Combining Intra- and Interindividual Approaches in Epistemic Beliefs Research

Abstract

We combined inter-and intraindividual approaches to investigate university students' biology-and psychology-specific specific epistemic beliefs (beliefs about the nature and structure of knowledge). We expected that university students would perceive the discipline of biology as more absolute and less multiplistic than the discipline of psychology (intraindividual perspective). Furthermore, we expected students from socalled "hard" disciplines to perceive biology as more absolute and less multiplistic than students from soft disciplines (interindividual perspective). Finally, we expected that students from hard disciplines, compared to their peers from soft disciplines, would perceive stronger differences between biology and psychology (combined perspective). Hypotheses were tested, using Bayes factors, in N = 938 university students from a multitude of disciplines. Results revealed that university students perceive biology as considerably more absolute and less multiplistic compared to psychology. However, the findings also suggest that there are no strong interindividual differences between students from hard and soft disciplines regarding the perception of biology. Finally, results revealed that students enrolled in harder disciplines perceive a slightly stronger difference between biology and psychology. In sum, intraindividual effects were considerably stronger, which elicits doubt that students from hard disciplines espouse a fundamentally different set of epistemic beliefs than their peers from soft disciplines.

Person- and situation-specific factors in discounting science via scientific impotence excuses

“…In fact, SIEs can be seen as a lack of beliefs in the epistemology of a domain ( Munro, 2010 ), and, vice-versa, the epistemology of the domain (or topic) itself may also affect SIEs. This is in line with a recent argument by Rosman et al (2020) . In their study, they suggest that students’ epistemic beliefs reflect, to a certain extent, the epistemology of the domain in question, which is why domain-specific epistemic beliefs are usually more absolute with regard to “hard” compared to “soft” ( Biglan, 1973 ) sciences ( Hofer, 2000 ; Muis et al, 2006 ; Muis et al, 2016 ; Rosman et al, 2017 ).…”

Protect ya Grandma! The Effects of Students' Epistemic Beliefs and Prosocial Values on COVID-19 Vaccination Intentions

“…Not surprisingly, knowledge structures vary across domains. Therefore, epistemic beliefs are often conceptualized with regard to specific disciplines or domains (e.g., biology-specific epistemic beliefs; Muis et al, 2006;Rosman et al, 2020). It is believed, according to the Theory of Integrated Domains in Personal Epistemology (TIDE), that global epistemic beliefs influence academic beliefs, which again influence beliefs about specific domains or even topics (Merk et al, 2018).…”

Teacher’s Reasons for Trust and Distrust in Scientific Evidence: Reflecting a “Smart But Evil” Stereotype?

“…It should also be noted that our findings for Hypotheses 3 and 4 are limited to comparisons between science in general and educational research. Future research might investigate whether the smart but evil pattern varies over different types of domains (e.g., well-structured vs. ill-structured disciplines), a question that is receiving increasing attention in the field of epistemic belief research, too (e.g., Rosman et al, 2020; Rowley et al, 2008). With regard to future research on Hypotheses 5 and 6, one might investigate samples across different cultural or socioeconomic contexts, such as collectivist versus individualistic cultures.…”