Kids have high trust of scientists, despite TV depictions

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Kids have high trust of scientists, despite TV depictions

'Mad scientist' characters have limited impact, study finds

Young children have a lot of trust in scientists, and watching superhero TV shows with villainous researchers has little impact - and only in certain situations, a new study shows.

Findings showed that children's trust only declined when the villains in a video they watched were explicitly labeled as scientists or talked about them "doing science" in the show.

"Our findings revealed some harmful effects of superhero television, yet those effects appeared weak and limited in scope," said Blue Lerner, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

"Even then, it is easy to mitigate that harm by removing associations between villainy and science. That's good news."

The findings also suggest that the "mad scientist" stereotype may not be as commonly believed by children as previous studies have suggested, said study co-author James Alex Bonus, associate professor of communication at Ohio State.

The study, published this week in the Journal of Media Psychology, involved 256 children aged 8 to 12 and their parents.

At the beginning, participating children completed measures that examined whether they thought scientists were best described as "smart" or "dumb." They also answered questions that measured three dimensions of trust in scientists: expertise, integrity and benevolence.

"Almost every child rated scientists as smart and gave them high marks for expertise, integrity and benevolence, although their ratings for expertise were higher than integrity and benevolence," Bonus said.

Participating children watched one of two five-minute segments of the animated Disney program "Marvel's Spiderman." One of the videos featured a villainous female scientist character and one featured a heroic female scientist character.

The researchers decided to use female scientist characters for several reasons, one being that previous work has shown that most kids think of scientists as males. It is possible that exposure to female scientists may lead kids to have stronger reactions to villainous or heroic actions because they don't have ingrained attitudes about female scientists.

One key finding was that children have very positive views of scientists overall. This is inconsistent with a lot of other research that suggests kids have a conception of "mad scientists" doing experiments for evil reasons.

Many of these earlier studies asked kids to draw their view of what a scientist looks like, and the researchers inferred what the children thought about scientists based on their drawings.

These studies found that many children depict scientists in their drawings as evil, crazy and supernatural, Bonus said.

But asking for drawings may get children to think about memorable characters from popular media rather than an average scientist.

"When you ask children directly, as we did in this study, it may allow them to evaluate scientists as a broader group," Bonus said.

"In other words, children may rely on stereotypical imagery when drawing scientists, but also recognize that such portrayals do not reflect all scientists."

Findings also showed that for impacts on trust, how the villainous scientist was referenced in the video clip was an important factor.

In one version of the video, the researchers edited out all references to the woman being a scientist or doing science as she committed her evil deeds. Children who saw this version of the villainous scientist didn't show any decreases in trust after viewing the clip.

"Kids may not be identifying the villainous actions of the character as science unless it is explicitly labeled that way," Lerner said.

Even when the videos of villainous characters included the science label, the decline in children's trust was relatively modest.

"It is not that kids who saw the villains thought scientists are wicked and evil. They were just not as often saying they were good," she said.

The children who watched the heroic scientist character did not, on average, show an increase in trust of scientists. However, the researchers noted that kids already showed a high level of trust, so there wasn't much room for it to increase.

As part of the study, parents were asked how much television featuring superheroes their children watched. Those who watched the most of these TV shows did show less belief that scientists were benevolent, the researchers said, but the effect was relatively small.

Overall, the findings suggest that children have more trust in the expertise, integrity and benevolence of scientists than was documented in studies that analyzed children's drawings of scientists, Bonus said.

And that trust was not easily shaken by watching villainous scientists in superhero TV shows.

To the extent that it did lower trust, there was an easy fix available to content creators: Just don't label the villainous characters as scientists.

"This minor change might reduce any negative influence on children's perceptions of real-life scientists," Bonus said.

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