Expertise is a prerequisite for communicator credibility, entailing the knowledge and ability to be accurate. Trust also is essential to communicator credibility. Audiences view trustworthiness as the motivation to be truthful. Identifying whom to trust follows systematic principles. People decide quickly another’s apparent intent: Who is friend or foe, on their side or not, or a cooperator or competitor. Those seemingly on their side are deemed warm (friendly, trustworthy). People then decide whether the other is competent to enact those intents. Perception of scientists, like other social perceptions, involves inferring both their apparent intent (warmth) and capability (competence). To illustrate, we polled adults online about typical American jobs, rated as American society views them, on warmth and competence dimensions, as well as relevant emotions. Ambivalently perceived high-competence but low-warmth, “envied” professions included lawyers, chief executive officers, engineers, accountants, scientists,…

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…

Communication is a cooperative endeavor that goes well beyond decoding sentences’ literal meaning. Listeners actively construe the meaning of utterances from bo...

Какие социальные факторы влияют на распространение и восприятие научной информации? Какие режимы медиатизации науки существуют сегодня в России? Как это связано с исследованиями доверия к научному знанию периода холодной войны и какие исторические параллели в философских спорах «просветителей» и «догматиков» раннего Нового времени здесь обнаруживаются?

Виктор Вахштайн — кандидат социологических наук, профессор, декан факультета социальных наук МВШСЭН, главный редактор журнала «Социология власти»

Слёт просветителей — ежегодное событие о самом важном и новом, что происходит в мире профессиональных популяризаторов науки. Организатор Слёта просветителей — фонд «Эволюция», поддерживающий перевод и издание научно-популярных книг, работу научных школ и борьбу с лженаукой, организует научные события в регионах, обучает начинающих лекторов и развивает просветительское сообщество.

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http://evolutionfund.ru
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