Publication Date

2022

Document Type

Book

Description

The ideas of eugenics infiltrated significant sectors of public activities like state fairs and sports culture by promoting the idea of a better society created by “eliminating” bad genes from the gene pool. Significantly, it also entered the legal code, most notably in the Buck v. Bell court case in 1927, which decided that it was fine to forcibly sterilize any “feeble-minded” women in order to prevent them from spreading their bad genes onto the next generation. Disinformation is an intentional act of spreading false information with the intent of causing harm. In the field of disinformation studies, scholars research how disinformation is used in our daily lives and how it affects everyone. This project will focus on how disinformation is spread within scientific communities. It will also examine the psychological factors that lead to disinformation spreading. The question now is how bad science infiltrated into society and how bad information harms people. Since the bad information came from the place (scientific community) that we expected good/reliable information from, what is the psychological impact on the public and how did they deal with it? In this paper, I argue that the psychological processes of "seizing" and "freezing" disinformation created by eugenics pseudo-scientists led to long-term societal harm.

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Eugenics Impact on Society

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