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

该奖项支持一个研究项目，该项目研究不断变化的社交网络如何影响公众对科学的信念；它将专门关注错误信念如何在证据丰富的环境中持续存在和传播，以及这些信念如何反过来通过民主机构反馈到集体决策中。该项目的成果将使人们更好地了解形成公众对科学事实问题的信念的驱动因素，以及这些影响如何与民主机构相互作用。这些结果将与社会科学和人文学科的学者相关，并将具有直接的社会意义，特别是对政策制定者，包括那些在政府工作的人和那些塑造社交媒体网站的人。私人投资机构还计划开发一种干预措施，可能有助于改善公众通过社交媒体获取数据的情况，向普通受众传播他们的结果，并制定新的方案，指导研究生和本科生产生自己的公共哲学。此外，他们将制定一项综合教学计划，将他们的研究成果纳入本科生和研究生层面的教学和指导，重点是指导在哲学上代表不足的少数群体成员。拟议的研究将探索一系列与民主社会中错误信念的社会动态和公众对科学的理解有关的主题。PIS将从科学哲学和社会认识论的角度探讨这些问题，借鉴经济学家、生物学家和哲学家开发的正式工具，包括认知网络模型和基于代理的建模技术。他们将使用这些方法来解决以下几个问题：新闻实践如何影响公众对科学的理解；影响者(如来自外国政府、国内政治团体和行业的宣传人员)在塑造公众对科学的理解方面的作用；社会动态如何与个人认知偏差相互作用以形成信念和共识；以及公众和政策制定者如何就科学信仰达成共识。这项研究的结果将发表在科学哲学和社会认识论的专业期刊上。该项目与经济学、政治学、心理学和社会学等其他学科的相关项目相吻合；该项目的结果应该引起这些学科的研究人员的极大兴趣。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.