Typically the flow of scientific communication has been one-way, with those in the scientific community attempting to educate the general public on their findings and help forge agreement with their scientific consensus. Research from Portland State University highlights how this approach has had mixed results.

“Human opposition to scientific consensus is an extremely important topic. For many years, smart people thought that the way to bring people more in line with scientific consensus was to teach them the knowledge they lacked,” the researchers explain. “Unfortunately, educational interventions haven’t worked very well.”

Problems of overconfidence

The study suggests that there may be a problem whereby overconfidence hampers the ability of people to learn, as we think we know far more than we do, and thus lack any real motivation to learn more.

“People with more extreme anti-scientific attitudes might first need to learn about their relative ignorance on the issues before being taught specifics of established scientific knowledge,” the researchers continue.

They examined public attitudes on eight different topics where both a scientific consensus exists and an anti-consensus opposition. These included GM foods, climate change, and nuclear energy. The researchers found that as people’s opinions on a topic get further from the consensus, their assessment of their own level of knowledge on the topic increases, even as their actual knowledge decreases.

“Essentially, the people who are most extreme in their opposition to the consensus are the most overconfident in their knowledge,” the researchers explain. “Our findings suggest that this pattern is fairly general. However, we did not find them for climate change, evolution, or the big bang theory.”

Identity matters

They believe that our identity underpins whether such patterns exist for any particular topic, with religious and political identity particularly important in this regard.

“For climate change, for example, attitudes in line with science tend to be held by liberals, whereas for an issue like genetically modified foods, liberals and conservatives tend to be fairly split in their support or opposition,” they continue. “It could be that when we know our in-groups feel strongly about an issue, we don’t think much about our knowledge of the issue.”

The implications of having anti-consensus views are considerable, however, and include financial hardship and even death. As a result, it’s crucial that scientists are able to understand how interventions and existing communications may not be effective in shifting views if people lack a realistic understanding of their own knowledge to begin with.

“The challenge then becomes finding appropriate ways to convince anti-consensus individuals that they probably aren’t as knowledgeable as they think they are,” the researchers explain.

One approach would be to move focus away from individual knowledge and towards the influence of experts. The researchers also highlight how social norms can be powerful and often more so than personal views. For instance, societal expectations were a big factor in high mask adherence in Japan during Covid.

“People tend to do what they think their community expects them to do,” the authors conclude. “While blindly following the consensus isn’t generally recommended, if anti-consensus attitudes create dangerous situations for the community, it is incumbent on society to try to change minds in favor of the scientific consensus.”