Public Understanding of Science最新文献

While much research has revealed the prevalence of climate change misinformation on social media, there is no conclusive evidence about its impact on cultivating public misperceptions. Even less work has been done to examine how social media use may condition the relationships between cognitive orientations, such as epistemic and science populism beliefs, and climate change misperceptions. This study fills this gap by analyzing data from a national representative survey of 1405 US adults. Results confirmed the relationships between cognitive orientations and climate change misperceptions. While neither mainstream nor alternative social media use had a direct impact, both types of social media use conditioned the relationships between cognitive orientations and climate change misperceptions. This study's findings suggest that social media use's adverse impact on climate change misperceptions may have been overstated.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a novel form of media, capable of generating human-like text and facilitating interactive communications. However, these systems are subject to concerns regarding inherent biases, as their training on vast text corpora may encode and amplify societal biases. This study investigates overestimation bias in LLM-generated climate assessments, wherein the impacts of climate change are exaggerated relative to expert consensus. Through non-parametric statistical methods, the study compares expert ratings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report with responses from GPT-family LLMs. Results indicate that LLMs systematically overestimate climate change impacts, and that this bias is more pronounced when the models are prompted in the role of a climate scientist. These findings underscore the critical need to align LLM-generated climate assessments with expert consensus to prevent misperception and foster informed public discourse.

Recent research examines how the transformational experience of the COVID-19 pandemic reshapes trust in science, expertise and public institutions in its aftermath. This article extends this scholarship by asking how the transformation of societal norms about expertise induced by the pandemic experience shapes social movements that contest state expertise. Using interview data with participants from an ongoing environmental health mobilization in Rouyn-Noranda (Quebec, Canada), this article highlights how participants negotiate their precarious status as challengers of expertise in a post-COVID world. First, I examine the direct and indirect evidence of politicized expertise that participants draw on to motivate their distrust. Second, I show how participants negotiate the boundary between claims of COVID-related groups labeled as conspiracist and their own. Overall, this article contributes to better understanding how mobilized citizens navigate changing norms around trust in science.

Scholars have increasingly turned to empathy to increase the effectiveness of participatory deliberations among individuals with diverse interests and values. However, because empathy is traditionally focused on in-group relations, deliberations in increasingly polarized contexts would benefit from ways to bridge across social groups. To address this, we apply the construct of social empathy. Our study explores social empathy through participatory technology assessment forums and asks: how do we incorporate, measure, and understand social empathy in public deliberations on human genome editing technology? The analysis reveals that by considering social empathy, participatory deliberation forum designers can use "persona" character cards and other forum infrastructure to increase the effectiveness of deliberation across social groups among individuals with diverse interests and values. For future deliberations seeking to cultivate social learning, social empathy-when designed for, integrated in, and measured through deliberations-presents an important mechanism for attention.

Promising results reported in genetic therapy clinical trials and recent US Food and Drug Administration approvals have attracted media attention. This critical content analysis examines themes and narrative framings present in feature articles published in US news media sources following patients involved in first-in-human clinical trials of genetic therapies. Articles were collected through focused searches across US news websites and LexisNexis databases in the period from 01 January 2017 to 06 April 2022. Forty-three articles met inclusion criteria (n = 13 from database searches, n = 30 from external searches). Articles were diverse across genetic conditions, news sources, and media types. Three dominant themes emerged: (1) Impacts of Living with Genetic Condition, (2) Consequences of Receiving Gene Therapy Treatment, and (3) Risks of Gene Therapy. Narrative frames included hope and caution. Results are discussed in relation to how the value of patient narratives and content may be situated alongside the interests of different actors.

Global challenges like biodiversity loss cannot be understood without essential knowledge about evolution. However, evolution is one of the most misunderstood concepts among the general public. Informal learning environments like natural history museums offer great potential for learning about evolution by showing the latest scientific findings in their exhibitions. But to date, there is a lack of evidence about museum visitors' understanding of evolution. Therefore, this study aims to identify which evolutionary key concepts and misconceptions are applied by visitors when asked to explain evolutionary scenarios. Using an online survey, visitors (n = 122) were asked to answer two open-response ACORNS items. Overall, respondents tended to use relatively few key concepts in their responses. Although museum visitors are considered a highly educated group, our surveyed visitors seem to have a poor understanding of evolution. The key concepts and misconceptions identified might help develop future exhibitions and educational programs/activities.

A fair (public) representation of women is one of the most discussed questions of our time. The way in which media coverage (re)produces genders may affect individual and collective thinking and the perceptions of women in society. We analyse the representation of female scientists in German news media coverage of eight science-related risk issues and compare male and female experts regarding their relative scientific reputation, the number of references and the content of their statements. Our findings show that female scientific experts are less visible in German media coverage than their male colleagues and that they are underrepresented compared to the respective proportions in the relevant research areas. At the same time, our data relativize the extent of the gender visibility gap - after controlling for hierarchical position and scientific reputation, the differences become rather small. We find no evidence of discrimination against female scientific experts through journalistic selection routines.

From disputes over COVID-19 to contestation over climate science, questions of the value and legitimacy of mainstream scientific knowledge have become matters of high-stakes political struggle. Here, we introduce a novel computational tool to identify and track the emergence, proliferation, and historical variations of discourses that either seek to invoke the authority of scientific expertise or to criticize scientific claims, institutions, and experts. We describe the tool's development, demonstrate its predictive and convergent validity, and illustrate its potential across three case studies shedding light on how elite rhetoric may drive political polarization around science in the United States. Among other findings, we find that political statements invoking scientific expertise have historically been more likely to receive coverage in mainstream American newspapers than statements that do not invoke expertise. However, this apparent advantage disappears over time, suggesting the discursive authority associated with the invocation of scientific methods, credentials, and institutions may be diminishing.

Admitting that one's research findings are wrong involves admitting a potential instance of incompetence, which can keep scientists from engaging in wrongness admission. However, wrongness admission can yield favorable perceptions. In five experiments (N = 2420), we tested whether wrongness admission yields higher perceived trustworthiness in the scientist and trust in science and discipline-specific research as well as public funding support for the scientist, science, and discipline-specific research. Scientists engaging in wrongness admission (vs refuse or do not comment) were perceived as more trustworthy and received more support for federal funding for their own research. Moreover, wrongness admission yielded similar levels of science and discipline-specific public funding support. Wrongness admission not only facilitated higher scientist trustworthiness, but trustworthiness was, in turn, associated with greater trust in science and psychology, as well as scientist and psychology public funding support. This work highlights potential benefits of scientist wrongness admission amidst failed replications.