Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza academic staff’s beliefs regarding the origin of life and human nature

Abstract

Beliefs that shape and make sense of the relationships between all that exists, operate as a critical, analytical and reflective guidance of human reality. Hence they underlie our attempts to understand and explain the origin of life, human nature and our relationship with our environment. As a benchmark of how to understand and explain human behavior, the study of beliefs is currently one of the most widely used frameworks in social psychology. We investigated whether the beliefs of academics from the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza regarding the origin of life and human nature are grounded in science and whether they differ according to their training. In order to find out, we selected a sample of 228 scholars from the FES-Z, who answered a Likert-type five-point-response questionnaire. The research was descriptive, field-based, inter-group, cross-sectional and with an ex-post facto design. The statistical analysis of the results was performed by using the SPSS program. The results show that the FES-Z scholars who participated hold beliefs about the origin of life and human nature that are not science-based and these differ according to their professional training.