By Luzia Heusler and Marlene Altenmüller.
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| Image source: Rutgers. |
Most science communicators work hard to be accurate, transparent and clear. But what if accuracy is not enough because the problem is not what people understand but how the evidence makes them feel?
Try a thought experiment. You read a study on a topic you care about. The methods look solid, the researcher sounds competent, the findings are clear. There is just one problem: the results contradict what you think is true and right. Would you judge the study the same way if it said the opposite? Research on motivated reasoning—the tendency to receive and judge information in a way that fits with existing preferences and beliefs—suggests most of us would not. We look at scientific evidence through the biased lens of our desires and priors, and we might not even notice that we do.
Testing it on a topic that divides
In our new paper, we asked how people respond psychologically when evidence clashes with their views. We chose a topic that splits Germany: gender-conscious language. This means using, for example, gender-inclusive nouns such as "Forscher:in" instead of the generic masculine "Forscher" (researcher) to promote gender equality by explicitly including all genders in language. Attitudes towards this topic have become highly polarized among the German public due to on-going politicization and polemics in the discourse surrounding it.
In three online experiments with 2,728 participants, people first reported their own attitudes toward gender-conscious language in a questionnaire. Then they read a fictional interview with a researcher who presented findings that either supported or challenged the meaningful effectiveness of gender-conscious language.
Indeed, when the findings contradicted people's own views, they rated the researcher as less trustworthy and the findings as less credible. To us, the even more interesting question was: why? Participants who read findings they disagreed with felt psychologically threatened. And this feeling, in turn, explained a good part of their harsher verdicts.
It is about freedom, not only about being right
But what exactly makes up this threat? We measured several kinds of threat, for example experiencing a challenge to one’s identity, values, competence or belonging, as well as the emotions that go with them. One type of threat stood out: autonomy threat. That is the feeling that someone is trying to tell you what to think and take away your freedom to make your own judgments and form your own opinions. Fittingly, anger, rather than sadness or insecurity, was the emotion that mattered most. Psychologists call this reactance. When we feel pushed, we push back, and one way to push back is to dismiss the message and the messenger.
Can the right communication technique defuse the threat?
Earlier research shows that identity threat can be buffered when people are reminded of “who they are”. Such self-affirming techniques seem to make them more resilient to threatening information. However, these techniques usually ask people to reflect on and engage extensively with their values themselves, for example, to write a short essay about them. This seems very hard to do and highly impractical in everyday science communication. So, we wondered whether the communicator could affirm their audiences’ values instead.
In our studies, we investigated whether a researcher could reduce perceived threat—and with it, motivated rejection of belief-inconsistent evidence—by affirming what is threatened. This could be an important value (“no matter what position one takes—we all actually share the same conviction: that equality between men and women is important”) or the recipients’ autonomy (e.g., “everyone is of course free to have their own position on gender-conscious language”).
Did this work? The effects were small and inconsistent. The shared values affirmation seemed to help in our first study but not in the second. The autonomy affirmation had at best a tiny effect. This may partly reflect weaknesses in our studies (more on that in our paper). But it may also simply reflect that the affirmation was one sentence in a long interview, and it is unrealistic to expect one sentence to beat a strong prior opinion. Still, addressing underlying threats might be a promising way to buffer motivated science rejection.
What science communicators can take from this
- Accuracy is necessary, but it is not the whole job. People bring pre-existing opinions, values, needs, and emotions to every piece of evidence and this determines their responses.
- Different topics, different threats: Rejection of science can be driven by feelings of threat – but what exactly is threatened might be different for every topic. For gender-conscious language, it was autonomy threat. For climate science, it may be political ideology, and for vaccination, it might be values. For other topics, competence or belonging. We tested only one topic, so take this as food for thought: What psychological threats might your own research pose to certain audiences?
- Do not expect one magic sentence to defuse all threat. Acknowledging people’s identity, values, and needs may still be a useful first step, but reassurances will not do the job alone. Which strategies work best is still an open question for future research.
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LinkedIn: Luzia Heusler.
LinkedIn: Marlene Altenmüller.