because a lot of the scientific theories are incomplete, controversial, unconvincing or otherwise unsatisfying. – dtech Jul 05 '18 at 22:47

4 Answers4

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There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:

  1. David Deutsch (2005) "A new way to explain explanation", and
  2. Richard Dawkins (2009) "Why the universe seems so strange"

At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and sometimes using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless unless they understand the story it tells. The problem with modern science is that to have a good grasp of its explanatory power, you need a lot of (often difficult) background. As you gain this background, you develop what Feynman would call the most fundamental skill in science: always questioning, being able to say "I don't know", and to hold contrasting ideas together. If you don't invest in acquiring this background, most of science seems like witchcraft passed down by ivory-tower academics in funny gowns and hats.

What pseudoscience (or even cargo-cult science) provide is explanations that require less background, purport to be more certain, have something for everyone (Forer effect), and reassure you that "there is an answer". If you look at much of pseudoscience (or ancient myths) more closely, you will notice that they tend to personify their subject matter much more than science (my favorite example is the homunculus fallacy). They use this personification to provide agency, intent, and meaning to their explanations.

The great advantage of these human stories is that our minds are optimized for them. If you subscribe to Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis, then one of the main things evolution produced is a mind built to understand social structure, and other people. When an agent does not adhere to its role and violates our theory-of-mind and behaves erratically, without discernible intent and meaning, this is dangerous to us and our society; it causes us great discomfort. When you hijack the social mind to try to explain further and further afield parts of nature, you try to build the same sort of characters.

When you have to say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" this character, it creates discomfort. Pseudoscience thrives on this by giving an arbitrary, simple, shallow and easy to change explanation. Since most lay-people never pursue this explanation far enough to notice its contradictions, and since it shapes their observations (in the Popper-sense and through confirmation bias) they never get a strong enough cognitive-dissonance to overcome to positive feeling of having an understandable 'explanation'.

Unfortunately, all I can do in this answer is provide a intuitively appealing, intent and agency based explanation. Reread my answer and make note of unnecessary personifications I made -- just like much of pseudoscience, science is a story and there is the biggest rub.

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Artem Kaznatcheev
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    I think the answer is OK, but there is a point in which I strongly disagree. You say that science provides explanation and, sometimes, predictions. If science is not required to provide predictions beyond the observed data, it's no different from myth and religion. Indeed your answer is scientific in this sense: it predicts that, whenever a pseudoscience succeeds it's always through extensive use of personification. – Javier Rodriguez Laguna Aug 23 '12 at 08:32
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    +1. Only missing reference to Daniel Dennett and it would be perfect :) – LitheOhm Sep 12 '12 at 21:54
  • @JavierRodriguezLaguna The point this sentence is that the the most important aspect of science is it's explanatory power. (You can find this argument in the book The fabric of reality by David Deutsch). Whether scientific theories need to provide predictions is a different subject, and Artem Kaznatcheev never said that science does not require to provide predictions. (nor did he say that science require to provide predictions) – Benjamin Crouzier Oct 14 '12 at 16:49
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    Prediction is mandatory, a nice story is not. A nice story to help understand is strongly recommended, sure. But science can proceed without. E.g., quantum mechanics as seen by Bohr. Without the ability to make predictions, science is just another narrative. – Javier Rodriguez Laguna Oct 14 '12 at 20:30
  • @JavierRodriguezLaguna I think you have a very naive view of how science proceeds. Physics is very exceptional compared to most of science in being able to generate predictions, and even when it does it is mostly by accident. Almost every theorist that sets out to work in physics has as their goal to explain something, only after they develop their theory do they realize that as a side-effect it made some new predictions. If you want a case-study, consider either Maxwell on light or Dirac's work on anti-particles. We remember predictions because they are romantic, but that is not the practice. – Artem Kaznatcheev Oct 14 '12 at 20:36
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    @JavierRodriguezLaguna prediction is definitely a big plus (why many prefer physics over psychology, say) but it is not mandatory. A good story (although also not necessarily mandatory) is almost always desired, once again consider how many theorists where guided by mathematical elegance (good story in math terms) to arrive at new truths. Notable case-studied would be Einstein and (again) Dirac. – Artem Kaznatcheev Oct 14 '12 at 20:40
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    @ArtemKaznatcheev, your definition of science is extremely weak. It is hard to distinguish from religion or philosophy. I am a physicist myself, you might have guessed that much :), and I do believe that other wannabe sciences should be modelled with our same level of demand, no less. Physics, and any good science, is predictive every day, not just at special romantic situations. I use predictions in my daily work. That's why everybody relies on physics, they put their lives in our hands, e.g.: when you travel by plane. And nobody would risk their lives on the predictions of e.g. economy. – Javier Rodriguez Laguna Oct 16 '12 at 14:03
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    @JavierRodriguezLaguna I am a physicists too (well, that is a lie, I am more a mathematician now) and I don't do engineering hence I rarely use predictions of physics. When I am doing science, I am explaining parts of physics that are not well understood, and then the engineers worry about the applications and predictions after. This is true of most of my colleagues as well, except for a few experimentalists. But we are going off-topic, if you want to discuss more then catch me on G+ or twitter. – Artem Kaznatcheev Oct 16 '12 at 20:54
  • I really like this answer, but this discussion about whether predictions are essential to science is sort of puzzling. I think the term prediction is just being used in different ways. We can agree, I think, that a valid scientific statement or theory requires a testable hypothesis (at least in principle), which I would call a prediction. If it does not then it can no longer be called a scientific statement. Most experiments are a form of inductive reasoning about such predictions -- if A then B. B is true, so A is more plausible. Or, just as importantly, B is false, so A is less plausible. – yamad Nov 02 '12 at 16:05
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    I'm wandering if this desire for an "explanation" plagues scientists as well, only in the form of "publication bias", where positive explanations are far more likely to get published than "I tried, but still don't know" ones. – Alex Stone Nov 03 '12 at 07:40
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    An addition to your great answer, Artem Kaznatcheev:

