what impact does pseudoscience have on consumers?

Answer 1

There is a huge volume of "pseudoscience" in our world, due mostly to marketing efforts. While it can be detected in every consumer advertising campaign in existence to some degree, it is especially prevalent in the hair care industry.

Shampoo and conditioner manufacturers make some of the wildest claims of pseudoscience imaginable. They make their products sound like high-tech miracles that revolutionize haircare in order to impress the masses into buying it. Some of their claims are simply empty words that have no basis in the way physics, biology, and chemistry work.

Consumers often fall for the amazing claims because they lack the background to understand the reality and deal with such claims critically. The impact? Sales based on misleading information like the claims of the snake oil vendors of yester-year. Fortunately FDA and other consumer protection mechanisms help prevent potentially damaging lies. The damage dealt by hair care pseudoscience is largely confined to the bank account rather than the body.

Answer 2

I think it has a huge impact. How many people have bought something because 4 out 5 professionals in a recent survey said they should?
Also, you have the issue with food. Studies show that tomatoes reduce the risk of cancer! People aren't going to fact find on these statements, they are just going buy more tomatoes.

Answer 3

A lot. The biggest so far, in my opinion, is how pseudoscience or should I say lack of science has managed to get most people interested in "natural products". Once people see "natural", it must be good right? And they have all these claims of 'the biggest scientific breakthrough', 'the cure for all your ailments.' And people believe it cuz it is natural and has a 'scientific backing'.

Answer 4

It makes consumers vulnerable to quackery.

For example:

People spend billions every year on herbal supplements with no evidence that they do anything. (Some actually do some things, and these are eventually backed by real science ... but most do absolutely nothing, and may actually be harmful.)

People with diseases and conditions that the medical community can't help, often turn to pseudo-scientific "alternative medicines". Again, some of these are valid and do help, but some are useless or worse, and often sold by charlatans taking advantage of desperate people.

People spend millions every year on books full of pseudo-scientific nonsense. Books about UFO sightings, and communications with extraterrestrials and time-travellers, and paranormal phenomena (ESP, ghosts, etc.). This also includes books on consipiracy theories about faked moon landings, or creationism/intelligent-design, or flat-earth propositions, etc. ... all the product of the fact that people have no ability to distinguish between real science and pseudo-science.

(Aside: Even the success of a book like the Da Vinci code, is in part attributable to people's inability to distinguish between real scholarship and pseudo-scholarship ... if something *sounds* scientific or historical, people are too quick to believe it, and efforts by actual experts to disprove it just add fuel to the fire that there is a "conspiracy to supress the truth.")

In short, pseudo-science just leaves consumers vulnerable to being convinced of *anything*. And worse, it destroys people's trust in actual experts who *do* know something. People consider an ad for supplements in the back of Us magazine, or a Chick cartoon on Adam and Eve, to be on equal scientific footing as research by MDs or researchers with PhD.s in biology or astrophysics.

Answer 5

It seems to sell them a lot of cosmetics. It also sells a lot of "healthy" food, with the false premise "natural=safe". Clearly, lions are natural, and are therefore also safe.

Answer 6

Some impact. It all depends. Maybe you could be more specific?

Answer 7

People buy stuff thinking it's great, only to find out that this psuedoshit is just that. $#!t.

Answer 8

very little people buy what they want when they want it