Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR), Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Apr;29(2):668-680. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01993-y. Epub 2021 Oct 29.
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 scientific evidence related to a lower likelihood of polarization over the science. This finding held irrespective of the direction of the scientific evidence (endorsing or rejecting anthropogenicity of climate change). Furthermore, the polarizing effect of scientific evidence could be traced back to higher metacognitive insight fostering belief-updating in the direction of the evidence at the expense of own, prior beliefs. By demonstrating how metacognition links to polarization, the present research adds to our understanding of the drivers of societal polarization over science.
近年来，社会对有争议科学的两极分化加剧。为了解释这一发展，政治、社会学和心理学研究已经确定了一些社会宏观现象和认知微观因素，这些因素解释了公民如何推理科学。在这里，我们采取了一种截然不同的视角，强调了元认知的作用：公民如何推理自己的推理。我们利用信号检测理论的方法，研究了元认知洞察力对气候变化这一争议极大的话题以及纳米技术这一争议较小的话题的极化的重要性。我们发现，对于气候变化（而不是纳米技术），对自己对现有科学证据的解释的准确性的洞察力越高，对科学的两极分化的可能性就越低。这一发现与科学证据的方向无关（支持或否定气候变化的人为因素）。此外，科学证据的极化效应可以追溯到更高的元认知洞察力，这种洞察力以牺牲自己的先入之见为代价，促进了证据方向的信念更新。通过证明元认知如何与极化联系起来，本研究增进了我们对社会对科学两极分化的驱动因素的理解。
