The scientific community has depended on educating the public in order to increase agreement with scientific consensus. This approach has only seen mixed results, according to new research.
The subject of human opposition to scientific consensus is very important. Nick Light, a PSU assistant professor of marketing, said that smart people used to think that the way to bring people more in line with scientific consensus was to teach them the knowledge they lacked. Educational interventions didn't work very well.
The research titled "Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues" was published recently in Science Advances.
If people think they know a lot, they don't have much motivation to learn more. Before being taught specifics of established scientific knowledge, people with more extreme anti-scientific attitudes need to learn about their relativeIgnorance on the issues before being taught.
Climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, the big bang, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19 are some of the issues that the paper looked at. 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. It is possible to take COVID-19 vaccines. The more people think they know about the vaccine, the more they think they know.
The people who are most extreme in their opposition to the consensus are the most confident in their knowledge. According to our findings, this pattern is fairly general. They weren't found for climate change, evolution or the big bang theory.
Light said that 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.
"Liberals tend to be more supportive of climate change than conservatives are of genetically modified foods," he said. We don't think much about our knowledge of the issue when we know our in-group feels strongly about an issue.
Property destruction is one of the consequences of these anti-consensus views. If individuals don't get an accurate picture of their own knowledge of an issue, educational interventions won't work.
Light said the challenge was finding ways to convince people that they aren't as knowledgeable as they think they are.
Light and his coauthors raised the idea of shifting focus from individual knowledge to experts. Personal views are not the only impact on the power of social Norms. Many people in Japan wore COVID-19 transmission-reducing masks to conform to society's norm.
Light said that people tend to do what they are expected to do. It is incumbent on society to try to change minds in favor of the scientific consensus if anti-consensus attitudes cause dangerous situations for the community.
More information: Nicholas Light et al, Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038 Journal information: Science Advances
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