Controversial research that breaks with conventions may be seen as necessary to move society on, but research from the University of Pennsylvania reminds us that it might also put people on the defensive.

This can result in people choosing to defund related programs, censor the research, or even promote biases against a community of people.

Loaded expectations

“With this set of studies, we learned that expectations about scientific consequences might have a negativity bias,” the researchers explain. “We found that participants consistently overestimated support for harmful behavioral reactions and consistently underestimated support for helpful behavioral reactions. And those more likely to overestimate harms tended to be more supportive of censoring scientific research.”

The researchers had almost 1000 people online read parts from five real studies that had surprising conclusions. Some conclusions went against what liberals might think, while others were different from what conservatives might believe. They also had one part that was neutral.

After reading these parts, some people were asked what they would do in response to the findings. Others were asked what they thought most people would do. The interesting thing was that the people guessing what others would do often got it wrong. They thought more people would support bad actions and fewer would support good actions.

They found that people with conservative views tended to think more people would support harmful actions. People who were both conservative and younger were more likely to want to stop certain research from being talked about. Surprisingly, people’s own political views didn’t change how they responded to a study about political intolerance.

In a nutshell, this study looked at how people react to bold research findings. It showed that our personal beliefs can affect how we think others will react to new ideas, sometimes in unexpected ways.