2.4 The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, and Humble

2-2 How do the scientific attitude’s three main components relate to critical thinking?

Underlying all science is, first, a hard-headed curiosity, a passion to explore and understand without misleading or being misled. Some questions (Is there life after death?) are beyond science. Answering them in any way requires a leap of faith. With many other ideas (Can some people demonstrate ESP?), the proof is in the pudding. Let the facts speak for themselves.

“The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens.”

Statistician Persi Diaconis (2002)

Magician James Randi has used this empirical approach when testing those claiming to see glowing auras around people’s bodies:

The Amazing Randi The magician James Randi exemplifies skepticism. He has tested and debunked supposed psychic phenomena.

Randi: Do you see an aura around my head?

Aura seer: Yes, indeed.

Randi: Can you still see the aura if I put this magazine in front of my face?

Aura seer: Of course.

Randi: Then if I were to step behind a wall barely taller than I am, you could determine my location from the aura visible above my head, right?

Randi once told me that no aura seer has agreed to take this simple test.

No matter how sensible-seeming or wild an idea, the smart thinker asks: Does it work? When put to the test, can its predictions be confirmed? Subjected to such scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas sometimes find support. During the 1700s, scientists scoffed at the notion that meteorites had extraterrestrial origins. When two Yale scientists challenged the conventional opinion, Thomas Jefferson reportedly jeered, “Gentlemen, I would rather believe that those two Yankee professors would lie than to believe that stones fell from Heaven.” Sometimes scientific inquiry turns jeers into cheers.

More often, science becomes society’s garbage disposal, sending crazy-sounding ideas to the waste heap, atop previous claims of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer cures, and out-of-body travels into centuries past. To sift reality from fantasy, sense from nonsense, therefore requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible.

“To believe with certainty,” says a Polish proverb, “we must begin by doubting.” As scientists, psychologists approach the world of behavior with a curious skepticism, persistently asking two questions: What do you mean? How do you know?

When ideas compete, skeptical testing can reveal which ones best match the facts. Do parental behaviors determine children’s sexual orientation? Can astrologers predict your future based on the position of the planets at your birth? Is electroconvulsive therapy (delivering an electric shock to the brain) an effective treatment for severe depression? As we will see, putting such claims to the test has led psychological scientists to answer No to the first two questions and Yes to the third.

Putting a scientific attitude into practice requires not only curiosity and skepticism but also humility—an awareness of our own vulnerability to error and an openness to surprises and new perspectives. In the last analysis, what matters is not my opinion or yours, but the truths nature reveals in response to our questioning. If people or other animals don’t behave as our ideas predict, then so much the worse for our ideas. This humble attitude was expressed in one of psychology’s early mottos: “The rat is always right.”

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“My deeply held belief is that if a god anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts … if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.”

Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain, 1979

Historians of science tell us that these three attitudes—curiosity, skepticism, and humility—helped make modern science possible. Some deeply religious people today may view science, including psychological science, as a threat. Yet, many of the leaders of the scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Newton, were deeply religious people acting on the idea that “in order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork” (Stark, 2003a,b).

Of course, scientists, like anyone else, can have big egos and may cling to their preconceptions. Nevertheless, the ideal of curious, skeptical, humble scrutiny of competing ideas unifies psychologists as a community as they check and recheck one another’s findings and conclusions.