Revisiting “Importance of domain-specific metacognition for explaining beliefs about politicized science: The case of climate change“ – Evidence from a cross-cultural sample

Abstract

Having accurate knowledge about climate change has been shown to influence climatechange attitudes and behavior. However, due to an increase in online mediaconsumption, people are also confronted with much misinformation about climatechange. It is thus crucial that people use valid cues to infer whether information is trueor false, when to update their beliefs, and to make informed decisions. One such cuecould be meta-knowledge, usually measured as the confidence one has in one’sknowledge. Recent findings show that higher confidence in knowledge about climatechange is associated with stronger beliefs that humans are causing climate changeand with perceptions that climate change is risky. We aim to extend and replicate thisfinding with improved methods (larger sample sizes, four instead of only two attitudes,U.S. and German samples), allowing us not only to put previous findings on a firmerbasis, but also to conduct cross-cultural comparative analyses.To this end, weassessed whether confidence in climate change knowledge as well as metacognitivesensitivity (insight into the accuracy of one’s knowledge), is related to climate changeattitudes for Germany (N = 1110, representative) and the US (N = 898, representative).Results show that, rather than confidence, higher insight into the accuracy of one’sknowledge was positively related to the climate change attitudes for the Germansample. In contrast, for the US, higher confidence was predictive of climate changeattitudes but only for participants with above-chance performance in the climatechange knowledge test. Our results emphasize the important role of metacognitiveabilities as predictor of climate change attitudes while also highlighting cross-culturaldifferences.