Teacher’s Reasons for Trust and Distrust in Scientific Evidence: Reflecting a “Smart But Evil” Stereotype?

Abstract

We investigate in-service teachers’ reasons for trust and distrust in educational research compared to research in general. Building on previous research on a so-called “smart but evil” stereotype regarding educational researchers, three sets of confirmatory hypotheses were preregistered. First, we expected that teachers would emphasize expertise—as compared with benevolence and integrity—as a stronger reason for trust in educational researchers. Moreover, we expected that this pattern would not only apply to educational researchers, but that it would generalize to researchers in general. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the pattern could also be found in the general population. Following a pilot study aiming to establish the validity of our measures (German general population sample; N = 504), hypotheses were tested in an online study with N = 414 randomly sampled German in-service teachers. Using the Bayesian informative hypothesis evaluation framework, we found empirical support for five of our six preregistered hypotheses.