Interaction of identity and beliefs with genetic literacy

Genetic literacy goes beyond knowledge of genetic terms, as it requires sufficient skills and understanding to effectively facilitate health-related decision-making and participation in social discussions about genetic issues. Personal identity and beliefs have been shown to affect how individuals interact with new information, but rarely in the context of genetic literacy. In 2021, we created and disseminated a survey to two separate samples: 2,050 members of the US general public and 2,023 participants in a large genetic research study. We assessed genetic literacy through three components: subjective knowledge (Familiarity), objective knowledge (Knowledge), and knowledge comprehension (Skills), making this one of the only large-scale surveys to assess comprehension as a part of genetic literacy. We hypothesized that additional measures of identity and belief factors would enable a better understanding of how individuals process and retain genetic information. We found that confidence in one's genetic knowledge was the strongest predictor of positive scores in all three components, controlling nearly 25% of the variance in scores, while perceived importance of genetic information had a positive but weaker relationship to scores. This suggests that improving confidence, not just providing knowledge, is an important part of increasing uptake of genetics in various applications. Further, we found that multiple self-described beliefs had mixed predictive effects on all three of our genetic literacy subscales. These findings demonstrate the complexity inherent in endeavors to raise genetic literacy in the US population as an example, as well as the importance of context-specific genetics communication.