Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize

Societal polarization over contested science has increased in recent years. To explain this development, political, sociological, and psychological research has identified societal macro-phenomena as well as cognitive micro-level factors that explain how citizens reason about the science. Here we take a radically different perspective, and highlight the effects of metacognition: How citizens reason about their own reasoning. Leveraging methods from Signal Detection Theory, we investigated the importance of metacognitive insight for polarization for the heavily contested topic of climate change, and the less heavily contested topic of nanotechnology. We found that, for climate change (but not for nanotechnology), higher insight into the accuracy of own interpretations of the available scientific evidence related to a lower likelihood of polarization over the science. This finding held irrespective of the direction of the scientific evidence (endorsing or rejecting anthropogenicity of climate change). Furthermore, the polarizing effect of scientific evidence could be traced back to higher metacognitive insight fostering belief-updating in the direction of the evidence at the expense of own, prior beliefs. By demonstrating how metacognition links to polarization, the present research adds to our understanding of the drivers of societal polarization over science. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-021-01993-y.