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Visitors to modern science museums are likely to encounter exhibitions presenting conflicting information, such as risks and benefits of new scientific developments. Such exhibitions encourage visitors to reflect upon different sides of a story and to form or adjust their attitudes toward the topic on display. However, there is very little evidence of museum visits influencing visitors’ attitudes. Using a risk–benefit museum text, we set out to explore this blind spot of attitude change in a science museum, with visual and auditory text as information conditions. Our results show a small average change in visitors’ attitude toward the text topic after information (N = 225). No significant differences were found between participants’ attitude change in the two information conditions. We also explored whether participants’ attitude change can be predicted based on presentation modality and four dimensions of attitude strength (prior knowledge, attitudinal certainty, attitudinal importance, and attitudinal ambivalence) that are known to play a role in attitude change. Results indicate that this model explained a small part of the variance, but only ambivalence added statistically significantly to the prediction. Overall, our findings suggest that risk–benefit information can on average change visitors’ attitudes and that prior attitudinal ambivalence can influence that change.

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There is a long tradition of museum research assessing visitors' personal background. In this article, we suggest an insightful way to enhance and intensify visitor analyses and adopt a more integrative approach. To this end, we draw attention to Latent Class Analysis (LCA), a classification method that allows us to investigate visitor profiles rather than isolated characteristics while using a mixture of socio-demographic variables and other personal characteristics. We illustrate our suggestion with two examples drawn from a study we conducted at two science museums and two museums of cultural history. The first example shows the use of LCA on variables that are easily assessed and that many museums already have access to through their visitor surveys. The second LCA involves more specific cognitive and motivational visitor variables that are of general importance for learning and that are assumed to be especially important when dealing with conflicting information. Both examples illustrate the additional value of investigating visitor profiles for researchers as well as museum practitioners.