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The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution

The role of science popularization remains relatively under-explored in research on contemporary public acceptance of evolution. In this study, we analyse national survey data to interrogate the role Britain’s best-known celebrity scientists David Attenborough, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins and Stephen...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Unsworth, Amy, Voas, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8114431/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33632025
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963662521989513
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author Unsworth, Amy
Voas, David
author_facet Unsworth, Amy
Voas, David
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description The role of science popularization remains relatively under-explored in research on contemporary public acceptance of evolution. In this study, we analyse national survey data to interrogate the role Britain’s best-known celebrity scientists David Attenborough, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking may have played in changing public views of evolution, as well as the role of two creationists: Ken Ham and Harun Yahya. We investigate how well known these public figures are, what their views of religion are perceived to be and, drawing on social identity theory, whether they exert different effects on attitudinal change to evolution among different religious and non-religious publics. Binary logistic regression analysis shows that among Muslim and Pentecostal Christian publics, those familiar with Dawkins as both a scientist and as someone who holds negative views of religion are more likely to have become less accepting of evolution. Conversely, among non-religious publics, Dawkins was the only celebrity scientist associated with higher odds of becoming more accepting of evolution. We suggest that engaging certain religious audiences with the science of evolutionary biology may be more effective when their religious identities are not threatened.
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spelling pubmed-81144312021-05-24 The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution Unsworth, Amy Voas, David Public Underst Sci Articles The role of science popularization remains relatively under-explored in research on contemporary public acceptance of evolution. In this study, we analyse national survey data to interrogate the role Britain’s best-known celebrity scientists David Attenborough, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking may have played in changing public views of evolution, as well as the role of two creationists: Ken Ham and Harun Yahya. We investigate how well known these public figures are, what their views of religion are perceived to be and, drawing on social identity theory, whether they exert different effects on attitudinal change to evolution among different religious and non-religious publics. Binary logistic regression analysis shows that among Muslim and Pentecostal Christian publics, those familiar with Dawkins as both a scientist and as someone who holds negative views of religion are more likely to have become less accepting of evolution. Conversely, among non-religious publics, Dawkins was the only celebrity scientist associated with higher odds of becoming more accepting of evolution. We suggest that engaging certain religious audiences with the science of evolutionary biology may be more effective when their religious identities are not threatened. SAGE Publications 2021-02-25 2021-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8114431/ /pubmed/33632025 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963662521989513 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Unsworth, Amy
Voas, David
The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title_full The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title_fullStr The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title_full_unstemmed The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title_short The Dawkins effect? Celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
title_sort dawkins effect? celebrity scientists, (non)religious publics and changed attitudes to evolution
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8114431/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33632025
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963662521989513
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