Rainer Bromme

University of Münster | WWU · Institute for Psychology

Previous research has shown that sophisticated epistemological beliefs exert a positive influence on students' learning strategies and learning outcomes. This gives a clear educational relevance to studies on the development of methods for promoting a change in epistemological beliefs and making them more sophisticated. To investigate the potential...

Outreach activities might facilitate researchers’ boundary crossing not only between science and society but also between disciplines. This offers opportunities for learning and reflection on the individual and the organizational level. We questioned N = 75 researchers of two interdisciplinary research programs. Researchers reported positive effect...

Zusammenfassung Informiertes Vertrauen in Wissenschaft ist nötig, damit die ‚Schnittstellen‘ für den Wissensfluss zwischen dem Alltagsverständnis der Bürger:innen über die Pandemie und dem sich dynamisch entwickelnden Wissensstand der Wissenschaften funktionieren. Das ist die Kernthese dieses Beitrags. Ohne Wissenschaft kann die COVID-19 Pandemie w...

The chapter provides a conceptual clarification of the concept 'public trust in science'. Our starting point is the model of trust formulated by Mayer, Davis, and Schoormann (1995), which has been widely used in trust research since then. Here, it is now specified for the context of citizens' encounter with science, by using the example of the COVI...

Researchers, policy makers and science communicators have become increasingly been interested in factors that affect public’s trust in science. Recently, one such potentially important driving factor has emerged, the COVID-19 pandemic. Have trust in science and other science-related beliefs changed in Germany from before to during the pandemic? To...

Scientists (and science as a whole) provide evidence and advice for societal problem solving and collective decision-making. For this advice to be heard, the public must be willing to trust science, where “trust” means that one can confidently expect science to provide reliable knowledge and evidence, even if one’s understanding of science is bound...

Zusammenfassung Wissenschaftspropädeutik gehört zu den drei zentralen Bildungszielen der gymnasialen Oberstufe. Aufgrund eines Mangels an geeigneten Untersuchungsinstrumenten, gibt es jedoch kaum Studien zur Erreichung dieses Bildungsziels oder seines Einflusses auf den Werdegang junger Menschen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die theoretischen Ans...

Usually, non-experts do not possess sufficient deep-level knowledge to make fully informed evaluations of scientific claims. Instead, they depend on pertinent experts for support. However, previous research has shown that the easiness by which textual information on a scientific issue can be understood seduces non-experts into overlooking their eva...

In an increasingly interconnected world, many people handle large parts of their communication online, often via social networking sites (SNS). In contrast to face-to-face communication, messages on SNS are accessible by potentially unknown and large audiences. However, it is an open question what users actually perceive as a large audience, or els...

Digital media has become a part of daily life and a means of support for various situations. In this context, the market for apps that deliver counselling and mental health content is growing rapidly, promising accessible solutions for psychological issues. However, the major benefit of digital counselling programs, namely easy access to potentiall...

Scientific debates are, in an epistemological sense, argumentative approaches aimed at coming to the most appropriate conclusion. However, as these debates sometimes involve interpersonal rather than content-driven attacks (e.g., an argument between scientific experts might involve personal dislike), the following question arises: How do such commu...

Science’s role in society is being threatened, as misinterpretation and denial of scientific evidence and the rejection or ignorance of scientific expertise are gaining prominence. This endangered role of science in society is characteristic of post-truthism. To deconstruct this process, we analyze how three potential gateways allow people to disco...

In public disputes, stakeholders sometimes misrepresent statistics or other types of scientific evidence to support their claims. One of the reasons this is problematic is that citizens often do not have the motivation nor the cognitive skills to accurately judge the meaning of statistics and thus run the risk of being misinformed. This study repor...

Es gibt einen Zusammenhang zwischen der Rationalität von öffentlichen Diskursen zu gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen (zum Beispiel des Klimawandels) und der Akzeptanz der Leistungsfähigkeit der Wissenschaft. Diese Leistungsfähigkeit der Wissenschaft betrifft die Gestaltung technologischer und sozialer Artefakte und Prozesse und das öffentliche V...

