Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize.

ABSTRACT: Societal polarization over contested science has increased in recent years. To explain this development, political, sociological, and psychological research has identified societal macro-phenomena as well as cognitive micro-level factors that explain how citizens reason about the science. Here we take a radically different perspective, and highlight the effects of metacognition: How citizens reason about their own reasoning. Leveraging methods from Signal Detection Theory, we investigated the importance of metacognitive insight for polarization for the heavily contested topic of climate change, and the less heavily contested topic of nanotechnology. We found that, for climate change (but not for nanotechnology), higher insight into the accuracy of own interpretations of the available scien

SUBMITTER: Said N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8555729 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature