title: The effects of social identity threat and social identity affirmation on laypersons' perception of scientists.
abstract: Public debates about socio-scientific issues (e.g. climate change or violent video games) are often accompanied by attacks on the reputation of the involved scientists. Drawing on the social identity approach, we report a minimal group experiment investigating the conditions under which scientists are perceived as non-prototypical, non-reputable, and incompetent. Results show that in-group affirming and threatening scientific findings (compared to a control condition) both alter laypersons' evaluations of the study: in-group affirming findings lead to more positive and in-group threatening findings to more negative evaluations. However, only in-group threatening findings alter laypersons' perceptions of the scientists who published the study: scientists were perceived as less prototypical, less reputable, and less competent when their research results imply a threat to participants' social identity compared to a non-threat condition. Our findings add to the literature on science reception research and have implications for understanding the public engagement with science.
authors.affiliation: Philipp University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nauroth
authors.affiliation: Philipp University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gollwitzer
authors.affiliation: Philipp University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Henrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kozuchowski
authors.affiliation: University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bender
authors.affiliation: University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Rothmund
mesh_terms: D010465:Perception; D011361:Professional Competence; D011639:Public Opinion; D012586:Science; D012933:Social Identification
keywords: public engagement with science; science attitudes and perceptions; science communication; social identity; subtyping; threat