In diesem Kapitel geht es um eine psychologische Perspektive auf Vertrauen in Wissenschaft. Deshalb liegt der Schwerpunkt auf der individuellen Auseinandersetzung von Bürger*innen mit wissenschaftlichen Geltungsbehauptungen. Gleichwohl bedarf auch eine solche psychologische Perspektive einer Vergegenwärtigung der gesellschaftlichen und der epistemi...

Science and rationality are strongly linked. Therefore, the public understanding of science (PUS) is crucial for rationality as an everyday mode of reasoning. However, the knowledge provided by science is distinct from everyday thinking to a large degree and, at least non-scientists’ understanding of it is limited. This chapter will provide an over...

In methodological and practical debates about replications in science, it is (often implicitly) assumed that replications will affect public trust in science. In this preregistered experiment (N = 484), we varied (a) whether a replication attempt was successful or not and (b) whether the replication was authored by the same, or another lab. Results...

The science on controversial topics is often heatedly discussed on social media, a potential problem for social-media-based science communicators. Therefore, two exploratory studies were performed to investigate the effects of science-critical user comments attacking Facebook posts containing scientific claims. The claims were about one of four con...

The authors examined how information relevance affects readers’ understanding of conflicting information in multiple documents and how relevance affects the processing of conflicting information on a moment‐by‐moment level. Sixty‐four undergraduate students read a set of documents about a medical topic containing three intertextual conflicts addres...

Although nonexperts usually lack sufficient topic knowledge and experience, they can be “seduced” into relying on their direct evaluation of scientific content, particularly when encountering information that is relatively easy to comprehend. Two experimental studies tested whether this easiness effect can be prevented if readers can lean on evalua...

Scientific claims that are connected to ethical concerns are frequently brought forward by communicators who are not ethically neutral. This study investigated how far recipients’ evaluation of such claims is guided by vigilance toward a potential ethical source bias rather than their own ethical bias. 110 individuals opposed to capital punishment...

Many social science-based interventions entail the transfer of evidence-based knowledge to the “target population,” because the acquisition and the acceptance of that knowledge are necessary for the intended improvement of behavior or development. Furthermore, the application of a certain prevention program is often legitimated by a reference to sc...

Zusammenfassung. Laien treffen heute im Internet auf eine besonders große Vielfalt an Wissenschaftsinformationen. Wer hiervon profitieren will, muss Informationen auswählen, Verknüpfungen zwischen verschiedenen, oftmals konfligierenden Aussagen herstellen und deren Gültigkeit kritisch überprüfen. Anhand der Ergebnisse aus zwei Projekten aus dem SPP...

The present study examined the role of conflict topics and individual differences in epistemic perspectives (absolutism, multiplism, and evaluativism) in students' explanations of expert conflicts. University students (N = 184) completed an epistemic thinking assessment and a conflict explanation assessment regarding two controversies in biology an...

Users of Social Networking Sites have the difficulty to regulate their privacy although they have limited knowledge about their audiences. We argue that in the absence of such knowledge, people utilize an overload heuristic. Users’ own experiences with information overload may lead them to perceive others’ messages as redundant noise. They might th...

This paper discusses opportunities as well as constraints of evidence based policy and evidence based practice in education. Expectations held by different strands of the public (policy makers, teachers, parents) are discussed as constraint of the underlying educational research. Furthermore, such expectations constrain the communication between re...

Due to the increasing educational use of the Internet, children in elementary school need to critically evaluate source information to judge the trustworthiness of information. Studies with adult readers show that sourcing prompts and mutually exclusive claims in reading materials promote the use of source information. However, little is known abou...

Science popularization fulfills the important task of making scientific knowledge understandable and accessible for the lay public. However, the simplification of information required to achieve this accessibility may lead to the risk of audiences relying overly strongly on their own epistemic capabilities when making judgments about scientific cla...

Laypeople need to trust experts, because they lack sufficient background knowledge to handle scientific evidence. This study investigates if a science blogger’s expertise, integrity, and benevolence are affected by an admission of a study’s flaw in contrast to a critique by another scientist. Results (N = 90) showed that ascriptions of expertise we...

