Want to squash misinformation? Teach people how science works.

One reason misinformation is such a problem these days is that many laypeople think they can evaluate science as well as the experts:

This belief that laypeople can do science as well as experts has been called the “do your research” phenomenon. Where does it come from? And why do many laypeople think they can evaluate science so well without formal training, when they don’t say the same thing about flying planes or performing a root canal? (“Do your dental exam!”) One reason might be the way science is taught in US K-12 education.

Chinn and colleagues (2023) have written a compelling paper in which they argue for a different approach to science education. They describe current science education as too “epistemically friendly” (Think about science experiments where you are expected to get it “right” the first time you try - when does that ever happen in real life?), with too little emphasis on the “messiness” of science. Instead, they advocate for a science education that focuses on two fundamental ideas.

First, students should learn science is a set of practices that reliably lead to better understanding about the world. These practices help to ensure the quality of science despite the fact that science is inherently social and influenced by values and cultural ideas. Likewise, scientists are and should be emotionally engaged with their work and are sometimes affected by bias despite their best efforts. This, plus the sheer difficulty of understanding our complex world makes science uncertain. None of that is a bad thing - they are simply natural consequences of being human. Science is useful because its practices reliably lead to useful knowledge despite all of those things. That’s what makes scientific practices so great.

Second, most students (who do not become “something of a scientist themselves”) should learn to be competent outsiders who understand how to determine: (1) who is a trustworthy source, (2) which scientific issues have more or less consensus, and (3) how to combine relevant scientific information with their own experiences and values to make decisions about socioscientific problems (e.g., should we invest more money in nuclear energy, to combat climate change?). This isn’t “do your research” it’s more like “find your reliable sources.”

Chinn and colleagues argue that when science education is focused on these two ideas, it will produce students who better understand how science works (and understand when it does not), and thus make them more resilient to misinformation. They also describe how they are designing science lessons to pursue these goals. If you’re interested in combatting misinformation, reforming science education, or both, I recommend you give this article a read.