By Joop de Boer and Harry Aiking. Photo credit: Unsplash “Viruses have been produced in government laboratories to control our freedom”. Conspiratorial anti-science beliefs such as the previous statement mix two related categories of unwarranted beliefs and attitudes: That of conspiratorial ideas and that of anti-science attitudes. The very existence and diffusion of such beliefs highlights an opposition between “the common people” versus “the social elite,” including academics, scholars, and experts, but this opposition shows itself in a variety of ways. The beliefs combine a mistreatment of the people with an image of science that seriously contradicts the cultural values of intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and commitments to the welfare of others. In European countries, the importance of these values is associated with national wealth and women’s political representation. Hence, characteristics of both individuals and countries are important to clarify the responses to the
By Alice Fleerackers and Chelsea Ratcliff. Photo credit: cclogg New study finds that over 50% of readers misunderstand the term “preprint” when they see it mentioned in a news story. A news story describing a novel blood test for Alzheimer diagnosis. An analysis of how Donald Trump is redefining the word felon . A deep dive into a promising new approach to building AI models. These three seemingly different news stories have one thing in common. They report findings from preprints —research articles that are publicly available but haven’t yet been peer reviewed or published by a journal. If you’ve never heard of preprints before, you’re not alone. Our new study suggests that more than half of readers are confused when they see the word preprint mentioned in a news story. For most people in our study, this held true even when they read a news story that included an explanation of the term. In fact, we found that over three-quarters of people who were shown an explanation like thi