Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?
Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, and Richard E. Petty
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Targeting Basis 4: Matching the Delivery of the Scientific Message with the Recipient’s Epistemic Style
People tend to reject scientific information when it is delivered in ways that mismatch their epistemic styles. This basic principle has theoretically straightforward implications for what counteractive strategies to use: Identify the recipient’s style, and match it. To implement a matching strategy, regional demographic data (e.g., on political leanings) can aid in developing psychographically targeted communications at the aggregate level. Given the vast amounts of fine-grained, person-specific data that various technology companies collect on people’s online activity (if they have not opted out), targeting may even be done at the individual level, which has been found effective for changing behavior (141). Consumer researchers have long been segmenting and targeting consumers based on rich psychographic and behavioral data. Other public interest groups could adopt similar strategies and use the logic of targeted advertising to more precisely position their scientific communications with different audiences in mind. The essence of this strategy is to craft different messages or different delivery approaches for different audiences. For recipients who think abstractly (vs. concretely), scientific messages delivered in an abstract (vs. concrete) manner increase their acceptance of the scientific information as true (142). For recipients who are promotion focused (vs. prevention focused), messages about health behavior framed as approaching gains (vs. avoiding losses) are better accepted (76), and so forth, as explained earlier.
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