When laypeople read controversial scientific information in order to make a personally relevant decision, information on the source is a valuable resource with which to evaluate multiple, competing claims. Due to their bounded understanding, laypeople rely on the expertise of others and need to identify whether sources are credible. The present stu...

In dem Beitrag geht es um Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer evidenz basierten Bildungspolitik und evidenzbasierten pädagogischen Handelns. Die Erwartungen der unterschiedlichen Öffentlichkeiten (Bildungsadministration, Lehrkräfte, Eltern) an die Wissen schaft (Bildungsforschung) sind dabei eine Rahmenbedingung der Erkenntnisgewinnung und zugleich der...

On the Internet, laypeople can access a great variety of scientific information. To benefit from the wealth of information, laypeople need to select information, integrate information within and across documents, and critically judge the validity of competing knowledge claims. Based on the findings of two projects involved in the Special Priority P...

Wer könnte es wissen? Erklären beeinflusst die Einschätzung unseres eigenen Wissens sowie unsere Einschätzung des Wissens von Experten Zusammenfassung. Kinder und Erwachsene überschätzen oftmals ihr eigenes Verständnis komplexer, kausaler Sachverhalte. Werden sie jedoch aufgefordert, die Mechanismen zu erklären, die den Sachverhalten zugrunde liege...

The experimental studies presented here investigated whether discussing ethical implications of preliminary scientific results in a science blog would impact blog readers’ perception of the responsible scientist blogger’s epistemic trustworthiness (on the dimensions expertise, integrity, and benevolence). They also investigated whether it made a di...

We present an empirical investigation of a classroom training fostering vocational students’ consideration of source information when deciding about science-based controversies. The training was specifically aimed at raising students’ awareness of the division of cognitive labor and the resulting need to take a source’s competence into account when...

When risky technologies are debated in the media or when cases of scientific misconduct are made public, inevitable discussions arise about public loss of trust in science. However, trust in science reaches far beyond such incidents: trust is of much more fundamental importance for science. Clearly, trust is pivotal in doing science, since research...

Because modern societies are built on elaborate divisions of cognitive labor, individuals remain laypersons in most knowledge domains. Hence, they have to rely on others' expertise when deciding on many science-related issues in private and public life. Even children already locate and discern expertise in the minds of others (e.g., Danovitch & Kei...

In der psychologischen Expertiseforschung gibt es zwei Auffassungen dazu, was ein ‚Experte' ist: Nach der einen Definition ist ein Experte ein Spitzenkönner in seiner Domäne, und es ist ein Zeitraum von mindestens zehn Jahren intensivster Beschäftigung und Übung erforderlich, um den Expertenstatus zu erreichen (Feltovich; Prietula & Ericsson 2006)....

Given their lack of background knowledge, laypeople require expert help when dealing with scientific information. To decide whose help is dependable, laypeople must judge an expert's epistemic trustworthiness in terms of competence, adherence to scientific standards, and good intentions. Online, this may be difficult due to the often limited and so...

In order to reap the social gratifications of Online Social Networks (OSNs), users often disclose self-related information, making them potentially vulnerable to their online audiences. We give a brief overview of our theoretical ideas and empirical research about additional cognitive and metacognitive factors relevant for the perception of risk wh...

Dieser Beitrag berichtet über Mathematikangst von angehenden Lehrkräften und stellt ein neu entwickeltes Inventar zur Messung von Mathematikangst (MA-KON) vor, mit dem diese unter Berücksichtigung von verschiedenen Bearbeitungssituationen, Aufgabenschwierigkeiten und Inhaltsbereichen unterschieden werden kann. Mit Daten von 209 Studierenden (angehe...

When making personally relevant decisions (e.g. on health-related issues), laypersons have to deal increasingly with science-based knowledge claims that are frequently not only inconsistent if not contradictory but also beyond their own everyday understanding. Nevertheless, they need to reason about these issues. The present interview study investi...

