Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Global Warnings: The Effect of Scientific Elite Conflict on Public Opinion

准确、全面地向公众传递科学信息是媒体最重要、也是最困难的责任之一。公众支持或反对具有较大科学成分的政策（例如环境政策），可能取决于新闻报道问题和解决办法的方式。 这项博士研究调查了科学家通过媒体在塑造公众对全球气候变化测试问题的态度方面可能产生的影响。本研究采用媒体报道的定量分析和实验相结合的方法，探讨了新闻中科学共识或分歧的框架如何影响普通公民的意见。特别是，它研究了媒体报道中所描述的科学一致性水平、政治线索的存在以及科学证据的强度如何影响认知信息处理，许多研究表明，新闻媒体经常将相反的专家意见配对，即使在科学界存在压倒性的一致意见。公民对这种相互矛盾的信息的反应相对来说是未经检验的，因此也就知之甚少。 这项研究将调查公民如何理解新闻中的科学分歧，同时也将扩大关于精英影响力的文献，以更充分地包括科学家。核心预测是，科学分歧实际上可能会阻碍公民仔细思考科学证据，导致他们使用内容线索作为捷径来确定他们对问题的看法。

Conveying scientific information to the public accurately and comprehensively is one of the media's most important, yet difficult, responsibilities. Public support for, or opposition to, policies with a relatively large scientific component (e.g. environmental policies) may hinge upon the way problems and solutions are presented in the news. This doctoral research investigates the influence that scientists, via the media, may have in shaping public attitudes for the test issue of global climate change. Using both quantitative analyses of media coverage and experiments, this research explores how the framing of scientific consensus or disagreement in the news affects lay citizens' opinions. In particular, it examines how varying the depicted level of scientific agreement, presence of political cues, and strength of scientific evidence in media coverage affects cognitive message processing.Numerous studies have documented that the news media routinely pair opposing expert opinions, even when overwhelming agreement about a problem exists in the scientific community. How citizens react to this conflicting information is relatively unexamined and thus poorly understood. This research will investigate how citizens make sense of scientific disagreement in the news, while also expanding the literature on elite influence to more fully include scientists. The central prediction is that scientific disagreement may actually discourage citizens from thinking carefully about scientific evidence, leading them to use content cues as shortcuts to determine their opinions about issues.