Laymen in scientists' clothing?

The author proposes that the motivation for such social-psychological strategies of advertisement may be pragmatic, that is, it "lies in the increasing pressure for science to be goal oriented". Individuals who adopt this view of science are often endowed with a high ability for rote memorization and an insatiable appetite for manipulation of 'black-box' recipes, but with poor imagination, little reflection and almost no scepticism. The resulting phenotype is a researcher with high uncertainty avoidance behaviour (with the corresponding dose of dogmatism), a poor sense of taste for fundamentals and little recognition of the inherent ambiguity of empirical evidence - the 'kit' generation, as described by Davies and Pugsley2.