Beware of vested interests: Epistemic vigilance improves reasoning about scientific evidence (for some people).

ABSTRACT: In public disputes, stakeholders sometimes misrepresent statistics or other types of scientific evidence to support their claims. One of the reasons this is problematic is that citizens often do not have the motivation nor the cognitive skills to accurately judge the meaning of statistics and thus run the risk of being misinformed. This study reports an experiment investigating the conditions under which people become vigilant towards a source's claim and thus reason more carefully about the supporting evidence. For this, participants were presented with a claim by a vested-interest or a neutral source and with statistical evidence which was cited by the source as being in support of the claim. However, this statistical evidence actually contradicted the source's claim but was presented as

SUBMITTER: Gierth L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7159212 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature