Do people's lay theories about parenting and child development affect their uptake of new information in that domain?
250 adults were recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. After completing the Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (PAQ), participants read four brief popular press articles and answered questions about them to assess their understanding and memory of the content. Two of the articles described findings from cognitive development studies, and two of them described findings from other scientific studies not related to child development. There were 6 questions about each article, for a total of 24 questions.
Higher scores on the EL and AA subscales of the PAQ predicted memory for both the child development (Experimental) and unrelated (Control) articles. Scores on the RR subscale did not predict memory for either type of article.
- Endorsement of El and AA subscales predicts memory for science articles in general, but there is no strong evidence for a domain-specific benefit.
More information and analytic code can be found here.