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但也是最困难的职责之一。公众对科学成分相对较多的政策（如环境政策）的支持或反对可能取决于新闻中提出问题和解决方案的方式。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这一重大问题的态度方面可能产生的影响。通过对媒体报道的定量分析和实验，本研究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不同程度的科学共识、政治线索的存在和科学证据的强度是如何影响认知信息处理的。大量研究已经证明，新闻媒体经常将相反的专家意见配对，即使在科学界对一个问题存在压倒性的一致意见时也是如此。公民对这些相互矛盾的信息的反应相对来说没有经过检验，因此很难理解。这项研究将调查公民如何理解新闻中的科学分歧，同时也将精英影响的文献扩大到更充分地包括科学家。核心预测是，科学上的分歧实际上可能会阻碍公民仔细思考科学证据，导致他们把内容线索作为决定自己对问题看法的捷径。

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.