Taking a stance on the role of nuclear energy to combat the climate crisis: how communication task and expert’s personal stance impact individuals' intellectual humility and strategies for dealing with a complex topic

We investigated how individuals deal with the limits of their own knowledge and productively cope with their dependence on experts as they engage with the socio-scientific topic of nuclear energy. We scrutinized the effects of content features of an interview text and of individuals’ communicative engagement with the information read. In a 2 × 2 factorial design study (N = 273), adult participants opposing nuclear energy read an online interview with a geophysicist. The same factual information was presented, but the geophysicist either took a stance for decommissioning nuclear energy plants or took no stance. After reading, participants were instructed to communicate their own position in an informative or persuasive manner. Dependent measures evaluated participants’ intellectual humility, strategies, perceived easiness of a simple solution, willingness to act and written arguments. Expert taking a stance led to lower intellectual humility, higher perceived easiness of a solution and stronger willingness to act against nuclear energy. Having the goal of persuading resulted in participants offering more one-sided arguments. Strategies were not significantly influenced by the independent factors. The contrasting effect on individuals’ intellectual humility and willingness to act is discussed from the perspective of climate-oriented action and science education.