Citation

Nauroth P, Gollwitzer M, Kozuchowski H, Bender J, Rothmund T. Public Underst. Sci. 2016; 26(7): 754-770.

Affiliation

University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Institute of Physics in association with the Science Museum, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0963662516631289

PMID

26902257

Abstract

Public debates about socio-scientific issues (e.g. climate change or violent video games) are often accompanied by attacks on the reputation of the involved scientists. Drawing on the social identity approach, we report a minimal group experiment investigating the conditions under which scientists are perceived as non-prototypical, non-reputable, and incompetent.

RESULTS show that in-group affirming and threatening scientific findings (compared to a control condition) both alter laypersons' evaluations of the study: in-group affirming findings lead to more positive and in-group threatening findings to more negative evaluations. However, only in-group threatening findings alter laypersons' perceptions of the scientists who published the study: scientists were perceived as less prototypical, less reputable, and less competent when their research results imply a threat to participants' social identity compared to a non-threat condition. Our findings add to the literature on science reception research and have implications for understanding the public engagement with science.

Language: en