Evidence-based scientific thinking and decision-making in everyday life | Dawson et al | 2024

This paper takes a rigorous, open-science approach to the question of what factors influence a person’s ability to evaluate information and subsequently make decisions on the basis of that information. The paper is purely dealing with humans reading text, and makes no mention of the source of the information (technology or otherwise). The factors are categorised as ‘individual difference’ variables and ‘perceptual and cognitive behavioural’ variables. The usefulness of the paper lies in it’s up to date synthesis of the literature relating to these factors, and the associated questions these constructs raise when it comes to understanding not only how humans engage with information, but more importantly for our work, how do we want humans to engage with information. Constructs of interest are the two dimensions of epistemic curiosity (these are ‘interest curiosity’ described as “an internally motivated drive to acquire information” and associated with mastery-orientated learning, analytical thinking and enjoyment of problem-solving, and “deprivation curiosity” described as “prompts people to find answers in order to end the uncomfortable state of uncertainty brought on by a knowledge gap”). The ‘intellectual humility’ scale (capturing four factors, for example openness to revising viewpoints), the need for closure scale, the ‘unusual uses’ task (measuring divergent thinking) and the ‘actively open-minded’ scale are all also useful to consider when thinking about the loss of human control that can arise when humans are working with AI decision aids. Key findings were that curiosity, cognitive flexibility, and prosociality were related to engaging with information and discernment of evidence reliability. Also, the perception of social authority (effectively a social dynamic, social identity related concept) was a powerful driver of outcomes, as well as perceived information credibility (even above the actual quality and relevance of the sources).

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