By Judith McKelvey
In the Jan 2018 edition of Scientific American, Michael Shermer writies “For the Love of Science: Combating science denial with science pleasure.” This sounds sexier than it is. But I really like the results he pulls from two studies done by Asheley Landrum that show how situational skepticism can be, for both Democrats and Republicans. For example, in a 2017 study (“Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing,” published in Advances in Political Psychology), Landrum concludes unsurprisingly that folks on the liberal side of things tend to refuse to read science that might detract even a little from the climate change claim, while strong conservatives refuse to read “climate-concerned” scientific publications. What is uplifting, however, is that she found that on all ends of the spectrum, people who were highly curious, who had “an appetite to be surprised by scientific information,” could hear facts even when they didn’t support their baseline beliefs. I share this with my students and make it our mantra in the social sciences: read and listen with an appetite for surprise.
Meanwhile, in the Jan-Feb 2018 Harvard Business Review, the entire edition is devoted to the concept of business culture. I’m using the whole thing in the new course on grant writing, because awareness of corporate and foundation culture is key to matching missions in the proposal process. But it also works for all classes where there’s a job application element, where we train students to use the rhetoric of persuasion, and strategies for proving their “fit” in order to get hired. In my neurodiversity-themed class, we are using the HBR’s in-depth definitions of culture to better understand what it means to be outside a culture that is pervasive and largely invisible to those who fit into it; and what it means to change it.
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
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