SciComm Conversations: “Measuring trust in scientists”
Transcript
Achintya Rao [00:09]: Hello and welcome to SciComm Conversations. My name is Achintya Rao. This is a special episode of the podcast in which I speak to Dr Viktoria Cologna and Dr Niels Mede about their recent paper looking into trust in scientists. Together with colleagues from around the world, Viktoria and Niels studied the responses of nearly 72,000 participants in 68 countries on all inhabited continents. In this episode, they tell us what they found.
Viktoria Cologna [00:38]: My name is Viktoria Cologna. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Collegium Helveticum, the Swiss Institute for Advanced Studies in Zurich, Switzerland. I’m really interested in understanding public opinion about science, especially sort of the psychology of trust in science. So, what are factors that lead people to trust science, more or less and how do these attitudes differ across countries? I’m also particularly interested in understanding trust in climate scientists and how that affects people’s pro-environmental behaviour and people’s willingness to act on climate change.
Niels Mede [01:11]: Hey, I’m Niels Mede, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich. I’m a communication researcher focusing on science communication, and particularly on public attitudes and opinion and public communication about science, on digital media and beyond. I focus on critical, skeptical and populist attitudes, towards science and this in different contexts, including climate change, for example, mostly using survey methods to study that. And I’m particularly interested in comparative research across countries, across regions.
AR [01:52]: Thanks both for being on SciComm Conversations with us today. To start with, could you please give our listeners a summary of your research and its findings?
VC [02:02]: So this project sort of started off in 2020, and there was a very strong public narrative about a crisis of trust in science, a crisis of expertise. And so Niels and I thought that it would be great if we could survey people all around the world on their levels of trust in scientists to see whether we’re actually seeing a crisis of trust in science or not.
And so that’s what we did with the TISP project, which is short for Trust in Science and science-related Populism. And this is really a big, group, team effort. The TISP consortium is a team of 241 researchers at 179 institutions around the world. And this really large team made it possible to then survey almost 72,000 participants, individuals all over the world in 68 countries on all inhabited continents.
And with this survey, we found that overall trust in scientists is moderately high. So we don’t see overall, you know, low levels of trust in scientists. And very importantly, we also find that trust in scientists is not low in any of the 68 countries that we’ve looked at.
NM [03:12]: Yeah, exactly. And all this also varies across different countries and world regions and also different groups of the population. So we also investigated predictors or, say, correlates with trust in scientists. And finding for example, that in several countries, mostly Western countries, trust is lower a lot among people with the right-leaning political attitudes. But in other countries it’s the other way around. So there trust in science is lower among left leaning people.
And that’s, that’s one interesting finding where we can really say, well, it’s important to study this comparatively, so as to not draw false conclusions from Western to non-Western countries. And, well, maybe you might wonder about the second part in the TISP title, which was about science-related populism. And well that’s still in the pipeline. So we’re focused on trust in science so far.
Also, we measured a couple [of] things about science communication: How do people found themselves about science, and science related issues. That’s also something that we’re currently working on. And also focusing on country differences and differences across population groups.
AR [04:29]: We’ll come to some of the aspects of the research that you’ve just mentioned, but before we go ahead, interestingly, you focused on trust in scientists rather than trust in science. And in your paper, you say, “Science is more abstract than scientists and therefore makes a less clear referent.” Could you elaborate on this distinction and how it affected your research?
VC [04:54]: So, as you can imagine, we spent a lot of time before – as we were developing the survey – to think about, well, you know, how do we exactly want to measure how people feel towards scientists for science more broadly. And, we decided to, as you mentioned, to use sort of the term “scientists” as the referent object in our survey because we thought that, you know, if we’re going to ask people to what extent they trust science, people may think about very different things, right? People may think about scientific methods. They may think about scientific institutions, or indeed about scientists as individuals.
And so to make sure that, you know, our survey respondents were sort of thinking about the same thing while filling out the survey, we decided to go with trust in scientists, a sort of a very clear, referent. And maybe, perhaps importantly to mention here is that we also provided a definition for science and scientists at the beginning of the survey, again, to sort of make sure that people were thinking about the same thing while filling out our questionnaire.
