Averyl Cobb
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Terri Conley
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: Averyl Cobb
Abstract
With the increasing prevalence of fake news and distrust of science, critical media consumption is more important than ever. With this oversaturation of scientific information and conflicting sources it is interesting to consider how this effects people’s world view. Nescience is a philosophical concept defined as an inability to know that something is true or that you know something at all. This term has been adopted by my research lab while exploring dominant narratives of information and truth. Dr. Terri Conley, created the Nescience scale, which assigns a value from 1-7 that defines how much nescience a person is experiencing. Can Nescience be induced in someone? If so to what degree? This is the question my lab explores in our research. We considered individuals personal background, political beliefs, and experiences during our evaluations. We conducted a study based on the hypothesis that you could induce a state of nescience in someone through informational manipulation. This is the first study in this format, and very early stages for this project. We conducted trials with control and experiment groups who were given scientific articles either in consensus or disagreement then surveyed about their personal and political beliefs. Then we evaluated participant’s level of nescience on a numerical scale and discovered a statistical significant difference of 0.04 in their responses on the Nescience scale. This experiment is being replicated in the same format in order to determine causation.
