Historically, the scientific community has relied on public education to improve
"For years, smart people thought thatthe best way to bring the rest of the world into line with the scientific consensus – is to teach them the knowledge that they lack,” – says Nick Light, assistant professor of marketing at PSU. “Unfortunately, educational measures did not produce good results.”
Their research suggests that there is a problem of over-confidence interfering with learning. Because if people think they know a lot, they have minimal motivation to learn more.
"People with more extreme anti-scientificviews, it may be necessary to first become aware of one's relative ignorance of these matters before teaching them the specifics of established scientific knowledge,” Light said.
In the work, scientists considered seven topics that causedisputes among the public, but not among the “world of science”: climate change, nuclear energy, genetically modified foods, the Big Bang theory, evolution, vaccination, homeopathic medicine and COVID-19.
According to Light, they found that, in general,as people's attitudes towards a subject move away from scientific consensus, their assessment of their own knowledge on the subject increases, but their actual knowledge decreases. They gave the example of COVID-19 vaccines. “The less a person agrees with the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine, the more he believes that he knows everything about it, but his actual knowledge is likely to be lower,” the authors of the work summed up.