Attitude change when presenting science museum visitors with risk–benefit information

Abstract

Abstract Visitors to modern science museums are likely to encounter exhibitions presenting conflicting information, such as risks and benefits of new scientific developments. Such exhibitions encourage visitors to reflect upon different sides of a story and to form or adjust their attitudes toward the topic on display. However, there is very little evidence of museum visits influencing visitors’ attitudes. Using a risk–benefit museum text, we set out to explore this blind spot of attitude change in a science museum, with visual and auditory text as information conditions. Our results show a small average change in visitors’ attitude toward the text topic after information (N= 225). No significant differences were found between participants’ attitude change in the two information conditions. We also explored whether participants’ attitude change can be predicted based on presentation modality and four dimensions of attitude strength (prior knowledge, attitudinal certainty, attitudinal importance, and attitudinal ambivalence) that are known to play a role in attitude change. Results indicate that this model explained a small part of the variance, but only ambivalence added statistically significantly to the prediction. Overall, our findings suggest that risk–benefit information can on average change visitors’ attitudes and that prior attitudinal ambivalence can influence that change.

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