Effects of Communication with Experts on the Evaluation of Ambiguous Scientific Evidence: Cognitive Tuning and Social Tuning

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gerald Echterhoff
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242185529

A key process in people's reception of scientific evidence is the evaluation of scientific evidence. The evaluation of science by laypeople plays an important role for the acceptance of research by the general public and ultimately funding decisions. The aim of this project is to investigate the processes affecting laypersons' evaluations and meta-cognitive judgments (certainty) regarding conflicting scientific evidence from a social-psychological perspective. First, I propose two experiments to investigate how the anticipation of communication (as producer vs. recipient) and the communication partner (expert vs. layperson; without information about her/his evaluation) influence evaluations of scientific evidence by laypeople (cognitive tuning). Second, I plan to examine the creation of a shared reality with partners who communicate their evaluation of a scientific topic (social tuning). According to extant research, the successful creation of a shared reality should depend not only on a partner's epistemic expertise but also on the experience of a personal relation and connection with the partner. The lack of personal connection is presumably a key obstacle to the creation of a shared reality in lay-expert communication. Four experiments are proposed to investigate factors and processes underlying the experience of a personal connection with experts, including the synchronicity of computer-mediated communication, self-disclosure of the experts, and basic language features signaling an interpersonal connection (e.g., collective pronouns like "we" or "us"). Beyond its relevance for basic science the project has important practical implications, especially for experts' successful communication of scientific evidence to laypeople.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1409: Science and the General Public: Understanding Fragile and Conflicting Evidence
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Persons: Professor E. Tory Higgins, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Tobias Richter