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 a contingency table, which are typically difficult for people to interpret correctly. When the source was a lobbyist arguing for his company's product people were better at interpreting the evidence compared to when the same source argued against the product. This was not the case for a different vested-interests source nor for the neutral source. Further, while all sources were rated as less trustworthy when participants realized that the source had misrepresented the evidence, only for the lobbyist source was this seen as a deliberate attempt at deception. Implications for research on epistemic trust, source credibility effects and science communication are discussed.

Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review

“…Individuals also take an expert's motives into account when evaluating trustworthiness; for example, readers were more inclined to trust a scientist when they believed the scientist intended to inform rather than persuade them , when the scientist provided a two-sided stance (instead of a one-sided stance) (Mayweg-Paus and Jucks, 2018) or mentioned the ethical aspects of a scientific issue (Hendriks et al, 2016). Furthermore, people perceived a source to be less trustworthy when the source had a vested interest in a claim (König and Jucks, 2019;Gierth and Bromme, 2020); this even sometimes motivated people to engage in effortful processing of complex evidence (Gierth and Bromme, 2020).…”

When research is me-search: How researchers’ motivation to pursue a topic affects laypeople’s trust in science

“…Disclosing such personal interest in a scientific endeavor might be able to bridge the stereotypical perception of cold and distant "science nerds" by revealing passionate, human and, thus, more relatable side of a researcher. When received negatively, however, "me-search" might be regarded as harboring vested interests, which casts doubts on a researcher's neutrality and objectivity [8][9][10][11]42].…”

“…Does that suggest that the general public tends to turn a blind eye on conflicts of interest that may arise from a researchers' personal affection by their research object? While the Jill Bolte Taylor case seems to suggest so, research on science communication and public understanding of science has shown that people are highly sensitive to potential conflicts of interest arising from researchers' personal involvement: perceiving researchers as pursuing an "agenda" for personal reasons is a major factor predicting people's loss of trust in researchers and science [8][9][10][11]. On the other hand, people may see personal ("autoethnographic") experiences of researchers personally affected by their topic as valuable and laudable -it may imply that "they know what they're talking about" [12][13][14].…”

Fighting “bad science” in the information age: The effects of an intervention to stimulate evaluation and critique of false scientific claims

“…Sperber et al (2010) describe epistemic vigilance as “not the opposite of trust; the opposite of blind trust (p. 235),” and they argue that trustful communication between individuals can only be possible if humans possess cognitive mechanisms to identify what is untrue. By doing so, individuals limit potential harm of relying on testimony without question (Gierth & Bromme, 2020). Epistemic vigilance can be achieved by “thinking slow” or thinking critically to assess a communicator's perceived competence and benevolence, and to evaluate the validity of claims and justifications (Kahneman, 2011; Sperber et al, 2010).…”