Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things thinks that a key to humankind's great evolutionary progress is the result of our being able to believe and disbelieve. Without both abilities we would be severely hampered. We must be able to believe enough to plan for the future, expect planted crops to germinate and grow, and rely on each other for support and comfort. But we must be skeptical enough to question why things work the way they do and whether there are improvements that can be made in ourselves, our tools, and our relationships. The problem comes when I am skeptical about something you believe or you are skeptical about something I believe. Two methods or sorting out such disagreements have been developed and used for several hundred, if not several thousand years: Authoritarianism and the Scientific Method.
According to Shermer (founding publisher of "Skeptic" magazine and regular contributor to Scientific American) people believe weird things because they have been taught to believe them (they have accepted the "authority" of the teacher) or they have experienced something that fits a pattern that makes sense to them. Shermer describes the thought process and how it works for both science and pseudoscience or superstition. The "weird things" he uses for examples are UFO's and alien abductions, near death experiences, ESP and other mind tricks, holocaust denial, creationism, and even Ayn Rand's Objectivism. He even shows how scientists can fall prey to superstition if they forget to continually use the scientific method to test their new found knowledge.
Originally published in 1998, Shermer brought out a revised edition in 2002 and included a final chapter "Why SMART people believe in weird things." In this chapter he details statistics that show that intelligence is no guarantee of being able to screen out superstition and pseudoscience. In fact, smart people might be even better at defending the weird beliefs that they picked up for non-smart reasons. In other words, intelligence is on a completely different axis from belief and skepticism.
I found the book very readable with good examples of all the propositions. But don't take my word for it. Be skeptical until you read it yourself.
Hmmm, it sounds like a decent hypothesis, but hardly something that has already passed the rigors of the scientific method. Scientists are just as likely to use authoritarianism to gain support as anyone else.
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