Science blogger Grant Jacobs refers his readers to a new study which shows the strongest opponents of GM (genetic modification) think they know the subject well, but in fact know the least.
Dr Jacobs asks: what does this means for science communication?
Especially contentious topics – and doubly so where deliberate misinformation is being offered?
Similarly, what are the lessons for politicians?
The paper in question isn’t looking at the Dunner-Kruger effect, Dr Jacobs acknowledges – but it helps to know what this is first, he advises.
The incident that prompted what has become known as the Dunner-Kruger effect involved a bank robber who was baffled to be caught after rubbing lemon juice into his face in the belief it would make him invisible to security cameras
As Errol Morris wrote in The Opinonator blog,
As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.
Revisiting the Dunner-Kruger effect, Dr Jacobs describes it as a cognitive bias where people of low ability mistakenly think they have better ability than they do. Their lack of ability also means they’re not good at recognising their lack of ability.
Conversely, those with great knowledge tend to underrate their ability. One finding was that capable people assume others find the tasks easy too, and so they don’t rate themselves so highly. They don’t recognise how much better they really are.
Dr Jacobs adds from personal experience that people with deep knowledge tend to be critically aware of what they don’t know. “Knowing what you don’t know is a tricky thing. You’ve got to be aware of what there is to know first.”
An upshot can be paradoxical communication styles. The poorly informed person will present incorrect or misleading ‘advice’ with great gusto, whereas those who are very well informed are tentative and cautious.
People who follow contentious topics see this all the time, Dr Jacobs says. In many ways vaccines discussions are a clearer example of this than GM food, he suggests. It’s more obvious the benefits that vaccines bring. Despite this, those strongly opposed to vaccines will say ‘definitively’ something is flat-out wrong.
Philip Fernbach and colleagues are looking at the psychology of extremism rather than the Dunner-Kruger effect. What does it take for people to hold extreme views about scientific topics?
In many ways what they find is that in order to hold extreme opposition to a scientific topic people have too a poor knowledge of the subject but be convinced they are knowledgable, Dr Jacobs says. Good knowledge introduces nuances and complexities that preclude a simplistic extreme opposition to the thing.
They compared public surveys from the US, Germany and France, comparing people’s views, their self-assessed belief of how good their science understanding was, and their actual science understanding. The research also checks out a number of potential pitfalls, for example –
- the order of the questions
- confounding from considering things other than food safety more important
- differences in education levels
Overall they find that –
The interaction is statistically significant, indicating that the relationship between objective knowledge and self-assessed knowledge differs by extremity of opposition
Basically, people’s tendency to be extremely opposed to GM food was intrinsically linked to their tendency to over-estimate their knowledge.
Dr Jacobs is interested in their focus on food safety because his (anecdotal) perception is that this is a dwindling concern. They find that –
Extreme opponents were actually more likely to cite food safety/health concerns than moderates and the main results replicate when we restrict analysis to the subset of participants citing food safety/health concerns.
It’s a minor result for their work, but an important one for dealing with the topic, Dr Jacobs observes. Concerns about food safety are not uniformly spread, but are mostly in those with extreme opposition to GM food.
They also looked at medical applications for genetic engineering. People are more accepting of this. It was possible that the trend of a disconnect of perceived and actual knowledge and extreme opposition was something mostly true of more strongly held things like opposition to GM foods.
Their results show a lower overall level of opposition, but the same the same trend of a disconnect of perceived and actual knowledge in those with the most extreme opposition.
They also investigated views on climate change. There the effects are similar, but people were readily split based on political views. Essentially, people fell in with their ‘in group’. (Climate change is political issue in the USA in particular.)
As to the lessons on communicating to people, the study authors suggest,
Our findings highlight a difficulty that is not generally appreciated. Those with the strongest anti-consensus views are the most in need of education, but also the least likely to be receptive to learning; overconfidence about one’s knowledge is associated with decreased openness to new information. This suggests that a prerequisite to changing people’s views through education may be getting them to first appreciate the gaps in their knowledge.
Dr Jacobs ventures that it you are familiar with interacting with people with opposing views on GM foods, there is a conundrum: these people don’t want to appreciate the gaps in their knowledge, thank you very much. They insist they already know everything they need to know.
He offers several thoughts:
Can you? Can you communicate with these people with extreme views at all?
Are there enough of them to matter? If they are a tiny minority, do they matter? What might matter more is to point out that they are a tiny minority. A minority at odds with everyone else for that matter. Strong opponents of vaccines might be an example.
Simply ignore them. Following the previous thought, ignoring them is an option. Write as if they’re not there. Of course, you won’t shift their views doing this; you’re no even engaging with them. A question might be how much influence do they have on others? If they have influence, you might want to deal with their influence. (This isn’t the same thing as dealing with the people.)
Try pointing to who they learnt their views from. Communicate with them, but refer to the views they hold as views others have encouraged them to hold, and criticise those people. This tries to avoid that some people bind their views to who they are, personalising any discussion. Make it someone else. You’re trying to get them—and any readers—to question what others have told them, a little of what Fernbach and colleagues suggested.
Use them as examples for those slightly less opposed. A bit nasty in some ways, but you could hold them up as examples of “you really don’t want to go to this place”. Deconstruct what they way, but for the benefit of others. This and slightly gentler approaches can aim to address the ‘silent readers’—people who are less vocally involved, and perhaps more likely to be open to new information.
And the lessons for politicians?
“I think there are always a few that you’ll never really get through to. Life is like that.
“You just wish politicians wouldn’t be such pathetic sods about this. You can’t make a policy that genuinely works for every last person. There will always be a few who are just ‘in an awkward place’. It may not be politically correct or the grand ideal, but it is reality.
“We do reasonably well with this for vaccines. Why not for GMOs?
“For vaccines in New Zealand the emphasis has been strongly on education, accepting that a tiny minority will just persist with unorthodox views whatever you do.
“Anecdotally there seems to be widespread recognition that GM food is safe, and that the opposition to GMOs is overplayed.. An Otago survey indicated most New Zealanders thought GM food safe.
“The persistence of laws ‘countering’ something that has no sound scientific basis appears to be largely political laziness. The previous government took the easiest option, one the EPA advised would be inherently temporary –
They suggested #4 is good and should be approached at some time, but the current problems want immediate attention and that options #2 or #3 would give immediate attention to this. They noted that options #2 and #3 could only be temporary as a longer-term, proper, review is needed.
They suggested #2 would address the immediate concerns, was a bare-bones temporary ‘patch’: “is a bare minimum and is not considered a long term solution.” Cabinet elected to take this approach.
“I’ll write about this some other time, but I feel a key is to recognise that the real objections to GMOs are not over science issues, but ‘values’ aspects that should be treated in the same way that secular governance deals with those with different religious views. People can choose to be ‘organic’, but they don’t have a right to inflict their wishes on others, or demand a monopoly.”
Source: SciBlogs
