Objective and Subjective Knowledge: “Feeling the truth” and its Importance for Science Communication
We would like to invite you to our colloquium, “Objective and Subjective Knowledge: “Feeling the truth” and its Importance for Science Communication”, on February 20, 2024, at 1 p.m. (GMT+1).
In this talk, Dr Helen Fischer will discuss the relevance of objective and subjective knowledge (“Feeling the truth”) for attitudes towards controversial and politicised science such as climate change or COVID-19. She will also show how objective and subjective knowledge shape behaviour and why science communicators should be aware of “truthiness,” the phenomenon that some statements ring true irrespective of evidence.
Dr Fischer currently holds the visiting professorship “Science and Society” at KIT and has been researching at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media in Tübingen since April 2022. She investigates the role of metacognition, our insight into the reliability and limits of our own knowledge for beliefs about politicized science such as climate change or COVID-19. Her research sheds light on the role of metacognition in recognizing one’s own thinking errors such as motivated information processing and information sharing in social networks.
Dr Fischer completed her doctorate in cognitive psychology at Heidelberg University in 2016. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Heidelberg on public perception of climate change, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2019. She worked at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm, Sweden, from 2019-2020 and was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, from 2020-2022. Since 2022, she has been conducting research at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, and most recently completed a research stay at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where she is researching the longitudinal relationship between social media use and beliefs about climate change in a project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
This is an online event carried out in English. However, questions in German are also welcomed. We look forward to your participation in our lively after-talk discussion! Please register here in advance.
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