Scientific texts are a genre in which adherence to specific discourse conventions allows for conclusions on the scientific integrity of the information and thus on its validity. This study examines whether genre-typical features of scientific discourse influence how laypeople handle conflicting science-based knowledge claims. In two experiments wit...

In order to build and maintain social capital in their Online Social Networks, users need to disclose personal information, a behavior that at the same time leads to a lower level of privacy. In this conceptual paper, we offer a new theoretical perspective on the question of why people might regulate their privacy boundaries inadequately when commu...

In this empirical paper we investigate how much users of Online Social Networks know about their self-disclosures. We conducted standardized interviews in which we asked students in what Facebook profile categories they had disclosed information and to which audience they had made each piece of information visible. Additionally we collected ratings...

Zusammenfassung: In dem Beitrag geht es um die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer evidenz-basierten Bildungspolitik und evidenzbasierten pädagogischen Handelns. Die Erwartungen der unterschiedlichen Öffentlichkeiten (Bildungsadministration, Lehrkräfte, Eltern) an die Wissen-schaft (Bildungsforschung) sind dabei eine Rahmenbedingung der Erkenntnisgewin...

Zusammenfassung: In dem Beitrag geht es um die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer evidenz-basierten Bildungspolitik und evidenzbasierten pädagogischen Handelns. Die Erwartungen der unterschiedlichen Öffentlichkeiten (Bildungsadministration, Lehrkräfte, Eltern) an die Wissen-schaft (Bildungsforschung) sind dabei eine Rahmenbedingung der Erkenntnisgewin...

Research shows that laypeople rely more on their capabilities to make decisions about science-based knowledge claims after reading comprehensible compared with less comprehensible topic information. This can be problematic, because complex science-based issues usually cannot be understood fully without experts' further advice. The present study inv...

Responding to misconceptions is an essential part of adaptive instruction. Nevertheless, research on both tutoring and expert–layperson communication has identified at least two problems that online counselors share with both face-to-face and online tutors. First, they generally do not notice when laypersons’ understanding differs from correct cont...

Ausgangspunkt dieses Sonderheftes der Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft ist ein Gutachten, das die Herausgeber (gemeinsam mit M. Jaeger) für das BMBF erstellt haben und das – etwas überarbeitet-den Auftakt dieses Bandes bildet. Es geht darin um den Zusammenhang zwischen evidenzbasierter Bildungspolitik sowie Bildungspraxis und der Kommunikatio...

In dem Beitrag geht es um die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer evidenzbasierten Bildungspolitik und evidenzbasierten pädagogischen Handelns. Die Erwartungen der unterschiedlichen Öffentlichkeiten (Bildungsadministration, Lehrkräfte, Eltern) an die Wissenschaft (Bildungsforschung) sind dabei eine Rahmenbedingung der Erkenntnisgewinnung und zugleich d...

This introduction to the special issue Understanding the Public Understanding of Science: Psychological Approaches discusses some of the challenges people face in understanding science. We focus on people's inevitably bounded understanding of science topics; research must address how people make decisions in science domains such as health and medic...

Accurate task perception is an important prerequisite for self-regulated learning. The present study explores if 12th-grade high school students (N=131) adapt their task definitions, goals and plans to task complexity when confronted with six differently complex tasks and if this process is related to their epistemic beliefs. Results indicate that...

Understanding conflicts between sources is an inherent part of science text comprehension. We examined whether readers' memories for conflicts and their situational interpretation of conflicts would be affected by reading goals and lexical cue phrases that signal rhetorical relationships. To this end, 198 undergraduates read multiple documents on a...

Epistemological beliefs are usually defined as beliefs about knowledge and knowing. One of the most widely used framework within educational psychology (Buehl & Alexander, 2001; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997), among others widely used (Niessen, Vermunt, Abma, Widdershoven, & van der Vleuten, 2004), comprises four identifiable and more or less interrelated...

