Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize

Abstract

Societal polarization over contested science has increased in recent years. To explain this development, political, sociological, and psychological research has identified societal macro-phenomena as well as cognitive micro-level factors that explain how citizens reason about the science. Here we take a radically different perspective, and highlight the effects of metacognition: How citizens reason about their own reasoning. Leveraging methods from Signal Detection Theory, we investigated the importance of metacognitive insight for polarization for the heavily contested topic of climate change, and the less heavily contested topic of nanotechnology. We found that, for climate change (but not for nanotechnology), higher insight into the accuracy of own interpretations of the available scientific evidence related to a lower likelihood of polarization over the science. This finding held irrespective of the direction of the scientific evidence (endorsing or rejecting anthropogenicity of climate change). Furthermore, the polarizing effect of scientific evidence could be traced back to higher metacognitive insight fostering belief-updating in the direction of the evidence at the expense of own, prior beliefs. By demonstrating how metacognition links to polarization, the present research adds to our understanding of the drivers of societal polarization over science.

Pre-registered replication of the gateway belief model – Results from a representative German sample

“…Although the literature on this topic is sparse, there are some studies that link individual metacognitive abilities to beliefs or belief formation about societal and political topics Rollwage et al, 2018;Said et al, 2021), which constitute the idea of metacognitive abilities to be associated with climate change attitudes and the effectiveness of the consensus messaging process. One important metacognitive aspect discussed in this literature is confidence in knowledge, which indicates how certain a person is about the accuracy of his or her own knowledge.…”

Navigating the COVID-19 Infodemic: The Influence of Metacognitive Efficiency on Health Behaviors and Policy Attitudes

“…While it seems reasonable to assume that misinformation may cause the impairment in metacognitive insight and consequent reductions in health-protective behaviours as effects, in principle the causality could be reversed: people with better metacognitive ability may be less influenced by misinformation. Indeed some studies have reported that lower metacognitive ability is associated with holding radical beliefs and with displaying tendencies toward polarization and dogmatism (Rollwage et al, 2018;Said et al, 2021;Schulz et al, 2020). Based on this interpretation one would expect that health-protective behaviours be associated also with metacognitive insight in general science, and not just with metacognitive insight specifically around COVID-19 knowledge.…”

Polarized climate change beliefs: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning in a U.S. national study.

“…Summaries varied in the direction of evidence: Either supporting or rejecting the anthropogenicity of climate change (four summaries supporting, four summaries rejecting). Four of the summaries about climate change were adapted versions taken from previous research (two endorsing, two rejecting; Fryer et al, 2019; Said et al, 2021) that had been pretested for comprehensibility (see Said et al (2021) for a description of the pretests); the other four summaries were newly developed to adhere to the same length and structure. All summaries were structured as follows: (a) two introductory sentences describing the aim of the study; (b) three to four sentences describing the findings of the study; and (c) one final sentence stating the conclusion of the study.…”