Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Phil Ducci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today is another very special one-hour-long Q&A episode.

Oh, goody.

Yes, I look forward to these very much, and it had been a while since we had done a Q&A,

and I assumed our many listeners were about to explode with all of the stored-up questions

that they were just waiting to ask us, so it was time.

And we have a great crop of questions today from the readers of the rationally speaking blog and our fans of rationally speaking podcast on Facebook and our various social networks.

So let's dive right in.

All right.

Let's start with a question from William Andrew, who wanted to know how much we think that works of fiction like books or movies or TV shows

actually influence people's rationality and skepticism and also their attitudes about

rationality and skepticism. He says that he gets angry when there's sort of a stereotypical

skeptic character that gets proven wrong in a particularly grating, particularly grading way, as they often are,

as they usually are in TV and movies. But he wonders how much we think that those kinds of

representations actually affect the way people view skepticism and rationality.

Well, I think they do, but there is actually some empirical evidence that goes a few years back.

Yeah.

Where, for instance, people that watch shows about the paranormal, even if they're fictional

...