The Interplay of Knowledge Overestimation, Social Media Use, and Populist Ideas: Cross-Sectional and Experimental Evidence From Germany and Taiwan

Abstract

Social media expose users to an abundance of information about various issues. But they also make it difficult for users to assess the quality of this information. If users do not recognize this, they may overestimate their knowledge about those issues. Knowledge overestimation may lead to increased social media engagement and can be linked to attitudes deeming expert knowledge inferior to common sense, such as science-related populist attitudes. We investigate this during the COVID-19 pandemic in two preregistered, cross-sectional survey experiments in Germany and Taiwan, two countries with different cultures, media environments, and responses to the pandemic. Our study offers two contributions: First, we develop a novel measure of COVID-19-related knowledge. Second, we provide comparative evidence on how social media affordances shape the interplay between knowledge overestimation, social media exposure and engagement, and populist attitudes. We do not find that frequent exposure to COVID-19 information is associated with a higher likelihood of knowledge overestimation. However, we show that overestimation is linked to more user engagement with social media content about COVID-19. Experimental data indicate that engagement depends on whether users are in a private or public communication environment. We find minor differences between Germany and Taiwan.

Perceptions of Science, Science Communication, and Climate Change Attitudes in 68 Countries: The TISP Dataset

“…Convergent validity. Correlations of the outspokenness scale and other constructs measured in the TISP survey are consistent with previous studies, which confirms its convergent validity: Outspokenness about science is positively associated with communicating with others about science 25 , using conversational media like messaging apps to obtain science information 82 , and having conversations about science with friends or family outside the Internet 90 (see Table 13).…”

“…It accounts for the conceptual premise that all components of science-related populism have to be concurrently present within a person to diagnose science-related populist attitudes, whereas the absence of one or more components would disqualify someone to be classified as a proponent of science-related populism (see Mede et al 80 and Wuttke et al 81 for more details). The Goertz approach has thus become a preferred procedure in research on both science-related and political populism 11,[82][83][84] . We therefore applied this approach when assessing the psychometric properties and measurement performance of the SciPop Scale in the TISP survey: First, we calculated unweighted arithmetic means of the response values for each of the four 2-item components of the scale (see Methods section).…”