Public concerns about violent video games are moral concerns-How moral threat can make pacifists susceptible to scientific and political claims against violent video games

When research is me-search: How researchers' motivation to pursue a topic affects laypeople's trust in science

Research is often fueled by researchers' scientific, but also their personal interests: Sometimes, researchers decide to pursue a specific research question because the answer to that question is idiosyncratically relevant for themselves: Such "me-search" may not only affect the quality of research, but also how it is perceived by the general public. In two studies (N = 621), we investigate the circumstances under which learning about a researcher's "me-search" increases or decreases laypeople's ascriptions of trustworthiness and credibility to the respective researcher. Results suggest that participants' own preexisting attitudes towards the research topic moderate the effects of "me-search" substantially: When participants hold favorable attitudes towards the research topic (i.e., LGBTQ or veganism), "me-searchers" were perceived as more trustworthy and their research was perceived as more credible. This pattern was reversed when participants held unfavorable attitudes towards the research topic. Study 2 furthermore shows that trustworthiness and credibility perceptions generalize to evaluations of the entire field of research. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information-A Literature Review

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information.

How Moral Threat Shapes Laypersons' Engagement With Science

Laypersons' engagement with science has grown over the last decade, especially in Internet environments. While this development has many benefits, scientists also face the challenge of devaluation and public criticism by laypersons. Embedding this phenomenon in social-psychological theories and research on value-behavior correspondence, we investigated moral threat as a factor influencing laypersons' engagement with science. Across three studies, we hypothesized and found that moral values shape the way laypersons evaluate and communicate about science when these values are threatened in a given situation and central to people's self-concept. However, prior research on the underlying mechanism of moral threat effects cannot fully rule out value salience as an alternative explanation. To close this gap, we situationally induced value salience while varying the degree of moral threat (Study 3). Our findings indicate that moral threat amplifies the influence of moral values on laypersons' evaluation of science above and beyond value salience.

Motivierte Wissenschaftsrezeption

Zusammenfassung. Wir bezeichnen motivierte Wissenschaftsrezeption als ein Phänomen, bei dem motivationale Zustände die kognitive Verarbeitung wissenschaftlicher Evidenz auf eine Weise beeinflussen, die es dem Rezipienten erlaubt Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen, die ihrerseits kongruent mit dem entsprechenden motivationalen Zustand sind. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wollen wir motivierte Wissenschaftsrezeption als ein psychologisches Phänomen beschreiben und auf der Basis sozialpsychologischer Konzepte und neuer empirischer Befunde aus dem Schwerpunktprogramm „Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit“ beleuchten. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf folgende Fragen: Worin äußert sich motivierte Wissenschaftsrezeption? Wie kann motivierte Wissenschaftsrezeption psychologisch erklärt werden? Welche Herausforderungen resultieren für die psychologische Forschung?