Evoking vigilance: Would you (dis)trust a scientist who discusses ethical implications of research in a science blog?

Indicators of trustworthiness in lay-friendly research summaries: Scientificness surpasses easiness

Lay readers' trust in scientific texts can be shaped by perceived text easiness and scientificness. The two effects seem vital in a time of rapid science information sharing, yet have so far only been examined separately. A preregistered online study was conducted to assess them jointly, to probe for author and text trustworthiness overlap, and to investigate interindividual influences on the effects. N = 1467 lay readers read four short research summaries, with easiness and scientificness (high vs low) being experimentally varied. A more scientific writing style led to higher perceived author and text trustworthiness. Higher personal justification belief, lower justification by multiple-sources belief, and lower need for cognitive closure attenuated the influence of scientificness on trustworthiness. However, text easiness showed no influence on trustworthiness and no interaction with text scientificness. Implications for future studies and suggestions for enhancing the perceived trustworthiness of research summaries are discussed.

Believing in science: Linking religious beliefs and identity with vaccination intentions and trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic

Despite evidence supporting numerous scientific issues (e.g. climate change, vaccinations) many people still doubt the legitimacy of science. Moreover, individuals may be prone to scepticism about scientific findings that misalign with their ideological beliefs and identities. This research investigated whether trust in science (as well as government and media) and COVID-19 vaccination intentions varied as a function of (non)religious group identity, religiosity, religion-science compatibility beliefs, and/or political orientation in two online studies (N = 565) with university students and a Canadian community sample between January and June 2021. In both studies, vaccination intentions and trust in science varied as a function of (non)religious group identity and beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy was further linked to religiosity through a lack of trust in science. Given the ideological divides that the pandemic has exacerbated, this research has implications for informing public health strategies for relaying scientific findings to the public and encouraging vaccine uptake in culturally appropriate ways.

How the public evaluates media representations of uncertain science: An integrated explanatory framework

Understanding how to portray uncertain science to the public is a pressing goal for science communication. This study compared US public audience reactions to a news article depicting a novel discovery in neurogenomics as certain or uncertain, with statements of (un)certainty attributed to either affiliated or unaffiliated scientists. The uncertainty disclosure had no main effect on perceived news article credibility, scientist trustworthiness, objectivity of the scientists' depiction, or willingness to participate in genomic research. However, news credibility and scientist objectivity ratings were higher for uncertainty disclosure attributed to the affiliated scientists. Participants with greater preference for information about uncertainty found the scientists more trustworthy, their depictions more balanced, and the news article more credible when the research was described as uncertain, and these effects were stronger for affiliated scientist attribution. Findings underscore the important roles of disclosure source and audience characteristics in public reactions to media representations of scientific uncertainty.

Critical topics and good practices for trust in science communication before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

For a qualitative analysis of factors affecting trust in science communication (scicomm) we used the Delphi method to reach a pool of experts based in Italy and Belgium (researchers/academics, journalists and scicomm practitioners) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed a ‘strong’ consensus (confirmed before and during the pandemic) about good practices promoting trust in scicomm (mainly based on direct interactions with targeted audiences), and about critical topics where trust plays a key role. Such topics include vaccines and the role of pharmaceutical companies, climate change and environmental issues, medical sciences, communication of health risks and public health issues. According to our results, issues related to health and environment were perceived as critical and controversial subjects for trust in scicomm even before the pandemic. The same pool of experts also expressed very diverse views regarding risks and threats to trust in scicomm, and the social, cultural, political and environmental factors that can increase and promote trust in scientific communication among lay audiences. Such diversity reveals the need for further research to explore differences due to the context, based on the individual views of experts or generated from a conceptualisation of trust in scicomm which may be still fuzzy and unclear.

Adolescents' credibility justifications when evaluating online texts

Research has shown that students differ in their abilities to evaluate the credibility of online texts, and, in general, many perform poorly on online evaluation tasks. This study extended current knowledge by examining students' abilities to justify the credibility of online texts from different perspectives, thus providing a more nuanced understanding of students' credibility evaluation ability. We examined how upper secondary school students (N = 73; aged 16 to 17) evaluated author expertise, author intention, the publication venue, and the quality of evidence when reading four texts about the effects of sugar consumption in a web-based environment. Additionally, we examined how students' prior topic knowledge, Internet-specific justification beliefs, and time on task were associated with their credibility justifications. Students evaluated author expertise, author intention, the venue, and the quality of evidence for each text on a six-point scale and provided written justifications for their evaluations. While students' credibility evaluations were quite accurate, their credibility justifications lacked sophistication. Inter-individual differences were considerable, however. Regression analysis revealed that time on task was a statistically significant unique predictor of students' credibility justifications. Instructional implications 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.

