People with more extreme attitudes towards science have self-confidence in their understanding of science, even if this is not justified

Abstract

People differ greatly in their attitudes towards well-evidenced science. What characterises this variation? Here, we consider this issue in the context of genetics and allied sciences. While most prior research has focused on the relationship between attitude to science and what people know about it, recent evidence suggests that individuals with strongly negative attitudes towards specific genetic technologies (genetic modification (GM) technology and vaccines) commonly do not objectively understand the science, but, importantly, believe that they do. Here, using data from a probability survey of United Kingdom adults, we extend this prior work in 2 regards. First, we ask whether people with more extreme attitudes, be they positive or negative, are more likely to believe that they understand the science. Second, as negativity to genetics is commonly framed around issues particular to specific technologies, we ask whether attitudinal trends are contingent on specification of technology. We find (1) that individuals with strongly positive or negative attitudes towards genetics more strongly believe that they well understand the science; but (2) only for those most positive to the science is this self-confidence warranted; and (3) these effects are not contingent on specification of any particular technologies. These results suggest a potentially general model to explain why people differ in their degree of acceptance or rejection of science, this being that the more someone believes they understand the science, the more confident they will be in their acceptance or rejection of it. While there are more technology nonspecific opponents who also oppose GM technology than expected by chance, most GM opponents fit a different demographic. For the most part, opposition to GM appears not to reflect a smokescreen concealing a broader underlying negativity.

Both trust in, and polarization of trust in, relevant sciences have increased through the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We are hesitant to extrapolate too much from the age effect as the COVID-19 epidemic was odd, especially affecting the old. Indeed, age is a strong predictor of whether individuals will take the vaccine in this same data [ 43 ] probably because they are also more at risk. Thus, we are left with one possibly generalizable result, namely that change in trust is well predicted by self-reported pre-pandemic degree of trust such that those that were more negative before the pandemic have become even more convinced of their opinion.…”

Conservation, uncertainty and intellectual humility

“…A second theme identified by work on intellectual humility concerns humans' generally poor ability to assess their own knowledge, even among experts (e.g., Fisher & Keil 2016, Fonseca et al 2023). Work in line with this theme has identified the way in which asking individuals to either write out or consider a step-by-step causal explanation of how an object or topic works can help temper their self-reported understanding of the object or topic (Porter et al 2022b).…”

Testing the cultural-invariance hypothesis: A global analysis of the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes to science

“…We include two measures of science knowledge, one that approximates the standard type of science literacy index used in most existing studies, and a measure of self-assessed understanding of science. While covering the same underlying conceptual domain, there are important differences between these types of measures [ 35 , 36 ]. Our purpose in including both is not to assess their relative performance in terms of validity and reliability but rather to provide a full descriptive picture of the global science knowledge-attitude association from the perspective of existing research on this question.…”