Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038
Public attitudes that are in opposition to scientific consensus can be disastrous and include rejection of vaccines and opposition to climate change mitigation policies.
Five studies examine the interrelationships between opposition to expert consensus on controversial scientific issues, how much people actually know about these issues, and how much they think they know.
Across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, as well as attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and mitigation measures like mask wearing and social distancing, results indicate that those with the highest levels of opposition have the lowest levels of objective knowledge but the highest levels of subjective knowledge.
Results from five studies show that the people who disagree most with the scientific consensus know less about the relevant issues, but they think they know more. These results suggest that this phenomenon is fairly general, although the relationships were weaker for some more polarized issues, particularly climate change. It is important to note that we document larger mismatches between subjective and objective knowledge among participants who are more opposed to the scientific consensus.
Thus, although broadly consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect and other research on knowledge miscalibration, our findings represent a pattern of relationships that goes beyond overconfidence among the least knowledgeable. However, the data are correlational, and the normal caveats apply.
One possible interpretation of these relationships is that the people who appear to be overconfident in their knowledge and extreme in their opposition to the consensus are actually reporting their sense of understanding for a set of incorrect alternative facts not those of the scientific community. After all, nonscientific explanations and theories tend to be much simpler and less mechanistic than scientific ones. As a result, participants could be reporting higher levels of understanding for what are, in fact, simpler interpretations. However, we believe that several elements of this research speak against this interpretation fully explaining the results.
Instead of interventions focused on objective knowledge alone, these findings suggest that focusing on changing individuals’ perceptions of their own knowledge may be a helpful first step. The challenge then becomes finding appropriate ways to convince anti-consensus individuals that they are not as knowledgeable as they think they are. One option may be to encourage people to try to explain the mechanisms underlying the complex scientific phenomena at issue. This has been shown to reduce subjective knowledge (33, 44) and increase deference to experts (45). Another way to potentially make feelings of ignorance more salient to people is to give them reference points.
Another strategy for bringing opponents in line with the scientific consensus is to ignore individual knowledge and focus instead on experts or perceived experts, gaining the allyship of agents of change. A survey on transmission of the coronavirus has found that the major reason people report wearing masks in Japan is not to mitigate risk nor be altruistic but to conform to a social norm (46), and studies in the United States have found that perceptions of the extent to which one’s social circle engages in preventive behaviors are strongly related to one’s own behaviors (47, 48). People tend to do what they think their community expects them to do (49). If policymakers and science communicators can convince influential thought leaders from political, religious, or cultural groups with whom people holding anti-consensus beliefs identify, then these thought leaders may be able to alter their followers’ views.