Science and Ethics of "Curing" Misinformation.

A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to "cure" public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences' agency over what to do with it.

Collateral damage from debunking mRNA vaccine misinformation.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has been understandably eager to combat misinformation about issues such as vaccine safety. In highly polarized information environments, however, even well-intentioned messages have the potential to produce adverse effects. In this study, we connect different disciplinary strands of social science to derive and experimentally test the novel hypothesis that although particular efforts to debunk misinformation about mRNA vaccines will reduce relevant misperceptions about that technology, these correctives will harm attitudes toward other types of vaccines. We refer to this as the "collateral damage hypothesis." Our study specifically examines a corrective message stating that "mRNA vaccines do not contain live virus," and our results offer some support for our hypothesis, with the corrective triggering increased societal risk perceptions of live vaccines. We also find that the effect is, predictably, most evident among those whose vaccine acceptance is low. Building on the theoretical grounding we outline, we test a "damage control" adjustment to the corrective message and present evidence supporting that it mitigates the collateral damage.

Believing and sharing misinformation, fact-checks, and accurate information on social media: The role of anxiety during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic went hand in hand with what some have called a "(mis)infodemic" about the virus on social media. Drawing on partisan motivated reasoning and partisan selective sharing, this study examines the influence of political viewpoints, anxiety, and the interactions of the two on believing and willingness to share false, corrective, and accurate claims about COVID-19 on social media. A large-scale 2 (emotion: anxiety vs relaxation) × 2 (slant of news outlet: MSNBC vs Fox News) experimental design with 719 US participants shows that anxiety is a driving factor in belief in and willingness to share claims of any type. Especially for Republicans, a state of heightened anxiety leads them to believe and share more claims. Our findings expand research on partisan motivated reasoning and selective sharing in online settings, and enhance the understanding of how anxiety shapes individuals' processing of risk-related claims in issue contexts with high uncertainty.

Placing "trust" in science: The urban-rural divide and Americans' feelings of warmth toward scientists.

Long-standing discussions of the so-called urban-rural divide in the United States have uncovered meaningful differences between urbanites and rural residents, but much of this work has focused on political attitudes. However, there is reason to believe that geographic divides also influence Americans' science attitudes, including, for example, positive affect toward scientists and levels of trust in them. Unfortunately, existing work has not clearly ruled out confounding factors such as religiosity, political views, media habits, and conspiracism. This brief article addresses this problem by drawing on survey data from 2016 to test the hypothesis that rural residency will be associated with colder feelings toward the scientific community, even with controls in place. The results offer support for this expectation. These findings lend support to recent arguments that rural Americans' science attitudes are influenced by factors that go beyond demographics, conspiracism, political polarization, differences of religiosity, and (partisan) media consumption.

What we know about effective public engagement on CRISPR and beyond.

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.

Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news.

Concerns about public misinformation in the United States-ranging from politics to science-are growing. Here, we provide an overview of how and why citizens become (and sometimes remain) misinformed about science. Our discussion focuses specifically on misinformation among individual citizens. However, it is impossible to understand individual information processing and acceptance without taking into account social networks, information ecologies, and other macro-level variables that provide important social context. Specifically, we show how being misinformed is a function of a person's ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increase the chances of citizens to be exposed to correct(ive) information. We conclude by discussing a number of research areas-some of which echo themes of the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Communicating Science Effectively report-that will be particularly important for our future understanding of misinformation, specifically a systems approach to the problem of misinformation, the need for more systematic analyses of science communication in new media environments, and a (re)focusing on traditionally underserved audiences.