AR [05:55]: And I think one of the aspects of this research when you conduct it in so many countries is to have some means of comparing them based on different languages. And I guess from that perspective, it was quite important to define these terms in a sort of uniform way across languages.
NM [06:14]: Yes, exactly, and that was one big challenge, as you mentioned, like to just translate the word “science” to different languages, or “scientists”. It’s also there’s different sort of, yeah, meanings, connotations in different languages. So many European or like Germanic languages, it also includes the humanities, social sciences and humanities. The word “Wissenschaft”, “wetenschap” and so on; “nauka” in Polish as far as I know.
But in some countries, as far as we know and were told, in some East Asian or Asian languages, it also is associated with technology and engineering. So, well, that’s one issue that came up. So in this example definition, this definition that we provided we actually also provided examples for different disciplines that could mean… that could be involved in studying something scientifically.
AR [07:25]: Another aspect that I was sort of personally intrigued by was the relationship between trust and political views. Now, you mentioned this at the at the top, and it isn’t, you know, so straightforward to look at political views on the left–right axis or indeed a liberal–conservative one. And in your research, you’ve looked at both of those because in different countries they’ve been measured differently. And, after all, these distinctions aren’t on some sort of universal scale that holds true across countries. So what were the challenges you encountered in incorporating political views into your research, and are there any lessons for us to learn from this?
VC [07:59]: Yeah, so this was definitely, you know, one of the challenges that one has when leading such a global survey project, right? And what we did is, first of all, we looked at how other studies had assessed political orientation and found that some of them had assessed it with a scale from liberal to conservatives, while others had assessed it on a sort of left-leaning towards right-leaning scale. So we saw kind of both in global research, and we decided to just measure it with both scales.
Because we thought that maybe it’s some… you know, in some countries, sort of a scale from left to right makes more sense to people than a scale from liberal to conservatives and vice versa. So we sort of decided to just measure both, and then sort of compare results for both scales. Now, importantly, we also gave participants the option not to answer this question. So if participants felt like, you know, the scale didn’t make any sense to them at all, they also had the option to select that. And I think this is, you know, again, a point that shows how important it was to have local experts in most of the countries that we surveyed, right?
And this is also feedback that we got from some of our collaborators who were like, you know, this scale from left to right doesn’t really make sense in our country. And, you know, so it was super helpful to also know that and this also allowed us to include this in sort of the limitation of our paper. And indeed, we find that the relationship between political orientation and trust in scientists differs depending [on] which measure we look at. And this is also one of the figures of we have in our paper, where you can really see sort of the contrast between the different trust measures.
And indeed we find that, for example, when we look at political orientation and trust in scientists, in the US, then we see that sort of conservatives have lower trust in scientists when we used the measure from liberals to conservatives. But when we use the measure from left- to right-leaning, we find no effect of political orientation on trust in scientists in the US. So again, it shows how using different measures, can also sort of, you know, lead to different results. And this is something that we have made transparent in our paper.
NM [10:08]: Yes, exactly. And maybe because that’s perhaps interesting for listeners in the UK and in the UK, it’s similar but a little different. In the UK we find both effects for right-leaning and conservative views on trust in scientists, such as that right-leaning people have lower trust and also conservatives have lower trust in scientists in the UK.
AR [10:33]: One of the other things that you investigated in your research was whether trust in scientists is related to something known as “social dominance orientation”. Now, what is this term and what did your research show?
VC [10:48]: Yeah, so “social dominance orientation” is really the concept that, you know, people who score highly on social dominance orientation perceive that there are natural hierarchies in society that there are, you know, dominant people, or dominant groups, who sort of dominate more inferior groups. And they think that there are these essential hierarchies and you should be maintained.
And so previous studies have sort of looked at how social dominance orientation relates to trust in scientists. And mostly previous studies have shown that more people have the social dominance orientation – so the more people perceive that there are these natural hierarchies in society, that should be sort of supported and maintained – the less people are likely to trust scientists.
