TY - JOUR
T1 - Emotion and judgments of scientific research
AU - Drummond, Caitlin
AU - Fischhoff, Baruch
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant DGE-1252522, to the first author, grant NCSE-1537364, to the authors, and grant SES-0949710, to the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making, and by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/4/1
Y1 - 2020/4/1
N2 - Scientific research has the power to prompt strong emotional reactions. We investigated the relationship between such reactions and individuals’ understanding and judgments of the research. Participants read an article describing recent cancer research and reported the extent to which it evoked six emotions: fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We modeled these emotions two ways, either considering each separately or clustering them into two groups, for emotions with positive or negative valence. Even after controlling for the number of predictors, models based on the six separate emotions better predicted participants’ subjective understanding of the research, judgments of its quality, and trust in the scientists who conducted it. Participants who reported more disgust also had more negative judgments of the research and the scientists, but these relationships were weaker when participants reported their emotions before making these judgments, rather than after. We discuss practical and ethical implications of these results.
AB - Scientific research has the power to prompt strong emotional reactions. We investigated the relationship between such reactions and individuals’ understanding and judgments of the research. Participants read an article describing recent cancer research and reported the extent to which it evoked six emotions: fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We modeled these emotions two ways, either considering each separately or clustering them into two groups, for emotions with positive or negative valence. Even after controlling for the number of predictors, models based on the six separate emotions better predicted participants’ subjective understanding of the research, judgments of its quality, and trust in the scientists who conducted it. Participants who reported more disgust also had more negative judgments of the research and the scientists, but these relationships were weaker when participants reported their emotions before making these judgments, rather than after. We discuss practical and ethical implications of these results.
KW - emotion
KW - science communication
KW - trust
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U2 - 10.1177/0963662520906797
DO - 10.1177/0963662520906797
M3 - Article
C2 - 32098582
AN - SCOPUS:85081573846
SN - 0963-6625
VL - 29
SP - 319
EP - 334
JO - Public Understanding of Science
JF - Public Understanding of Science
IS - 3
ER -