Importance of domain-specific metacognition for explaining beliefs about politicized science: The case of climate change

Fischer, Helen; Said, Nadia

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104545

“…Prior research has established a link between the degree of politicization of different scientific domains, and the accuracy of metacognitive insight in that domain (Fischer et al, 2019 ). Furthermore, emerging evidence suggests a relationship between metacognitive insight, and the accuracy of evidence accumulation, and belief updating (Fischer & Said, 2021 ; Sinclair et al, 2020 ). Based on this evidence, we expected that metacognitive insight into the accuracy of one’s interpretation of scientific evidence might relate to belief-updating about politicized science.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Said

¹

,

Fischer

²

,

Anders

³

2021

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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.

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“…This relationship is supported by empirical evidence showing that more dogmatic people use their internal confidence signals less efficiently when searching for new information, leading to reduced informationseeking overall (Schulz et al, 2020). It has also been shown that domain-specific meta-knowledge predicted climate change beliefs (Fischer & Said, 2021) more effectively than factual knowledge (Drummond and Fischhoff, 2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 77%

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

Beukelaer

¹

,

Vehar

²

,

Rollwage

³

et al. 2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarised beliefs. We here aimed at investigated the role of metacognition in changing beliefs about climate change. To that end, we focused on the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updating prior beliefs about climate change across the spectrum of climate change scepticism. We also considered the role of how climate science is communicated in the form of textual or visuo-textual presentations. We asked two large US samples to perform a perceptual decision-making task (to assess domain-general decision-making and metacognitive abilities. They next performed a belief-updating task, where they were exposed to good and bad news about climate change and we asked them about their beliefs and their updating. Lastly, they completed a series of questionnaires probing their attitudes to climate change. We show that climate change scepticism is associated with differences in domain-general as well as domain-specific metacognitive abilities. Moreover, domain-general metacognitive sensitivity influenced belief updating in an asymmetric way: lower domain-general metacognition decreased the updating of prior beliefs, especially in the face of negative evidence. Our findings highlight the role of metacognitive failures in revising erroneous beliefs about climate change and point to their adverse social effects.

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“…good news regarding climate change), did sceptics tend to update their beliefs.Importantly both domain-general and domain-specific metacognition showed significant relationships with climate change scepticism, in line with previous findings showing that metacognition has both domain-general and domain specific aspects.While domain-general aspects of metacognition were significant predictors of climate change scepticism and belief updating, domain-specific metacognition (i.e., insight about the correctness of one's climate change related knowledge) had stronger predictive power. This highlights how general cognitive characteristics can affect people's behaviour with even more pronounced effects.In a recent study on a German sample(Fischer & Said, 2021), metacognition about participants' climate change knowledge predicted beliefs about climate change (the riskiness and anthropogenic nature of climate change) but metacognition about otherdomain science knowledge did not, suggesting a greater role for domain-specific metacognition. Importantly, however, our domain-general measure of metacognitive sensitivity was derived from a perceptual decision-making task, which may quantify a broader and general level of metacognitive function.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

Tsakiris¹,

Vehar²,

Fleming³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarized beliefs. We investigated the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updating prior beliefs about climate change across the spectrum of climate change scepticism. We also considered the role of how climate science is communicated in the form of textual or visuo-textual presentations. We show that climate change scepticism is associated with differences in domain-general as well as domain-specific metacognitive abilities. Moreover, domain-general metacognitive sensitivity influenced belief updating in an asymmetric way : lower domain-general metacognition decreased the updating of prior beliefs, especially in the face of negative evidence. Our findings highlight the role of metacognitive failures in revising erroneous beliefs about climate change and point to their adverse social effects.

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Importance of domain-specific metacognition for explaining beliefs about politicized science: The case of climate change

Cited by 23 publications

References 39 publications

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

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

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

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