Explore the vast range of titles available.

Scholarship on (mis)information does not easily translate into recommendations for policy-makers and policy influencers who wish to judge the accuracy of sciencerelated truth claims. This is partly due to much of this literature being based on lab experiments with captive audiences that tell us little about the durability or scalability of any potential intervention in the real world. More importantly, the “accuracy” of scientific truth claims is much more difficult to define than many scholars in this space acknowledge. Uncertainties associated with the nature of science, sociopolitical climates, and media systems introduce compounding error in assessments of claim accuracy. We, therefore, need a more nuanced understanding of misinformation and disinformation than those often present in discussions of the “infodemic.” Here, we propose a new framework for evaluating science-related truth claims and apply it to real-world examples. We conclude by discussing implications for research and action on (mis)information, given that distinguishing between true and false claims is not as easy as it is sometimes purported to be.

Advances in gene editing technologies for human, plant, and animal applications have led to calls from bench and social scientists, as well as a wide variety of societal stakeholders, for broad public engagement in the decision-making about these new technologies. Unfortunately, there is limited understanding among the groups calling for public engagement on CRISPR and other emerging technologies about 1) the goals of this engagement, 2) the modes of engagement and what we know from systematic social scientific evaluations about their effectiveness, and 3) how to connect the products of these engagement exercises to societal decision or policy making. Addressing all three areas, we systematize common goals, principles, and modalities of public engagement. We evaluate empirically the likely successes of various modalities. Finally, we outline three pathways forward that deserve close attention from the scientific community as we navigate the world of Life 2.0.

While confidence in science is high compared to other institutions, many Americans question whether scientists share their values, including religious ones. Narratives surrounding science and religion often focus on a conflict between the two, but religious people, especially, tend to see their religious views as in line with science. Using survey data of two probability samples representative of U.S. adults, we examine how religious views, including perceptions of conflict and harmony between science and religion, predict confidence in science. We found that while general perceptions of religion and science as conflicting negatively predicted confidence in science, when individuals think religion endorses protecting the planet, their confidence in science was higher. The results suggest that attitudes toward religion and science are more nuanced than is often acknowledged and that audiences can be confident in science while holding strong religious beliefs. Further, the work suggests that finding and highlighting common ground between religion and science is a potentially promising avenue for cultivating confidence in science.

Social media platforms play a central role in shaping today’s information ecosystem, yet access to both their internal data and even publicly visible content remains tightly restricted for academic researchers. This stands in sharp contrast to other industries, such as food and pharmaceuticals, where researchers can independently study product ingredients and effects. As a result, academic research on social media faces an unprecedented dependency on industry-controlled data, increasing the risk of bias and potentially distorting the evidence needed for effective regulation and policymaking. Drawing on research from other disciplines, we examine how industry influence operates and how researchers’ reliance on platforms for data may amplify industry influence. We identify four challenges in collaborations between researchers and social media platforms: restricted data access, selective funding, hard-to-detect influence, and institutional entanglements. These challenges risk undermining the independence and transparency of research in a field of growing societal relevance. Addressing these challenges requires policymakers to regulate data access, as illustrated by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates data access for vetted researchers while safeguarding user privacy. In addition, new independent funding mechanisms could help ensure that research agendas remain free from platform interests. In parallel, the social science community must adopt stronger ethical standards and invest in “research on research” to detect and mitigate potential biases in policy-relevant research. With a dual approach—policy reforms and critical academic debates—we can ensure that research on social media platforms serves the public interest rather than platform priorities.

The idea of faculty engaging in meaningful dialogue with different publics instead of simply communicating their research to interested audiences has gradually morphed from a novel concept to a mainstay within most parts of the academy. Given the wide variety of public engagement modalities, it may be unsurprising that we still lack a comprehensive and granular understanding of factors that influence faculty willingness to engage with public audiences. Those nuances are not always captured by quantitative surveys that rely on pre-determined categories to assess scholars’ willingness to engage. While closed-ended categories are useful to examine which factors influence the willingness to engage more than others, it is unlikely that pre-determined categories comprehensively represent the range of factors that undermine or encourage engagement, including perceptual influences, institutional barriers, and scholars’ lived experiences. To gain insight into these individual perspectives and lived experiences, we conducted focus group discussions with faculty members at a large midwestern land-grant university in the United States. Our findings provide context to previous studies of public engagement and suggest four themes for future research. These themes affirm the persistence of institutional barriers to engaging with the public, particularly the expectations in the promotion process for tenure-track faculty. However, we also find a perception that junior faculty and graduate students are challenging the status quo by introducing a new wave of attention to public engagement. This finding suggests a “trickle-up” effect through junior faculty and graduate students expecting institutional support for public engagement. Our findings highlight the need to consider how both top-down factors such as institutional expectations and bottom-up factors such as graduate student interest shape faculty members’ decisions to participate in public engagement activities.

