Nuestro compañero Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen, miembro de FiloLab, participa en un estudio recientemente publicado en la revista Science & Education, en colaboración con Hugo Viciana, Aníbal M. Astobiza y Angelo Fasce. El artículo, titulado «Scientifically Together, Politically Apart? Epistemological Literacy Predicts Updating on Contested Science Issues», explora mediante procedimientos empíricos cómo una mejor comprensión de la epistemología que subyace a la ciencia previene la adopción de creencias pseudocientíficas y favorece una mayor aceptación de posiciones alineadas con el consenso científico en cuestiones políticamente controvertidas. A continuación reproducimos un resumen del trabajo, que puede encontrarse completo a través de este enlace.
Science education is generally perceived as a key facilitator in cultivating a scientifically literate society. In the last decade, however, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by evidence that greater scientific literacy and critical thinking skills may in fact inadvertently aggravate polarization on scientific matters in the public sphere. Supporting an alternative “scientific update hypothesis,” in a series of studies (total N = 2087), we show that increased science’s epistemology literacy might have consequential population-level effects on the public’s alignment with scientific results. In one exploratory study and a pre-registered national online survey, we first show that understanding scientific epistemology predicts refusal of pseudoscientific beliefs and higher scores in a methodology of science test. We also find and replicate a propensity for epistemologically literate citizens to endorse the norm of belief updating and the communicated scientific consensus following both ideologically congruent and incongruent scientific results. Notably, after 2 months of first being presented with scientific results on politically controversial issues, a one standard deviation higher score in epistemological literacy is associated with a 14% increase in the odds of individuals switching their beliefs to align with the scientifically communicated consensus. We close by discussing how, on the face of ideological incongruity, a general understanding of scientific epistemology might foster the acceptance of scientific results, and we underscore the need for a more nuanced appreciation of how education, public comprehension of scientific knowledge, and the dynamics of polarization intersect in the public sphere.
