Psychological distance to science: Decreasing distance reduces science scepticism

We present evidence for a theory-informed and causal antecedent of science scepticism: psychological distance to science. We presented participants with brief newspaper-like advertisements describing gene editing (N = 586) and nanotechnology (N = 465). We manipulated the advertisements content, such that the information was either psychologically close or distant. We first show that the distance manipulations reduced perceptions of distance to science on the implicit level (N = 55) and affected explicit perceptions of spatial distance to gene editing (N = 469) as well as spatial and hypothetical distance to nanotechnology (N = 370). The main studies find that participants presented with the psychologically close content were less sceptical about gene editing and nanotechnology. They also more strongly supported government funding for gene editing. These studies show that psychological distance to science can be manipulated, providing a tool that can be applied to modify complex social attitudes like science scepticism.