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The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:
who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least
The paper's key finding is that:
the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.
Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:
the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.
It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as
Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
Where would you like to see this study done next?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:13PM (1 child)
Shouldn't everyone know less than they think by virtue of it being highly likely that some of the information you have is wrong?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:37PM
That depends, of course, on how you measure "how much you think you know" and the compared "how much you know".
For example, the internet favorite Dunning-Kruger experiment asked people to place their understanding of 4 subjects as a percentile score, compared to their fellows in the room taking the same tests. People in the bottom 3 quartiles of actual performance almost always overestimated their knowledge of a subject area(proportionally overestimating more if they knew less), whereas the the top quartile was an inflection point where people started to underestimate their own performance and overestimate their peers.
In that sense, you could very much argue that the people who understood those 4 subject areas knew more than they thought they did, compared to other people.
So it may seem logical to say that, but it's an intuition that doesn't hold for all frames of analysis