Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review

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Abstract

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information.

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Most cited references 238

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Proposed model of the relationship of risk information seeking and processing to the development of preventive behaviors.

R. J. Griffin, S Dunwoody, K. Neuwirth (1999)

We articulate a model that focuses on characteristics of individuals that might predispose them to seek and process information about health in different ways. Specifically, the model proposes that seven factors-(1) individual characteristics, (2) perceived hazard characteristics, (3) affective response to the risk, (4) felt social pressures to possess relevant information, (5) information sufficiency, (6) one's personal capacity to learn, (7) beliefs about the usefulness of information in various channels-will influence the extent to which a person will seek out this risk information in both routine and nonroutine channels and the extent to which he or she will spend time and effort analyzing the risk information critically. By adapting and synthesizing aspects of Eagly and Chaiken's Heuristic-Systematic Model and Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, we also expect that people who engage in more effortful information seeking and processing are more likely to develop risk-related cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors that are more stable (i.e., less changeable or volatile) over time. Since most forms of health information campaigns attempt to get people to adopt habitual or lifestyle changes, factors leading to the stability or volatility of those behavioral changes are essential concerns. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.

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Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips.

Jenny Liu, Duncan Sparrow, M Wegner (2011)

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can "Google" the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

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Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news

Dietram Scheufele, Nicole M. Krause (2019)

Concerns about public misinformation in the United States—ranging from politics to science—are growing. Here, we provide an overview of how and why citizens become (and sometimes remain) misinformed about science. Our discussion focuses specifically on misinformation among individual citizens. However, it is impossible to understand individual information processing and acceptance without taking into account social networks, information ecologies, and other macro-level variables that provide important social context. Specifically, we show how being misinformed is a function of a person’s ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increase the chances of citizens to be exposed to correct(ive) information. We conclude by discussing a number of research areas—some of which echo themes of the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Communicating Science Effectively report—that will be particularly important for our future understanding of misinformation, specifically a systems approach to the problem of misinformation, the need for more systematic analyses of science communication in new media environments, and a (re)focusing on traditionally underserved audiences.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Friederike Hendriks: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/881731/overview

Mark Felton: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/1048299/overview

Kalypso Iordanou: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/962181/overview

Regina Jucks: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/342171/overview

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Front Psychol

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Front Psychol

Journal ID (publisher-id): Front. Psychol.

Title: Frontiers in Psychology

Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A.

ISSN (Electronic): 1664-1078

Publication date (Electronic): 08 December 2020

Publication date Collection: 2020

Volume: 11

Electronic Location Identifier: 572744

Affiliations

[1] ¹Institute for Psychology in Education and Instruction, Department of Psychology and Sport Studies, University of Münster , Münster, Germany

[2] ²Institute of Educational Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Einstein Center Digital Future , Berlin, Germany

[3] ³Department of Teacher Education, Lurie College of Education, San Jose State University , San Jose, CA, United States

[4] ⁴School of Sciences, University of Central Lancashire , Larnaka, Cyprus

Author notes

Edited by: Patricia A. Alexander, University of Maryland, United States

Reviewed by: Stefan Fries, Bielefeld University, Germany; Byeong-Young Cho, Hanyang University, South Korea

*Correspondence: Friederike Hendriks f.hendriks@ 123456uni-muenster.de

This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Article

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.572744

PMC ID: 7759725

SO-VID: 6d62487b-c2b0-4d57-ab0a-1462131a17af

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

History

Date received : 15 June 2020

Date accepted : 16 November 2020

Page count

Figures: 1, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 241, Pages: 21, Words: 19587

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Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review

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Climate Change: Open Access

Most cited references 238

Proposed model of the relationship of risk information seeking and processing to the development of preventive behaviors.

Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips.

Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news

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