Disagreement and uncertainty are common features of everyday life. They’re also common and expected features of scientific research.

Despite this, disagreement among experts has the potential to undermine people’s engagement with information. It can also lead to confusion and a rejection of scientific messaging in general, with a tendency to explain disagreement as relating to incompetence or nefarious motivations.

To help, we recently developed a tool to help people navigate uncertainty and disagreement.

To illustrate its usefulness, we applied it to a recent topic which has attracted much disagreement (including among experts): whether social media is harmful for kids, and whether they should be banned from it.

We research how people navigate disagreement and uncertainty. The tool we developed is a framework of disagreements. It provides a structured way to understand expert disagreement, to assess evidence and navigate the issues for decision making.

It identifies ten types of disagreement, and groups them into three categories:

The social and policy debate about the impacts of social media is rapidly evolving. This can present a challenge, as we try to apply........

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