Denialism

In the sciences and in historiography, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus or historical record on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated.[1] Examples include Holocaust denial, AIDS denialism,[2] and climate change denial.[3] The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.[4][5]

In psychology, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid believing in a uncomfortable truth.[6] Denialism is an essentially irrational human behavior that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.[7]

The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance.[8][9]

  1. ^ Scudellari 2010.
  2. ^ Usages of Holocaust and AIDS denialism: Kim 2007; Cohen 2007; Smith & Novella 2007, p. e256; Watson 2006, p. 6; Nature Medicine's editor 2006, p. 369
  3. ^ Usages of global-warming denialism: Kennedy 2007, p. 425 Colquhoun 2009, p. b3658; Connelly 2007; Goodman 2007.
  4. ^ Diethelm, Pascal; McKee, Martin (January 1, 2009), "Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?", European Journal of Public Health, 19 (1): 2–4, doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn139, PMID 19158101
  5. ^ McKee, Martin; Diethelm, Pascal (December 14, 2010), "How the growth of denialism undermines public health" (PDF), BMJ, 341: 1309–1311, doi:10.1136/bmj.c6950, PMID 21156741, S2CID 35789525
  6. ^ Maslin 2009.
  7. ^ O'Shea 2008, p. 20.
  8. ^ Hambling 2009.
  9. ^ Monbiot 2006.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.