Standard Research: Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science

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This award supports a research project that studies how changing social networks influence public belief about science; it will focus specifically on how false beliefs can persist and spread even in evidence-rich environments, and how these beliefs in turn feed back into collective decision-making through democratic institutions. The results of this project will provide a better understanding of the drivers that shape public belief about matters of scientific facts and how those influences interact with democratic institutions. The results will be relevant to academics across the social sciences and humanities, and they will have immediate social significance particularly to policy makers, including those working in the government and those shaping social media sites. The PIs also have plans to develop an intervention that may serve to improve public uptake of data through social media, to disseminate their results to general audiences, and to develop new programs to mentor graduate and undergraduate students on producing their own public philosophy. In addition, they will develop an integrative teaching plan that incorporates their research outcomes into teaching and mentoring at the undergraduate and graduate levels, with an emphasis on mentoring members of underrepresented minorities in philosophy.The proposed research will explore a cluster of topics related to the social dynamics of false belief and the public understanding of science in democratic societies. The PIs will explore these issues from the perspectives of philosophy of science and social epistemology, drawing on formal tools developed by economists, biologists, and philosophers, including epistemic network models and agent-based modeling techniques. They will use these methods to address several questions concerning how journalistic practices bear on public understanding of science, the role of influencers (such as propagandists from foreign governments, domestic political groups, and industry) in shaping the public understanding of science, how social dynamics interact with individual cognitive biases to shape belief and consensus, and how consensus over scientific belief emerge among the public and policy makers. The results of this research will be published in professional journals in philosophy of science and in social epistemology. The project dovetails with related projects from other disciplines including economics, political science, psychology, and sociology; the results of this project should be of substantial interest to researchers in those disciplines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.