Interdisciplinary approaches to identifying, understanding, and remediating people's reliance on inaccurate information that they should know to be wrong. Our lives revolve around the acquisition of information. Sometimes the information we acquire—from other people, from books, or from the media—is wrong. Studies show that people rely on such misi...

Accessing a set of documents on a scientific topic has become a widespread activity both in school and in informal learning. Often, the Internet, offering a wide variety of unfiltered information, is the primary source individuals turn to. However, reading multiple documents online can be a challenging cognitive endeavor requiring readers to locate...

Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of comprehensibi...

Past research has shown that readers often fail to notice conflicts in text. In our present study we investigated whether accessing information from multiple documents instead of a single document might alleviate this problem by motivating readers to integrate information. We further tested whether this effect would be moderated by source expertise...

In this chapter we raise two important issues regarding the metacognitive self-regulation of learning with technologies: First, adaptation to the external context is a core component of self-regulated learning. Empirical research regarding task complexity and text complexity – two exemplary external conditions – shows that learners systematically a...

Tutors often fail to address learners' misconceptions. Although this may indicate a failure to grasp these misconceptions, it may simply be due to a wish to be polite and save the learner's face. In this study we examined whether instructing tutors about the pitfalls of politeness could increase the clarity and precision of their tutorial communica...

Background The aim of this study was to develop an instrument to measure laypeople’s beliefs about the nature of medical knowledge and knowing (the EBAM). Such beliefs should be a target of increased research interest because they influence how people handle medical information, for example in shared decision making. Methods An online survey was c...

Theories of self-regulated learning assume that learners flexibly adapt their learning process to external task demands and that this is positively related to performance. In this study, university students (n = 119) solved three tasks that greatly differed in complexity. Their learning processes were captured in detail by task-specific questionnai...

The present research investigated whether laypeople are inclined to rely on their own evaluations of the acceptability of scientific claims despite their knowledge limitations. Specifically, we tested whether laypeople are more prone to discount their actual dependence on expert knowledge when they are presented with simplified science texts. In tw...

The Internet is a convenient source of information about science-based topics (e.g., health matters). Whereas experts are familiar with the conventions of “true” scientific discourse and the assessment of scientific information, laypeople may have great difficulty choosing among, evaluating, and deciding on the vast amount of information available...

To examine how physicians use information about a patient's background knowledge when both anticipating what a patient knows and producing actual answers in an email counseling setting. A fictitious patient used a (high vs. low) level of technical jargon in an email inquiry about diabetes and provided explicit information on prior knowledge (high v...

In diesem Cutachten stellen wir zunächst eine Verortung der Herausforderung Wissenschaftsrezeption an, indem wir verschiedene Kontextfaktoren von Wissenschaftsrezeption ausführen (Abschnitt 2). Im folgenden Abschnitt (3) fokussieren wir auf die Analyseebene des Rezipienten. Hierbei betrachten wir zentrale Personenvariablen, die aus kognitionspsycho...

The uneven distribution of knowledge within modern societies requires a reliance on sources (e.g., reference books, teachers, the Internet) in addition to own experience. Most scientific issues are far too complex to be understood in any depth by laypersons. Successful knowledge acquisition comprises the ability to vary the amount of sources used a...

When people stumble across inconsistent or conflicting scientific information, for example, on the Internet, they have to find an adequate explanation for the inconsistency or conflict. We focus on two types of explanations people could consider: the lack of one’s ability to understand the information or to explain away the inconsistency, and the a...

This book addressed the notions of (epistemological) beliefs and cognitive flexibility throughout different chapters. Whereas some chapters focus mainly on epistemological aspects and others on flexibility, all chapters tried to make the connection between these two concepts.

The present study investigated how dealing with conflicting versus consistent medical information on the Web impacts on topic-specific and medicine-related epistemic beliefs as well as aspects of health decision making. One hundred mostly female university students were randomly assigned to three groups. Two intervention groups searched the Web for...

This article examines which features of computer-mediated communication make perspective taking more demanding in online instructional settings compared with face-to-face situations. The first part presents the theoretical basis: It uses research on expertise to gain insights into the instructor’s perspective, and research from psycholinguistics an...