Attitude change when presenting science museum visitors with risk–benefit information

Abstract

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.

Fostering students’ willingness to act pro-environmentally through an identity-oriented socio-scientific exhibition on the energy transition

“…Particularly suitable sites to provide sociocultural situated environments for students to engage with might be museum exhibitions. Not only are museum exhibitions already known to play a key role in supporting the overall science literacy of society (Falk and Dierking, 2010) and to promote knowledge, interest, motivation, and attitudes (Falk and Dierking, 2010;Schwan et al, 2014;Phelan et al, 2017;Lewalter et al, 2021), due to their free-choice-learning they also offer "powerful opportunities for doing identity work" (Rounds, 2006, p. 133) in a way that might complement formal education in its efforts to help students become active energy literate citizens.…”