Light, N. et al.
Science Advances, 20 Jul 2022
Vol 8, Issue 29
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038
Abstract
Public attitudes that are in opposition to scientific consensus can be disastrous and include rejection of vaccines and opposition to climate change mitigation policies. Five studies examine the interrelationships between opposition to expert consensus on controversial scientific issues, how much people actually know about these issues, and how much they think they know. Across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, as well as attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and mitigation measures like mask wearing and social distancing, results indicate that those with the highest levels of opposition have the lowest levels of objective knowledge but the highest levels of subjective knowledge. Implications for scientists, policymakers, and science communicators are discussed.
Discussion
Results from five studies show that the people who disagree most with the scientific consensus know less about the relevant issues, but they think they know more. These results suggest that this phenomenon is fairly general, although the relationships were weaker for some more polarized issues, particularly climate change. It is important to note that we document larger mismatches between subjective and objective knowledge among participants who are more opposed to the scientific consensus. Thus, although broadly consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect and other research on knowledge miscalibration, our findings represent a pattern of relationships that goes beyond overconfidence among the least knowledgeable. However, the data are correlational, and the normal caveats apply.
A strength of these studies is the consistency of the main result across the overall models in studies 1 to 3 and specific (but different) instantiations of anti-consensus attitudes about COVID-19 in studies 4 and 5. Additional strengths are that study 5 is a conceptual replication of study 4 (and studies 1 to 3 more generally) using different measures and operationalizations of the main constructs, conducted by an initially independent group of researchers (with each group unaware of the research of the other during study development and data collection). The final two studies were also collected approximately 2 months apart, in July and September 2020, respectively. These two collection periods reflect the dynamic nature of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, with cases in July trending upward and cases in September flat or trending downward. The consistency of our effects across these 2 months suggests that the pattern of results is fairly robust.
One possible interpretation of these relationships is that the people who appear to be overconfident in their knowledge and extreme in their opposition to the consensus are actually reporting their sense of understanding for a set of incorrect alternative facts not those of the scientific community. After all, nonscientific explanations and theories tend to be much simpler and less mechanistic than scientific ones. As a result, participants could be reporting higher levels of understanding for what are, in fact, simpler interpretations. However, we believe that several elements of this research speak against this interpretation fully explaining the results. First, the battery of objective knowledge questions is sufficiently broad, simple, and removed (at first glance) from the corresponding scientific issues. For example, not knowing that “the skin is the largest organ in the human body” does not suggest that participants hold alternative views about how the human body works; it suggests the lack of real knowledge about the body. We also believe that it does not cue participants to the fact that the question is related to vaccination.
