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

Oct 15, 2026

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Investigates in-service teachers’ reasons for trust and distrust in educational research relative to research in general, building on prior work on the “smart but evil” stereotype. Three preregistered sets of confirmatory hypotheses were tested using Bayesian informative hypothesis evaluation in an online study with 414 randomly sampled German in-service teachers, following a validity pilot study (German general population, N=504). Empirical support was found for five of six preregistered hypotheses, with teachers emphasizing expertise as a stronger trust driver and exploring generalization beyond education.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Teachers’ preferences and consequences

Second-hand evaluations and social-cognitive mechanisms

Smart but evil stereotype

Prior findings and competing explanations

Present study and hypotheses

AERA Open January-December 2021, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1–15 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584211028599 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2021. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Teacher’s Reasons for Trust and Distrust in Scientific Evidence: Reflecting a “Smart But Evil” Stereotype? Tom Rosman Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID), Germany Samuel Merk PH Karlsruhe, Germany 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. Keywords: epistemic trust, trust in researchers, teacher education, evidence-based teaching The integration of research results into teachers’ classroom practice is becoming ever more important (e.g. , Southerland et al. , 2016) . However, several studies show that both preservice and in-service teachers tend to prefer conventional wisdom and practically derived knowledge sources over scientific evidence (Bråten & Ferguson, 2015; Cramer, 2013; Parr & Timperley, 2008) . This has potentially far-reaching consequences: Teachers not knowing the science behind their profession may succumb to misconceptions on teaching and learning, which, in turn, may lead to dysfunctional educational practices. For example, they may waste time developing teaching materials tailored to individual students’ learning styles (the“learning style” myth has long been debunked; Kirschner, 2017; Pashler et al. , 2008), or they may recommend grade retention for lower performing students (there is no evidence of academic benefit for retained students; Hughes et al. , 2018; Jimmerson, 2001) . Several authors have argued that this underreliance on research knowledge might be grounded in beliefs about the sources of educational knowledge (e.g., Bråten & Ferguson, 2015; Merk et al., 2017; Sjølie, 2014). This is because directly evaluating the validity and robustness of educational research is hard for teachers, as it often requires a considerable amount of background knowledge in research methodology (Hendrikset al., 2021) . Therefore, to “acquire reliable and useable information about learning and teaching,(pre-service) teachers must instead be able to identify and evaluate knowledgeable and trustworthy sources of information—that is, to figure out whom to believe” (Hendriks et al., 2021, p. 2) . Keeping in mind the importance of such “second-hand evaluations”(i.e., figuring out “whom to believe” instead of“what is true”; Bromme et al., 2015), we know from social psychology that members of one’s in-group are seen as more positive compared with individuals from outside one’s group (ingroup bias; Mullen et al., 1992) . Therefore, teachers might rate fellow teachers as more trustworthy compared with researchers. Furthermore, considering the findings that teachers view researchers as competent but self-interested (Critchley, 2008), and that researchers are generally ascribed less warmth (i.

FAQs

What problem does the article address?

It examines why in-service teachers trust or distrust scientific and educational research, especially in comparison with other knowledge sources and with teaching practitioners.

What hypotheses were preregistered in the study?

The article reports three sets of preregistered confirmatory hypotheses, including expectations that expertise would be a stronger basis for trust than benevolence or integrity, and that patterns could generalize beyond educational researchers.

How were the hypotheses tested and what were the main results?

Hypotheses were tested in an online study of 414 German in-service teachers using a Bayesian informative hypothesis evaluation framework. Empirical support was found for five of six preregistered hypotheses.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Adam