C4 Social communication for sustainable food systems

The sustainability of food systems involves highly specialized knowledge and stirs emotional public debates. In some debates, public preferences are based on assumptions that diverge from scientific evidence. Research has shown that many people have knowledge illusions, i.e., high levels of self-assessed but low levels of objective knowledge. We will study how knowledge illusions emerge and how they might affect public debates. On several critical issues (e.g., GMOs, pesticides, trade), we will measure citizens’ self-assessed and objective knowledge and identify crucial predictors (e.g., people’s media consumption) as well as consequences (e.g., people’s readiness to articulate political claims in public debates).

Possible dissertation topics:

Illusions of knowing? Actual and perceived knowledge about critical food systems issues
Media influences on actual and perceived public knowledge about GMOs, crop protection, and international agricultural trade
Agricultural scientists’ anticipations of costs and benefits of public science communication