Emlen Metz
Emlen Metz is a Public Education Specialist at the Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley's public science institution. She develops curricula on scientific critical thinking for high school and undergraduate classrooms and conducts qualitative and quantitative research on student thinking and learning. She is committed to building student understanding of key conceptual tools from science and psychology in such a way that they are able to use them beyond the classroom, for problems and questions they care about.
She earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, writing her dissertation under Jon Baron, Michael Weisberg, and Angela Duckworth on psychology of epistemology in adolescents and adults. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College, where she double majored in philosophy and psychology.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Science, psychology, and philosophy offer a number of conceptual tools that can make it easier for people to make good decisions as individuals and in groups, especially under conditions of uncertainty and complex information. These conceptual tools include scaffolds for coping with uncertainty like credence levels, signal and noise, Type I & Type II errors, statistical & systematic error, and concepts that help us minimize common mistakes by simply being aware of their temptation, like confirmation bias. They also include techniques for minimizing mistakes by addressing bias and uncertainty, like blind analysis and scenario planning. I seek to develop and test more effective ways of teaching these ideas, both in and out of the classroom. The goal is to teach them in such a way that students can use them to make better judgments about what is likely to be true and how to use the best available information to achieve their goals.
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S&S&S is an interdisciplinary project at UC Berkeley led by Nobel Laureate in physics Saul Perlmutter, which seeks to furnish students of all kinds with these conceptual tools. After seven iterations as a popular undergraduate course, we are now working to expand the course to other institutions, including other universities, high schools, and professional schools. I conduct research on student thinking and learning in the context of the course, which has shown improvement in critical reasoning skills of d=.45 over the course of a semester.
Public Editor is an online platform and growing community which structures more critical reading of the news, training users in evaluating evidence, sources, arguments, language, and probabilistic reasoning. The system trains volunteers to critique texts, using crowdsourcing to create co-generated credibility scores for news articles. It results in articles with credibility badges and any problems or particularly well-done arguments highlighted and tagged within the article. I run the training team, developing online video and interactive trainings to help volunteers become more effective critical readers and empirically testing out different approaches to teaching these skills.
Actively Open-Minded Thinking
Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is crucial for epistemic responsibility. Without engaging seriously with evidence and perspectives that run against our views, we will not improve upon our representations of the world. However, AOT is difficult to measure. A major focus of my research program centers around developing better tools for observing AOT in the wild, including rating scales and multiple choice questions (Baron, Scott, Fincher, & Metz, 2015; Metz, 2017), interviews (Metz, 2017), and textual analysis (Tetlock, Metz, Scott, & Suedfeld, 2014; Metz et al., in preparation).
Evolution by natural selection is widely rejected by the public, despite strong consensus among scientists and extraordinary explanatory power for biological phenomena. In collaboration with Michael Weisberg and Deena Weisberg, I have found evidence for two novel factors for this phenomenon; disagreement over legitimate criteria for belief and perceived explanatory power.
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For example, there are major individual differences in trust in different criteria for belief (e.g. some people put more stock in scientific consensus, others believe you should trust your gut), and these differences track both group affiliation and acceptance or rejection of scientific theories like evolution with remarkable fidelity (Metz, Weisberg, & Weisberg, 2018).
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