Publications in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities – insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarised beliefs. We here aimed at investigated the role of metacognition in changing beliefs about climate change. To that end, we focused on the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updating prior beliefs about climate change across the spectrum of climate change scepticism. We also considered the role of how climate science is communicated in the form of textual or visuo-textual presentations. We asked two large US samples to perform a perceptual decision-making task (to assess domain-general decision-making and metacognitive abilities. They next performed a belief-updating task, where they were exposed to good and bad news about climate change and we asked them about their beliefs and their updating. Lastly, they completed a series of questionnaires probing their attitudes to climate change. We show that climate change scepticism is associated with differences in domain-general as well as domain-specific metacognitive abilities. Moreover, domain-general metacognitive sensitivity influenced belief updating in an asymmetric way: lower domain-general metacognition decreased the updating of prior beliefs, especially in the face of negative evidence. Our findings highlight the role of metacognitive failures in revising erroneous beliefs about climate change and point to their adverse social effects. © 2023, The Author(s).

How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? People who trust in science are reportedly more likely to comply with official guidelines, implying that higher levels of adherence could be achieved by improving trust in science. However, analysis of a global dataset (n = 4341) suggests otherwise. Trust in science had a small, indirect effect on adherence to the rules. Nonetheless, it predicted people’s approval of prevention measures such as social distancing, and bridged political ideology and approval of the measures (conservatives trusted science less and in turn approved of the measures less). These effects were stronger in the USA than in other countries. Even though any increase in trust in science is unlikely to yield strong behavioural changes, given its relationships with both ideology and individuals’ attitudes to the measures, trust in science may be leveraged to yield longer-term sustainable social benefits.

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.