Teacher’s Reasons for Trust and Distrust in Scientific Evidence: Reflecting a “Smart But Evil” Stereotype?

Rosman, Tom; Merk, Samuel

doi:10.1177/23328584211028599

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(115 reference statements)

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“…Referring to the dependent variable "trust, " previous studies primarily measured dimensions of trust (expertise, integrity, and benevolence) rather than an overall assessment of (dis-)trust in science. In these studies, trust ratings regarding science and scientists in general were lower than those regarding teachers-especially in terms of integrity and benevolence-but globally still rather high (Merk and Rosman, 2019;Hendriks et al, 2021;Rosman and Merk, 2021). The operationalization of the independent variable "source" also deviates from previous operationalizations.…”

Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 62%

“…A key finding of our study is that teachers consider knowledge claims made by educational scientists (on average) as more trustworthy than those made by other teachers. This result is particularly surprising because it contradicts numerous previous research results on the preference of anecdotal over scientific evidence (e.g., Landrum et al, 2002;Merk and Rosman, 2019;Hendriks et al, 2021;Rosman and Merk, 2021). In the following, we want to discuss possible reasons for this deviation:…”

Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…The operationalization of the independent variable "source" also deviates from previous operationalizations. While previous studies focused on trust in the source itself without referring to any content-related information (Landrum et al, 2002;Hendriks et al, 2021;Rosman and Merk, 2021), we focused on trust in specific claims made by a specific source. The inconsistencies of our findings regarding prior research might thus be caused by the fact that we kept all knowledge claims mostly constant over the different sources, whereas, in other studies, there is a potential confounding between source and content.…”

Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Accordingly, they attributed more expertise but less benevolence and integrity to scientists than to practicing teachers. In a follow-up study, Rosman and Merk (2021) examined teachers' reasons for (dis-)trusting educational science vs. science in general. In line with the "smart but evil" pattern outlined above, teachers more strongly emphasized integrity and benevolence-compared to expertise-as reasons for distrusting educational scientists.…”

Section: Trust In DI Erent Knowledge Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, educators who share anecdotal evidence from their day-to-day practice might seem more trustworthy to teachers compared to scientists. The preference for anecdotal evidence coming from other teachers could then act as a barrier to evidenceinformed school practice, and, in the worst case, as Rosman and Merk (2021) argue, lead to dysfunctional practices when decisions are, for example, built on passed-on misconceptions like the prominent so-called neuromyths that can appear at an early career stage and are thus already common among student teachers (Krammer et al, 2019(Krammer et al, , 2021. There are many neuromyths with the learning style myth as a wellknown example that has been debunked years ago (e.g., Pashler et al, 2008), but is still very popular among practitioners (Krammer et al, 2019(Krammer et al, , 2021.…”

Section: Trust In DI Erent Knowledge Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teachers trust educational science - Especially if it confirms their beliefs

et al. 2022

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Teachers around the world are increasingly required by policy guidelines to inform their teaching practices with scientific evidence. However, due to the division of cognitive labor, teachers often cannot evaluate the veracity of such evidence first-hand, since they lack specific methodological skills, such as the ability to evaluate study designs. For this reason, second-hand evaluations come into play, during which individuals assess the credibility and trustworthiness of the person or other entity who conveys the evidence instead of evaluating the information itself. In doing so, teachers' belief systems (e.g., beliefs about the trustworthiness of different sources, about science in general, or about specific educational topics) can play a pivotal role. But judging evidence based on beliefs may also lead to distortions which, in turn, can result in barriers for evidence-informed school practice. One popular example is the so-called confirmation bias, that is, preferring belief-consistent and avoiding or questioning belief-inconsistent information. Therefore, we experimentally investigated (1) whether teachers trust knowledge claims made by other teachers and scientific studies differently, (2) whether there is an interplay between teachers' trust in these specific knowledge claims, their trust in educational science, and their global trust in science, and (3) whether their prior topic-specific beliefs influence trust ratings in the sense of a confirmation bias. In an incomplete rotated design with three preregistered hypotheses, N = 414 randomly and representative sampled in-service teachers from Germany indicated greater trust in scientific evidence (information provided by a scientific journal) compared to anecdotal evidence (information provided by another teacher on a teacher blog). In addition, we found a positive relationship between trust in educational science and trust in specific knowledge claims from educational science. Finally, participants also showed a substantial confirmation bias, as they trusted educational science claims more when these matched (rather than contradicted) their prior beliefs. Based on these results, the interplay of trust, first-hand evaluation, and evidence-informed school practice is discussed.

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Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 62%

Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 63%

Section: Summary and Discussion Of Main Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Trust In DI Erent Knowledge Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Trust In DI Erent Knowledge Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teachers trust educational science - Especially if it confirms their beliefs

et al. 2022

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Science communication gets personal: Ambivalent effects of self-disclosure in science communication on trust in science.

Altenmüller,

Kampschulte,

Verbeek

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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In an attempt to display themselves as warm, approachable, and trustworthy, researchers might reveal personal details about themselves (i.e., self-disclosure) when communicating their science to the public. Here, we test whether self-disclosure in science communication can actually increase public trust in science. We present six online experiments (overall N = 2,431), integrate their results in a mini meta-analysis, and report a field experiment in a science museum (N = 480): In sum, our findings suggest that self-disclosure leads to small, but measurable increases in laypeople's feelings of closeness toward researchers and perceptions of researchers' warmth-related trustworthiness; yet, self-disclosure also leads to decreases in competence-related trustworthiness perceptions. The credibility of scientific findings was, overall, unaffected by self-disclosing communication. Findings from the field study further question whether selfdisclosure in science communication has any practical relevance. Public Significance StatementResearchers are often perceived as highly competent, yet distanced and rather cold, which might impair the public's trust in science. We investigated whether researchers can overcome these perceptions by disclosing personal information about themselves when communicating scientific insights. For this, we conducted six online experiments and a field experiment in a large science museum. Our findings show that laypeople ascribe more benevolence and integrity (i.e., warmth-related trustworthiness), yet less expertise (i.e., competence-related trustworthiness) to self-disclosing (vs. nondisclosing) researchers. Researchers' self-disclosure was irrelevant for the perceived credibility of the communicated scientific insights.

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