Study Objectives and Hypotheses
This study is designed to better understand the degree to which the use of cognitive and normative language by scientists influences perceptions of trust and credibility. Specifically, this paper reports the results from a highly granular, causal assessment of the effect of a single exposure to normative language from a scientist. For transparency, we use much of the language from our study protocol verbatim [Our study will draw conclusions by randomizing a large, nationally representative sample of US adults to view a sample social media post that either (1) shares a cognitive claim from a 2020 study on face masks (control group), or (2) shares the same cognitive claim but also includes a normative claim about what people should do, given the cognitive claim, which is also from that study (intervention group; see the “Methods” section). We hypothesize the following:Hypothesis 1: Overall trust in science and scientists [Hypotheses 2-5: The Preregistered analyses (without hypotheses): We will study the interaction between the study arm and political orientation for each of the 5 preregistered hypotheses. We included these analyses because of complex and nuanced, but consistent evidence that trust in science and scientists is associated with political orientation [