NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology Is Scientific

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 14, 2014 @07:28AM from the not-dumb-just-ignorant dept.

RichDiesal writes "A new report (PDF) from the National Science Foundation, which we discussed a few days ago, states that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific. This turns out to be false; most of those apparently astrology-loving Americans have actually confused astrology with astronomy. In a 100-person Mechanical Turk study with a $5 research budget, I tested this by actually asking people to define astrology. Among those that correctly defined astrology, only 10% believe it to be scientific; among those that confused astrology for astronomy, 92% believe 'astrology' to be scientific."

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Re:Go back .... by ShanghaiBill · 2014-02-14 07:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

So instead of being scientifically illiterate, USians are just vanilla illiterate?
This $5 study does NOT support that conclusion since the overwhelming majority of Mechanical Turkers are NOT Americans.
Although there there plenty of stupid Americans, America does not have a monopoly on stupidity. There's plenty of competition from the rest of the world.