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Category: Project

Description: Scientific reasoning plays an important role in science literacy and science capital, i.e. who in society can access, understand, engage with, and use scientific knowledge and resources that have social and economic value (Archer, 2015; Howell and Brossell, 2021). Education and scientific content knowledge provide the necessary framework to understand scientific concepts. However, education may not give a straightforward protective effect against naïve theories, heuristic thinking, and bias, which tend to persist even when people are aware that they are active (Zmigrod et al., 2021; Morsanyi et al., 2009). Cognitive flexibility, the capacity to adjust one’s thinking to different situations, has been linked to perceptual processing, creativity, and ideological attitudes, suggesting that it also plays an important role in engaging with new ideas, reasoning, and decision-making (Blake & Palmisano, 2021; Zmigrod et al., 2019). Recent research suggests that reasoning and decision-making are also driven by how people engage with information on a social and emotional level. Trait-like individual qualities such as curiosity, openness and motivation to seek answers, and willingness to consider alternative viewpoints also contribute to how and why people seek, filter, and integrate new information (Zedelius et al., 2021; FitzGibbon et al., 2020). Moreover, understanding how people engage with information to update or maintain knowledge and beliefs is essential to addressing the issues of misinformation and disinformation in a “post-truth” society (Scheufele & Krause, 2019). This study will employ exploratory factor analysis on a battery of surveys and cognitive tasks to identify relationships between personality traits related to information-seeking, science-related attitudes and experiences, and cognitive skills and styles. The goals for this study are to: 1. Identify the factors underlying engagement with scientific thinking and reasoning. 2. Understand how the factors are related to each other in order to develop a framework of people's engagement with science. The factors identified from this exploratory phase feed into a second study phase which focuses on the citizen’s initiative task, a realistic science-related decision-making task. In the citizen’s initiative task, participants are presented with a petition related to reclassifying peat as a renewable resource, a recent subject of debate in Finland. Participants are asked about their likelihood of supporting the petition and their familiarity, curiosity and interest in the topic. Then, they are presented with a series of six news and information sources on the subject representing different levels of authority and credibility and asked to evaluate the quality of the sources, and again asked about their opinions on the petition. The outcome variables from this task represent realistic behavior when encountering a science-related decision in everyday life: e.g. time spent information seeking, source evaluation, and self-reported shifts in interest and familiarity with a topic. We are interested in which factors from the first phase predict behavior in the citizen’s initiative task. In the first phase, we identify the relationships between cognitive, personality, attitudinal, and behavioural factors and create profiles that describe how people engage with scientific concepts in general. In the second phase, we examine how the different profiles behave when presented with the realistic citizen’s initiative task. Plans for the second study phase will be reported in a subsequent preregistration and the citizen’s initiative data are not further described here.