The Public's Bounded Understanding of Science

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue Understanding the Public Understanding of Science: Psychological Approaches discusses some of the challenges people face in understanding science. We focus on people's inevitably bounded understanding of science topics; research must address how people make decisions in science domains such as health and medicine without having the deep and extensive understanding that is characteristic of domain experts. The articles reflect two broad streams of research on the public understanding of science—the learning orientation that seeks to improve understanding through better instruction and the communications orientation that focuses on attitudes about science and trust in scientists. Challenges to understanding science include determining the relevance of information, the tentativeness of scientific truth, distinguishing between scientific and nonscientific issues, and determining what is true and what is false. Studying the public understanding of science can potentially contribute to psychological theories of thinking and reasoning in modern societies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The conference that was the spring board for this special issue was held in 2011 in New York and was organized by Rainer Bromme and Susan R. Goldman, together with M. Ann Britt, Dorothe Kienhues and William Sandoval. Thanks to Clark Chinn, Dorothe Kienhues, Lisa Scharrer and Marc Stadtler for helpful comments on this paper.

FUNDING

The conference was jointly funded by the German Science Foundation, DFG (BR 1126/5-1), the U. S. National Science Foundation (Grant #1065967). Preparation of this article was supported, in part, by these grants as well as a U. S. Department of Education grant (Grant #R305F100007) to University of Illinois at Chicago. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the funding agencies.

Notes

¹ The topic of this special issue is often called “Public Understanding of Science.” We use capitals and the abbreviation PUS and PES when referring to endeavors/campaigns for the improvement of understanding or accepting science. When using these terms without capitals we refer to the understanding of science held by the public (i.e., by laypeople) as a research topic for the Social Sciences.

² We are aware that there are interesting cases in which learning researchers focus deliberately on PUS and PET, for example, research on the “big” public debates about socio-scientific issues like climate change (see Sinatra, Kienhues, & Hofer, this issue).

³ Cummings (2014) emphasized that reasoning strategies which defer to the authority of others are “informal fallacies,” albeit she underlines the importance of such strategies for the public understanding of science. In contrast, Chinn et al. (2011) argued that deference to others and thereby trust matters not only in the context of the public understanding of science but also within science. Several philosophers of science have argued that the work of scientists is based on mutual trust (Origgi, 2004).

⁴ This special issue encompasses not only different fields within psychology and communication science but also an international perspective. All contributions have a binational authorship, from the United States and from Germany. The contributors from Germany are all involved in a research program called “Science and the General Public: Understanding Fragile and Conflicting Scientific Evidence,” including about 16 projects from psychology, communication science, educational research, and the sociology of science (http://www.scienceandthepublic.de). The articles evolved from a conference between researchers involved in the German program and a group of researchers in the United States who are exploring similar issues of scientific literacy and public understanding and engagement with science.