Credible information and science: Understanding and overcoming challenges
Prof. Gilad FELDMAN
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong
Date: 25 November 2024 (Monday)
Time: 10:30 to 12:00
Venue: E22-G008
Host: Prof. Kraivin CHINTAKANANDA, Assistant Professor of Management
Abstract
Do we know how to assess the credibility of information and scientific evidence? It’s a routine task we face in our everyday lives and in our work as scientists, and yet in recent years we’ve increasingly become aware of our limitations – we are not sure how to assess credibility of information and when we try it turns out we are not very good at it. This has immense implications, ranging from for making simple decisions, to addressing urgent global challenges such as pandemics and climate change. In every step, our cognitive limitations, bounded rationality, and social influences hinder us in our processing of information – in noticing, searching, evaluating, interpreting, comparing, remembering, retrieving, and communicating.
I will address these challenges from the perspective of experiments from the fields of judgment and decision making and social psychology. In these fields we are now facing the immense task of understanding and addressing the growing crisis of misinformation and the increasing prevalence and quality of AI tools. Yet, in our very own academic circles we have yet to come to a consensus as a scientific community as to how to best assess the credibility of scientific evidence, in how we should conduct and evaluate research. A recent example is the so-called “science crisis” identifying challenges regarding the replicability, reproducibility, theory, measurement, and sharing of scientific evidence. This led to a science reform movement calling for major overhaul in the way that we do science and the need for an implementation of “open science”, routinely evaluating science using scientific principles using “meta science”, and moving towards collaborative large-scale “team science”.
I will provide a brief overview of my understanding of these challenges, my changes to my own science process, and the research that I do that aims to understand and then address some of these challenges.
Speaker
Prof. Gilad is an Assistant Professor with the psychology department at the University of Hong Kong. Gilad’s work is in the areas of social psychology and judgment and decision-making. In recent years, following signs regarding the need for a science reform and a credibility revolution, Gilad has taken a special interest in the movement for improvement of psychological science to implement and promote open-science, meta-research, large team science, diamond (no fee) open access, and community initiatives. More details on Gilad can be found at https://giladfeldman.org/resume-cv/ .
All are welcome!
