Why do People Hold to Pseudoscientific Beliefs?
Our study was consistent with other local, regional, and national surveys. Clearly, scientific literacy is in question. Why? Some have suggested that students in small rural schools have poorer educational opportunities compared to students in larger school systems. Perhaps the high science illiteracy rates were due to the representation of small schools in our sample. However, we compared small school to large school results and found no statistically significant differences based on school size. In fact, the actual percentage of pseudoscientific answers was slightly higher in the large school sample! Religious background was another possible factor that we suspected could lead to bias in students responses. Southern Oklahoma is dominated by conservative Protestant religions and is located in a region of the United States commonly called the “Bible Belt.” To explore the possibility that answers were influence by this well-known religious belief system, we selected questions for analys
