The evidence reported here will likely be discouraging for many skeptics, but it is evidence that skeptics must nonetheless consider if they are to effectively counter entertainment media tendencies to devalue science and reason. There is a correlation between watching entertainment television and credulity. These findings persist even taking into consideration education, sex, age, and other factors that are known to influence people's attitudes toward science. Habitual viewers are also more likely than infrequent viewers to believe that astrology is scientific. While the existing evidence does not permit us to claim that viewing entertainment television creates antiscience and pro-pseudoscience attitudes, it seems certain that entertainment television provides a symbolic environment in which such attitudes are readily cultivated.
Mad scientists are second only to psychotics as the primary source of trouble in horror films.
Although scientists have been consistently portrayed as dangerous in twentieth-century popular entertainment media, there have been important changes in the portrayal of scientists' abilities to solve problems. In films of that era science is dangerous, but science also provides the most appropriate means of dealing with the dangers that science unleashes. Scientists might, for example, inadvertently create mutant monsters, but scientists also most commonly figure out how to eliminate the threats they have created. In these films, science is dangerous but efficacious. In contrast, more recent entertainment films portray scientists as being unable to solve problems or eliminate threats to humanity.