And one argument that has been made was that individuals who score highly in social dominance orientation sort of perceive universities as more liberal, as more hierarchy-attenuating institutions. And so therefore they also tend to trust scientists less. And indeed, this is also what we found in our study. So sort of supporting previous results that the more people have this social dominance orientation, the less likely they are to trust scientists.
AR [12:04]: Onto something slightly different and this comes back to this comes back to our conversation from earlier about science and scientists. When it comes to science communication, I’m personally interested in the distinction between different sciences and acknowledging that, you know, when we think of science, we try and treat it as this homogeneous entity. In your paper, of course, you note that you don’t distinguish between different scientific fields. And obviously, a study of yourself is looking not at scientists as a single group, but then as individual disciplines would just be far from trivial to even perform. Like you’d have far more questions and there’d be a lot more to understand there.
So what solution do you think there is to this issue of grouping distinct fields of research under a single umbrella of science, because something that is a fundamental science might have a very different scope for the public to trust in it, if it’s not impacting their lives so very much or doesn’t inherently impact funding policies and environmental policies and all of these things?
NM [13:05]: Well, I think, the most comprehensive solution to that would be doing multiple, many-lab studies and testing different disciplines, individually, or at least use different designs and ask people about their specific level of trust in climate scientists or environmental scientists versus social scientists and so on. How it would could also be done is to just ask for what people associate with the term “scientists”, which field comes to them […] and measure that and then control for that.
Past research shows that most people in many countries think of natural scientists when they hear the terms “science” and “scientists”. But again, depending on in which culture you are, like, for example, in China and South Korea, people might also associate like technology [and] engineering with that. And also most people have the stereotypical image of medicine or like doctors in their mind when they think of science and [that] would make sense… something scientific.
So well, it’s, as you said, definitely not… or it’s way too simple to generalise from science in general or like specifically medicine and so on, natural sciences to other disciplines, because yeah, well, there’s different degrees of polarisation, for example, among different issues. So trust might be more polarised or even overall lower among disciplines that are more involved in controversial policy debates, for example, such as climate change.
Many people have, less pronounced attitudes or trust in science in countries where certain issues are not that important, such as GMOs, genetic engineering, genetic modification, which is not a really big thing in my impression in some European countries or has been but declined a little bit, but is more important in the US, for example. So that’s a little bit more polarised or politicised, which might also affect levels of trust in scientists.
VC [15:34]: Yeah, thank you, Niels. And maybe something to add here. We also assessed trust in climate scientists, in our study and indeed have just published a preprint where we looked at whether levels of trust in scientists more generally and trust in climate scientists specifically differ. And indeed, we find that in most countries that we looked at, trust in scientists in general is higher than trusted climate scientists. And then we sort of look at what explains the difference.
And indeed we found, as Niels has also mentioned political polarisation, political orientation, playing an important role here, where trust in climate scientists is much more strongly driven by people’s political orientation then trust in scientists in general is. So again, we of course… as you mentioned, it would have been amazing if we were able to assess trust in many different types of scientists. But we sort of reduce it to scientists in general and trust in climate scientists. But we do hope that our study will inspire future studies that will then specifically look at different types of scientists, too.
AR [16:38]: Yeah, and I imagine that sort of aspects of social dominance orientation will also play into specifics like climate science or GMO or whatever, when people think that there’s like this social hierarchy that is inherent and should exist and shouldn’t be changed and so forth. That’s really quite interesting.
One of your, you know, in your research, one of your hypotheses in doing this was that trust in scientists relates to expectations about what societal goals scientists should prioritise. Can you tell our listeners about the four societal goals that you focused on and what you found?
VC [17:15]: Yeah, exactly. So we thought that, you know, first of all, we think it’s very important for the public and for policymakers to know which sort of sign scientific-research areas the public prioritises and what the public feels is important for scientists to tackle. And we looked specifically at sort of improving public health, solving energy problems, reducing poverty, and developing defence and military technology. And we asked participants to what extent they feel that scientists should prioritise this research goal. And, we found that participants assigned the highest priority to improving public health.