Recently, concerns about misinformation have received much public attention as labels by the World Health Organization like “infodemic” for misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic show. While misinformation is neither new nor confined to social media, social media has expanded and accelerated the dissemination of misinformation. Misinformation can have enormous consequences if individuals change their beliefs or behavior based on it, and it is very difficult to correct once people believe it. This dissertation, therefore, focuses on preventing the spread of misinformation on social media in the first place by examining the evaluation of social media content. Specifically, this dissertation provides a user’s perspective on evaluating social media posts by answering the following research question: How do social media users evaluate the message credibility of posts? Building on misinformation research and on research on information processing and evaluation, more broadly, mostly on information coming from news sources, as well as on trust and credibility research, I answer the research question using a mixed-methods approach. Study 1 investigated the strategies that individuals employ on social media to determine the accuracy of posts in the context of news and non-news (i.e., posts from friends) in Germany with qualitative think-aloud interviews. The results extend strategies that the previous research on news has revealed individuals employ to cover messages from their friends. Based on some of the identified strategies and on research on the processes of trust and credibility evaluations, I have contributed to theory development on the process of evaluating messages by developing the source message interaction model (SMIM). The SMIM theorizes how the source and message interact in individuals’ evaluations and how this interaction might influence behavior as well as the next cycle of information evaluation. As a first step toward testing the SMIM, I tested parts of it in two quantitative online experiments in Germany and the U.S. Study 2 focused on the role of perceived trustworthiness of the source and attention to the message in credibility judgments by letting users evaluate the credibility of posts on measures against COVID-19 from some of their Facebook friends or from some news outlets. Study 3 tested the influence of closeness to Facebook friends on blind actions. Most relationships in the SMIM that were tested held as expected in both Germany and the U.S. Limitations of the studies and how they might explain why some relationships were not found are discussed. I discuss how future research can test the model further and end with scientific implications as well as practical implications that might help to counter the spread of misinformation.

Blaming a phenomenon like vaccine hesitancy on an uninformed public that lacks trust offers an easy and convenient culprit for a complex problem, without exploring deeper issues such as where public messengers have fallen short in communicating about COVID-19 risks, the importance of physical distancing or masks, and the value of vaccines. These trust fallacy narratives pose dangers of their own. Intuiting pathologies and remedies for public behavior can lead to misalloeated resources and misdirected policies. Trust fallacy narratives can also politicize science in ways that inhibit efforts to preserve the very trust that scientists and other authority figures hope to maintain. Here, Krause discusses the scientists' search for public pathologies.

The idea of faculty engaging in meaningful dialogue with different publics instead of simply communicating their research to interested audiences has gradually morphed from a novel concept to a mainstay within most parts of the academy. Given the wide variety of public engagement modalities, it may be unsurprising that we still lack a comprehensive and granular understanding of factors that influence faculty willingness to engage with public audiences. Those nuances are not always captured by quantitative surveys that rely on pre-determined categories to assess scholars' willingness to engage. While closed-ended categories are useful to examine which factors influence the willingness to engage more than others, it is unlikely that pre-determined categories comprehensively represent the range of factors that undermine or encourage engagement, including perceptual influences, institutional barriers, and scholars' lived experiences. To gain insight into these individual perspectives and lived experiences, we conducted focus group discussions with faculty members at a large midwestern land-grant university in the United States. Our findings provide context to previous studies of public engagement and suggest four themes for future research. These themes affirm the persistence of institutional barriers to engaging with the public, particularly the expectations in the promotion process for tenure-track faculty. However, we also find a perception that junior faculty and graduate students are challenging the status quo by introducing a new wave of attention to public engagement. This finding suggests a \"trickle-up\" effect through junior faculty and graduate students expecting institutional support for public engagement. Our findings highlight the need to consider how both top-down factors such as institutional expectations and bottom-up factors such as graduate student interest shape faculty members' decisions to participate in public engagement activities.