Investigating Factors Influencing Audiences’ Integration of Scientific Evidence

To enable a broad societal impact of science, people need to update their beliefs based on the best available evidence. Here we investigate the influences of external and internal factors on lay audiences' belief updating based on scientific evidence with a diverse sample of U.S. residents from which data was collected in May 2023. Participants were presented a series of fictitious hypotheses. For each hypothesis, we assessed their initial beliefs and subjective expertise, presented them fictitious study outcomes, and then assessed their beliefs again. Importantly, the outcomes' presentation format and ordering were manipulated. Participants exhibited more belief updating when study outcomes were presented simultaneously (all on one page) instead of sequentially (split up across different pages). While chronologically ordering outcomes given sequential presentation did not affect belief updating, participants weighted more recently presented outcomes more strongly. We further found that belief updating was less pronounced with increasing subjective expertise, and more pronounced with increasing trust in science and scientific literacy. These results provide practical implications for science communication and the consumption of scientific evidence.