SIUE’s Hupp Produces Skeptical Film Premiering this Weekend
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Stephen Hupp, PhD, professor of psychology in SIUE’s School of Education, Health and Human Behavior, is an executive producer of Science Moms, a documentary promoting critical thinking about parenting. The film premiers Saturday, Oct. 14 at the QED Conference (Question, Explore, Discover; QEDCon) in Manchester, England.
It’s no coincidence that this skeptical documentary, which features scientists and science communicators (who also happen to be moms), is premiering this weekend of Friday the 13th, a date associated with the thinking fallacies that lead to superstitious behavior.
According to Natalie Newell, the creator and director of Science Moms, the film “focuses on providing a science and evidence-based counter-narrative to the pseudoscience-based parenting narrative that has cropped up in recent years.”
Science Moms covers topics such as vaccines, autism, celebrity-endorsed health fads, cancer, allergies, organic food and GMO’s. Hupp hopes the documentary will help influence the choices that parents make for their children.
“We do research, because it helps people make decisions about their lives, but doing research is not enough,” Hupp said. “We also desperately need to share our findings with a public that has extremely limited access to research journals, so I helped produce a fun science communication film.”
This is also why Hupp authored the book Great Myths of Child Development that emphasizes, “What every parent needs to not know.”
The American premiere of Science Moms will occur at the CSI Conference (Center for Skeptical Inquiry; CSICon) in Las Vegas on Saturday, Oct. 28, the weekend before Halloween, another date plagued by superstition. The film will be available for download at the end of October with details provided at sciencemomsdoc.com.
According to Hupp, “Science communication is also becoming a bigger part of the training we provide in the Clinical Child and School Psychology graduate program at SIUE.”
Photo: Stephen Hupp, professor of psychology at SIUE.
