Viés Alternativo Para a Compreensão do Mundo? Uma Análise da Percepção de Graduandos em Ciências Biológicas Sobre Pseudociência

Abstract

Pseudoscience is able to deceive even the most skeptical individuals due to its tactic of mimicking the processes of science, from simulating a methodology and a scientific language, to inducing a rationality. Therefore, considering this trick of pseudoscience, this study aimed to analyze the perception of undergraduate students in Biological Sciences about the general characteristics of pseudoscience, since these students are in the process of training and may act to combat the anti-science front. To achieve our goal, we applied a questionnaire of agreement with a Likert-type scale, and its results were analyzed from the average ranking of the answers obtained. In total, 56 undergraduate and 32 bachelor students participated. The results of the research show that students do not differentiate scientific denialism from pseudoscience and remain in a field of neutrality, when dealing with the criterion of falsifiability to characterize the Sciences.