On Jan. 24, Goop, actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle company long criticized for peddling pseudoscience, launched its Netflix documentary series, The Goop Lab. The six-part series covers subjects such as “energy healing,” exorcisms and cold therapy. In the show, various Goop employees — a young and diverse crowd — try health fads like vampire facials, in which the client’s own blood is drawn and applied to the face, supposedly to promote cell renewal. Another thing they try is the Wim Hof method, which involves jumping into an icy lake after meditation and breathing exercises.
"Something The Goop Lab does is sprinkle in a bit of science by talking about some interesting, real research going on," said Tim Caulfield, the research director of the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute and author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash. “That makes everything that follows seem more legitimate. I call that science-ploitation, using real science to sell pseudoscience.”
“The one bit of good news is when you start talking about science to justify what you’re presenting, we, the research community, find it entirely appropriate to critique it against the standards of science," Caulfield said.
Irene Kan, an associate professor in psychological and brain sciences at Villanova University, said when a product or practice is advertised as natural, people may automatically assume that it’s good for them, and be less likely to engage in critical thinking — reading the labels or conducting their own research — surrounding it. She also said that research has shown that when people are familiar with something, they tend to trust it more, like believing that being cold can make you sick.
“This happens even when we don’t remember where we learned that piece of information to begin with,” Kan said. “This phenomenon is called the ‘illusory truth effect.’”
She also pointed to the continued influence effect, a related idea, to highlight how pseudoscientific information can lead to real actions and decisions made by people.
“For example, despite a two-decades-long battle to counter the unfounded association between MMR vaccine and autism, a large proportion of the general public continues to hold that inaccurate belief,” Kan said.
Caulfield, who hosted a 2017 Netflix series called A User’s Guide to Cheating Death that examined controversial procedures, diets and therapies to extend people’s lives, said that it was “disappointing” to see the streaming platform feed into the problem of scientific misinformation.
“It’s important to recognize that people who have a science-informed background have open minds,” Caulfield said. “If something works, we want to know. But that’s not what the show promotes. It actually promotes skepticism of science.”
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Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘The Goop Lab’ treats fake science like the real thing. Here’s why that’s dangerous. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
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