SensipoV – Raising awareness of political bias
How well do people recognise their own and others' political bias when dealing with scientific evidence – and can raising awareness of it reduce susceptibility to misinformation?
In an interdisciplinary research project, we study individual political bias awareness when dealing with scientific evidence on socio-scientific issues, understood as a metacognitive belief. Metacognitive beliefs are subjective assumptions about how one’s own thinking and the thinking of others works – “thinking about thinking”. Political bias awareness in this sense describes how individuals think about their own political bias and the political bias of others.
By political bias we mean the phenomenon that scientific evidence is selected, interpreted and judged for its credibility against the background of political convictions. Political bias poses a particular challenge for science communication, as it fosters science denial on the one hand and susceptibility to misinformation on the other.
So far, however, we know very little about the extent to which
- people accurately assess their own and others’ political bias,
- awareness of one’s own bias can be changed through feedback, and
- raising awareness of political bias can reduce susceptibility to misinformation, conspiracy narratives and science denial.
Overall, the project aims to make political bias awareness measurable and to empirically examine the relationship between political bias awareness and politically biased processing of scientific evidence in the context of socio-scientific issues.