Some Hindrances to

Scientific Inquiry
(Research)
 Tradition

• Accepting customs, beliefs, practices, and superstitions

are trues and are pants of the daily lives of men.
• There are some cultures that believe ailments such as headaches
are the result of possession rather than of illness.
• Women who are conceiving should avoid eating dark or black
foods because their children will become dark also.
• Traditional practices of these cultures limit their ability to
adapt to a more modern world.
 Authority
• Accepting without question.
• Well known athlete is made to announce that to drink a certain
brand liquor is good because it makes the body strong.
• usage of snow caps can lighten your skin. (Alden Richards)

• They are believed without any scientific inquiry about the

truth of their pronouncements.
 Inaccurate Observation
• Describing wrongly what is actually observed.
• In the dead of moonlight night, a man sees a shadow in the form
of a person and the man concludes at once without any
investigation that he has seen a ghost.
 Overgeneralization
• Establishing pattern out of a few instances.
• Two Ilocano husbands who were hardworking, responsible and
trustworthy then he or she concludes that Ilocano husbands are
hardworking.
• One happens to travel in a rough road in a certain province he
forms the impression that the roads in province are rough.
 Selective Observation
• Persisting to believe an observed pattern from and
overgeneralization and ignoring pertinent patterns.
• One sees for the first time one or two prosperous Chinese stores
beside a poor, struggling Filipino store. He forms the conclusion
that the Chinese are more shrewd and more competitive than
Filipinos.
• So every time that he sees Chinese and Filipino stores he always
has the idea that Chinese are better businessman than Filipinos.
 Made-up-information
• Making up information to explain away confusion.
• Suppose a buyer buys from a store, goods worth P50. 00 and gives
the storekeeper a P100.00 bill. The storekeeper mistakenly gives a
change of P40.00.
• The buyer goes away without counting the change but when he
gets home he finds that the change is short of P10.00. He then
concludes that the storekeeper is a cheater.
 Illogical Reasoning
• Attributing something to another without any logical basis
• For instance, extended good weather it may rain on weekend.
• It is sunny today so it will not rain.
• A woman is believed to be a sorcerer.
 Ego-involvement in
Understanding
• Giving an explanation when one finds himself in an
unfavorable situation.
• When a student gets a low grade, he says that he got low grade
because his teacher has a personal grudge against him and he is a
victim of vindictiveness.
 Mystification
• Attributing to supernatural power, the phenomena that
cannot be understood.
• This is accepting that there are things which are beyond human
intelligence to understand and which are reserved only to
supernatural being.
 To err is human
• An attribute admits the fallibility of man.
• When a man renders a wrong decision or commits a mistake, he
merely leans on the saying “To err is human”.
• Does not make any effort to determine the error
 Dogmatism
• The unwritten policy of certain institutions and
governments prohibiting the study of topics that are
believed to run counter to the established doctrines of
such institutions and governments.

• Catholic School – Research about non-existence of god