    Science produces knowledge, but people are interested in solutions.

    Much of scientific knowledge is either too complicated for the average person to understand or not yet applicable to reality due to its own incomplete understanding. It is a common error in reasoning among scientists, when they believe that science explains anything. It usually doesn't.

    For example, if I want to buy a new car and can't decide, should I study economics and engineering, or throw a coin? Throwing the coin is the recommended practice.

     –  Aug 21 '13 at 13:19
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    in other words, it's because of the laziness – chaohuang May 20 '15 at 19:42
  • I disagree that science is only about explanations. What draws a line between science and pseudoscience is applicability. Both often try to explain. – rus9384 Sep 26 '18 at 05:20
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There are now many full-length books that focus on this deep, complex question about human nature/psychology and note newer/ongoing/active research in the area, some of it cited in them.

But some counterpoint from the reverse, flip side. Science is a complex, evolving, and at times subtle field in a way that was not fully recognized largely until the research in Kuhnian shifts.

Nick Stauner
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vzn
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Perhaps people are attracted to these theories in part because of the inability for mainstream science to answer anomalies.

The occasion of governmental

  • lying,
  • hiding of technology, and
  • corruption,

helps reinforce the idea that there exists real Science that is not known to the mainstream. In the absence of trust, people contemplate the possibilities (imagination) by which the breach of trust could harm them.

New Alexandria
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Taking Up John Berryman's challenge in the Comment to the Question:
Most people do not develop mentally past the Concrete Operations stage or early Formal Operations (Piaget). People with this (very common and normal) level of mental development do not reason well in abstract terms and cannot do advanced symbolic manipulations. They are prone to the many Cognitive Biases and other types of fallacy because they cannot see how proper reasoning is different from the fallacies and biases. (Indeed, if everyone could reason properly, the biases would not exist.)

So, like the common tendency to need glasses to see well, and the likelihood of having crooked teeth or getting cataracts, these are just normal situations that render many people unable to reason as needed to understand science. No amount of 'splaining' or 'edumication' will help.

People usually stop developing mentally when they finish school, unless they are unusually motivated to keep studying something out of interest or have very stimulating companions. (Note that this is not to say that anyone cannot develop farther mentally due to some sort of deficiency, merely that they do not, out of life choice and habit. So don't call me a bigot!)