Beware of vested interests: Epistemic vigilance improves reasoning about scientific evidence (for some people)

In public disputes, stakeholders sometimes misrepresent statistics or other types of scientific evidence to support their claims. One of the reasons this is problematic is that citizens often do not have the motivation nor the cognitive skills to accurately judge the meaning of statistics and thus run the risk of being misinformed. This study reports an experiment investigating the conditions under which people become vigilant towards a source’s claim and thus reason more carefully about the supporting evidence. For this, participants were presented with a claim by a vested-interest or a neutral source and with statistical evidence which was cited by the source as being in support of the claim. However, this statistical evidence actually contradicted the source’s claim but was presented as a contingency table, which are typically difficult for people to interpret correctly. When the source was a lobbyist arguing for his company’s product people were better at interpreting the evidence compared to when the same source argued against the product. This was not the case for a different vested-interests source nor for the neutral source. Further, while all sources were rated as less trustworthy when participants realized that the source had misrepresented the evidence, only for the lobbyist source was this seen as a deliberate attempt at deception. Implications for research on epistemic trust, source credibility effects and science communication are discussed.

Replication crisis = trust crisis? The effect of successful vs failed replications on laypeople's trust in researchers and research

In methodological and practical debates about replications in science, it is (often implicitly) assumed that replications will affect public trust in science. In this preregistered experiment (N = 484), we varied (a) whether a replication attempt was successful or not and (b) whether the replication was authored by the same, or another lab. Results showed that ratings of study credibility (e.g. evidence strength, η_P² = .15) and researcher trustworthiness (e.g. expertise, η_P² = .15) were rated higher upon learning of replication success, and lower in case of replication failure. The replication's author did not make a meaningful difference. Prior beliefs acted as covariate for ratings of credibility, but not trustworthiness, while epistemic beliefs regarding the certainty of knowledge were a covariate to both. Hence, laypeople seem to notice that successfully replicated results entail higher epistemic significance, while possibly not taking into account that replications should be conducted by other labs.

Attacking science on social media: How user comments affect perceived trustworthiness and credibility

The science on controversial topics is often heatedly discussed on social media, a potential problem for social-media-based science communicators. Therefore, two exploratory studies were performed to investigate the effects of science-critical user comments attacking Facebook posts containing scientific claims. The claims were about one of four controversial topics (homeopathy, genetically modified organisms, refugee crime, and childhood vaccinations). The user comments attacked the claims based on the thematic complexity, the employed research methods, the expertise, or the motivations of the researchers. The results reveal that prior attitudes determine judgments about the user comments, the attacked claims, and the source of the claim. After controlling for attitude, people agree most with thematic complexity comments, but the comments differ in their effect on perceived claim credibility only when the comments are made by experts. In addition, comments attacking researchers' motivations were more effective in lowering perceived integrity while scientists' perceived expertise remained unaffected.

The problems of increasing transparency on uncertainty

Public regulators (such as European Food Safety Authority, European Medicines Agency, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) are placing increasing demands on scientists to make uncertainties about their evidence transparent to the public. The stated goal is utilitarian, to inform and empower the public and ensure the accountability of policy and decision-making around the use of scientific evidence. However, it is questionable what constitutes uncertainty around the evidence on any given topic, and, while the goal is laudable, we argue the drive to increase transparency on uncertainty of the scientific process specifically does more harm than good, and may not serve the interests of those intended. While highlighting some of the practical implications of making uncertainties transparent using current guidelines, the aim is to discuss what could be done to make it worthwhile for both public and scientists.

Scientific uncertainty in media content: Introduction to this special issue

This introduction sets the stage for the special issue on the public communication of scientific uncertainty that follows by sketching the wider landscape of issues related to the communication of uncertainty and showing how the individual contributions fit into that landscape. The first part of the introduction discusses the creation of media content as a process involving journalists, scientific sources, stakeholders, and the responsive audience. The second part then provides an overview of the perception of scientific uncertainty presented by the media and the consequences for the recipients' own assessments of uncertainty. Finally, we briefly describe the six research articles included in this special issue.