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In late 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 to talk about the recently approved COVID-19 vaccines and his concerns that the American public might [...]

A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to "cure" public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences' agency over what to do with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic went hand in hand with what some have called a "(mis)infodemic" about the virus on social media. Drawing on partisan motivated reasoning and partisan selective sharing, this study examines the influence of political viewpoints, anxiety, and the interactions of the two on believing and willingness to share false, corrective, and accurate claims about COVID-19 on social media. A large-scale 2 (emotion: anxiety vs relaxation) × 2 (slant of news outlet: MSNBC vs Fox News) experimental design with 719 US participants shows that anxiety is a driving factor in belief in and willingness to share claims of any type. Especially for Republicans, a state of heightened anxiety leads them to believe and share more claims. Our findings expand research on partisan motivated reasoning and selective sharing in online settings, and enhance the understanding of how anxiety shapes individuals' processing of risk-related claims in issue contexts with high uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paralleling very visible debates in psychology, some parts of the communication field have recently pushed for a wholesale endorsement of the principles of open science and its practices, including a particular focus on replicability and reproducibility as quality criteria. Unfortunately, these discussions have been plagued by a set of at least 3 interrelated problems: A lack of conceptual clarity when defining open science-related challenges to communication scholarship; the irony of using intuition rather than evidence when trying to improve communication science; and our field's surprising lack of attention to nonreplicability in social media data as one of our field's most rapidly growing data sources. In response to these problem areas, we argue that communication as a field proceed empirically as it applies open science practices to different subfields in communication and end our essay with pathways forward for a science of open (communication) science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Events such as the 2017 "March for Science" have brought greater attention to public attitudes toward science and scientists. Our analyses of recent poll data show that Americans' confidence in scientists has been high for roughly 40 years (relative to other institutions), and that it is high even for controversial topics such as global warming and nuclear energy. International comparisons show broad similarities with individuals in Germany and the UK, including that trust in scientists can fluctuate depending on who employs them and what topic is under discussion. Finally, more granular analyses in the United States reveal large divides in trust based on geographic location and religious identification (i.e., rural residents exhibit comparatively low trust and the nonreligious comparatively high trust), while the gap between political partisans has been relatively small but has spiked in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]