Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Disagreement is inherent to the production of scientific knowledge, but its communication can erode the credibility of science in the eyes of the public. This tension pervades all science communication; however, under conditions of uncertainty it is most vital to act on knowledge about which experts are certain. To better understand how the public responds scientific agreement and disagreement, this dissertation investigates three questions that spring from previous work on the subject. It explores how much scientific disagreement the public is exposed to, how disagreement affects trust in science, and whether motivated perceptions of disagreement can be corrected by scientific agreement messages. The first study uses multiple computer-assisted content analytic methods to reveal that, in the last thirty years of climate change newspaper coverage, the prevalence of scientific agreement and disagreement have declined but denial messages have increased. The second study examines the effects of civil and uncivil scientific disagreement on a range of science attitudes in an online experiment. Compared to agreement messages, I find that disagreement and incivility not only negatively affect attention to and evaluation of scientific topics, but also trust in science and perceptions about the value of science. The final experiment reveals that agreement messages are insufficient to persuade those motivated by political identities of scientifically supported positions on climate change. It also highlights that debate about the efficacy of consensus messages in extant research comes in part from the choice by some researchers to pretest climate attitude measures. In sum, people are frequently exposed to messages about scientific disagreement in news, these messages negatively affect both issue attitudes and broader views about science, and agreement messages are not sufficient to reduce motivated perceptions of scientific disagreement on politicized issues. Understanding the ways in which the public responds to scientific disagreements is important because scientists have an ethical obligation to be honest about uncertainties. Additionally, increasingly competitive political and media systems are likely to amplify scientific disagreements in the public eye. Though trust in science remains high among the US public, this work shows that disagreement messages, amplified by politicization, can have consequences beyond a single issue contexts, with implications for public perceptions about the value of scientific knowledge in social and political life.
Author: Sedona Chinn
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3092165964