Public perceptions of federal science advisory boards depend on their composition.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science Advisory Board (SAB) provides expert advice to inform agency decision-making. Recent regulations have decreased the representation of academic scientists on the EPA SAB and increased the representation of industry scientists. In an experiment, we asked how the US public views the goals and legitimacy of the board as a function of its composition. Respondents perceived SABs with a majority of industry scientists to be more likely to promote business interests than SABs with a majority of academic scientists. Liberals were less likely than conservatives to perceive industry-majority SABs as promoting human health and the environment, and making unbiased and evidence-based decisions. Our findings underscore the potential for politicization of scientific advice to the government.

Industry-Dominated Science Advisory Boards Are Perceived To Be Legitimate But Only When They Recommend More Stringent Risk Management Policies.

In 2017, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was criticized for two controversial directives that restricted the eligibility of academic scientists to serve on the agency's key science advisory boards (SABs). The EPA portrayed these directives as necessary to ensure the integrity of the SAB. Critics portrayed them as a tactic by the agency to advance a more industry-friendly deregulatory agenda. With this backdrop, this research examined board composition and its effect on the perceived legitimacy of risk management recommendations by the SAB. In an experiment, we presented participants with hypothetical EPA SABs composed of different proportions of academic and industry scientists. We then asked participants to rate their satisfaction with, and the legitimacy of, these boards in light of their decisions in scenarios based on actual EPA SAB deliberations. Participants perceived higher levels of satisfaction and legitimacy when SABs made more stringent risk management recommendations. While SABs dominated by industry scientists were perceived to be more strongly motivated to protect business interests, we found no effect of board composition on perceptions of satisfaction and legitimacy. These results are consistent with prior research on decision quality that suggests people use normative outcomes as a heuristic for assessing the quality of deliberations. Moreover, these results suggest that members of the public are supportive of federal SABs regardless of their composition, but only if they take actions that are consistent with normative expectations.

Emotion and judgments of scientific research.

Scientific research has the power to prompt strong emotional reactions. We investigated the relationship between such reactions and individuals' understanding and judgments of the research. Participants read an article describing recent cancer research and reported the extent to which it evoked six emotions: fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We modeled these emotions two ways, either considering each separately or clustering them into two groups, for emotions with positive or negative valence. Even after controlling for the number of predictors, models based on the six separate emotions better predicted participants' subjective understanding of the research, judgments of its quality, and trust in the scientists who conducted it. Participants who reported more disgust also had more negative judgments of the research and the scientists, but these relationships were weaker when participants reported their emotions before making these judgments, rather than after. We discuss practical and ethical implications of these results.

Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics.

Although Americans generally hold science in high regard and respect its findings, for some contested issues, such as the existence of anthropogenic climate change, public opinion is polarized along religious and political lines. We ask whether individuals with more general education and greater science knowledge, measured in terms of science education and science literacy, display more (or less) polarized beliefs on several such issues. We report secondary analyses of a nationally representative dataset (the General Social Survey), examining the predictors of beliefs regarding six potentially controversial issues. We find that beliefs are correlated with both political and religious identity for stem cell research, the Big Bang, and human evolution, and with political identity alone on climate change. Individuals with greater education, science education, and science literacy display more polarized beliefs on these issues. We find little evidence of political or religious polarization regarding nanotechnology and genetically modified foods. On all six topics, people who trust the scientific enterprise more are also more likely to accept its findings. We discuss the causal mechanisms that might underlie the correlation between education and identity-based polarization.

Surprise: a belief or an emotion?

Surprise is a fundamental link between cognition and emotion. It is shaped by cognitive assessments of likelihood, intuition, and superstition, and it in turn shapes hedonic experiences. We examine this connection between cognition and emotion and offer an explanation called decision affect theory. Our theory predicts the affective consequences of mistaken beliefs, such as overconfidence and hindsight. It provides insight about why the pleasure of a gain can loom larger than the pain of a comparable loss. Finally, it explains cross-cultural differences in emotional reactions to surprising events. By changing the nature of the unexpected (from chance to good luck), one can alter the emotional reaction to surprising events.