Historically, the scientific community has relied on educating the public in
order to increase agreement with scientific consensus. New research from
Portland State University suggests why this approach has seen only mixed
results.
"Human opposition to scientific consensus is an extremely important topic.
For many years, smart people thought that the way to bring people more in
line with scientific consensus was to teach them the knowledge they lacked,"
said Nick Light, a PSU assistant professor of marketing. "Unfortunately,
educational interventions haven't worked very well."
Light's research titled "Knowledge overconfidence is associated with
anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues," was published
recently in Science Advances.
"Our research suggests that there may be a problem of overconfidence getting
in the way of learning, because if people think they know a lot, they have
minimal motivation to learn more," Light said. "People with more extreme
anti-scientific attitudes might first need to learn about their relative
ignorance on the issues before being taught specifics of established
scientific knowledge."
The paper examined attitudes about eight issues with scientific consensus on
which anti-consensus views persist: climate change, nuclear power,
genetically modified foods, the big bang, evolution, vaccination,
homeopathic medicine and COVID-19. Light said they found that in general, as
people's attitudes on an issue get further from scientific consensus, their
assessments of their own knowledge of that issue increases, but their actual
knowledge decreases. Take COVID-19 vaccines, for example. The less an
individual agrees with the COVID-19 vaccine, the more they believe they know
about it, but their factual knowledge is more likely to be lower.
"Essentially, the people who are most extreme in their opposition to the
consensus are the most overconfident in their knowledge," Light said. "Our
findings suggest that this pattern is fairly general. However, we did not
find them for climate change, evolution, or the big bang theory."
The degree to which attitudes on an issue are tied up with political or
religious identities could affect whether this pattern exists for that
issue, Light added.
"For climate change, for example, attitudes in line with science tend to be
held by liberals, whereas for an issue like genetically modified foods,
liberals and conservatives tend to be fairly split in their support or
opposition," he said. "It could be that when we know our in-groups feel
strongly about an issue, we don't think much about our knowledge of the
issue."
The consequences of these anti-consensus views are widespread, including
property destruction, malnutrition, financial hardship and death.
Educational interventions to shift views may not work unless individuals
first get an accurate picture of their own knowledge of an issue's
complexities.
"The challenge then becomes finding appropriate ways to convince
anti-consensus individuals that they probably aren't as knowledgeable as
they think they are," Light said.
Shifting focus from individual knowledge to the influence of experts is one
possibility raised by Light and his coauthors. The power of social norms
despite personal views is also impactful. In Japan, for example, many people
wore COVID-19 transmission-reducing masks not to mitigate personal risk, but
to conform to a societal norm.
"People tend to do what they think their community expects them to do,"
Light said. While blindly following the consensus isn't generally
recommended, if anti-consensus attitudes create dangerous situations for the
community, "it is incumbent on society to try to change minds in favor of
the scientific consensus."
Reference:
Nicholas Light et al, Knowledge overconfidence is associated with
anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues, Science Advances
(2022).
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038
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