Iara Jones
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Terri Conley
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program:
Authors:
Session: Session 7: 4:40 pm – 5:30 pm
Poster: 95
Abstract
This research project explores nescience and how it can be induced. Nescience is the belief that there is no objective truth and truth is unknowable. This study is replicating previous research to discover if nescience can be induced. Participants can experience two conditions: either information overload with several articles with opposing views, or have less information that all have similar non conflicting conclusions. First participants read the articles based on the condition that they were randomly assigned to. Participants then complete a survey which includes a nescience scale. All the responses were collected then analyzed with a t-test to determine statistical significance. The results showed that there is a statistically significant difference when a participant experienced information overload and their nescience score and that nescience can be induced, this result wasn’t replicated in this study. The ability to induce nescience allows for more experiments to be conducted to see how nescience affects different variables. In this study we are seeing if inducing nescience can yield negative outcomes like belief in conspiracy theories or lack of intellectual humility. The consequences from people who are high in nescience can be taken into consideration when presenting information to people and how the modern day access to endless information may have negative effects.
