Social identity threat motivates science-discrediting online comments.

ABSTRACT: Experiencing social identity threat from scientific findings can lead people to cognitively devalue the respective findings. Three studies examined whether potentially threatening scientific findings motivate group members to take action against the respective findings by publicly discrediting them on the Web. Results show that strongly (vs. weakly) identified group members (i.e., people who identified as "gamers") were particularly likely to discredit social identity threatening findings publicly (i.e., studies that found an effect of playing violent video games on aggression). A content analytical evaluation of online comments revealed that social identification specifically predicted critiques of the methodology employed in potentially threatening, but not in non-threatening research (S

SUBMITTER: Nauroth P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4315604 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature