An Nguyen
Research Mentor(s): Terri Conley
Mentor Department: Psychology
Authors: An Nguyen, Chloe Brookes, Terri Conley
Session: Session 1 (9:00am – 9:50am)
Presentation Type: Poster 19
Abstract
In a time of continuous attitudinal changes in our perceptions of what truths are—“Trump administration’s cuts to federally funded STEM research are devastating†(Flannery, 2025)—a number of citizens have interpreted these attitudinal changes to mean that truth is unknowable or that no truth exists (e.g., science is not an endless frontier), a belief known as nescience. In the current experiment, we aimed to induce nescience through an unscrambling sentence task. Positivistic phrases of science were used to evoke pro-science sentiments for the control group, while nescient phrases were used to evoke nescient sentiments for the experimental group. The control participants received statements composed of pro-science sentences, while the experimental participants received statements that primed them to have a more nescient perception of science. Participants then completed a survey that included the following measures: the Nescience Scale (NS), Intellectualism-Anti-Intellectualism Scale (IAIS), Generic Conspiracist Beliefs (GCB), and Revised Belief in Trustworthiness Scale (RBT). The experiment revealed that nescience sentiments were statistically significantly positively correlated with conspiracy beliefs, and nescience was not correlated with either anti-intellectualism or belief in trustworthiness.