This is also perhaps not so surprising since, you know, our study was fielded in 2023 so, you know, coming out of the COVID pandemic. So this could have potentially affected this. And improving public health was then followed by solving energy problems, which also scored very highly, it’s very important for the public across countries. And this was again followed by reducing poverty. And then we find that the scale midpoint was sort of developing defence and military technology. So this sort of scored the lowest.
But again, here we find, you know, very, very strong differences across countries and global regions. So for example, supporting defence and military technology, which was sort of the research goal that was desired the least, this sort of scored the lowest in Uruguay and scored the highest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there we see like very, very big differences. So again, sort of the research goals that the public wishes for scientists to tackle really strongly differ across countries.
NM [19:00]: Yeah, and what we also did then was to study and to ask whether science actually tackles these goals and follows these priorities. And then we tested discrepancies, differences, between the perceived and the desired priorities of scientific research.
And, well, for the first three goals that Viktoria mentioned – improving public health, solving energy problems, reducing poverty – we found that on average, globally, people think that scientists do not prioritise this goal enough. So they said, “Oh they should prioritise to this goal, but they tackle it to a lower extent than I would desire.” And it was the other way around for the fourth goal, which was developing defence and military technology, so there people said, “Well, maybe scientists do pay too much attention to that.”
AR [20:02]: Coming to a sort of the end of your end of your research paper, in your discussion section, you say “Our study thus confirms, expands and strengthens previous work that refutes the narrative of a wide ranging crisis of trust.” At the start, you mentioned that you started this project in sort of 2020 when there was there were these narratives emerging in popular discourse that there is a lack of trust in scientists and in science.
But your research seems to suggest that there is no real crisis of trust, at least in the 68 countries that you’ve studied. So why is it a problem if there is a small number of people with low trust in scientists? Because there’ll always be outliers in any aspect of society, I imagine.
NM [20:46]: I think here it becomes important to consider the role of science communication. So more generally speaking about how people communicate about science, for example, on social media. And well in some countries, this sort of distrustful minority is comparatively loud on social media, very outspoken and more outspoken than people with moderate views or even trust higher trust in scientists.
And well this may create an impression of – or like a false impression of – public opinion about science [and] might even like, persuade or tempt others to think, well, “This is a minority that criticises science, that is distrustful… maybe it’s not a minority. Maybe it’s legitimate to have lower trust in scientists, to be skeptical… more legitimate.” It’s always kind of legitimate to be skeptical about scientists’ work. That’s important to note. But, so these kind of loud minorities might create false impressions of public opinion.
And the same goes to some extent for media reporting, media coverage. So they… if they promote this sort of false or short-sighted narrative of a crisis of trust in scientists, they might also actually create some sort of false impression of public opinion about science, which might then… I mean, it’s still hypothetical, but not too far fetched, I would say… which might then also have implications for those who observe media coverage and social-media communication and have power to take decisions such as policymakers.
VC [22:42]: Maybe to jump in here, I think that, you know, we should take distrusting minorities seriously. First of all, because, you know, our study provides… it’s cross-sectional, right? It provides sort of a snapshot of the current state of trust the scientist. But, you know, we don’t know… are these minorities increasing or decreasing globally, right? So it’s very important to sort of observe these minorities.
And we also don’t know I mean, you know, we’re… We might do this in a follow up study, but sort of looking at, well, who are these distrusting minorities specifically, right? And as Niels mentioned, if these are people that are in, you know, that have a certain power in society, these are people in policymaking, even these are just a minority, they could really sort of affect the consideration of evidence… of scientific evidence in policymaking.
So I think it’s really important to sort of study these distrusting minorities, identify who they are. And, definitely also, yeah, also take them seriously. And we also know from several studies that show that, you know, even minorities can sort of flip… can flip a majority in certain cases, right? So it’s very important to sort of observe these minorities, and sort of, you know, also take their concerns and their reasons for distrust seriously.
AR [23:59]: Something else that came up in your research was the finding that the perception of scientists’ openness is comparatively low. What does openness mean in the context of your research, and what are the solutions for tackling this issue?
NM [24:16]: Yeah, well, so this openness dimension… This addresses the perception that – measures the perception that – scientists are open, receptive to feedback from the public, the audience, willing to engage with it. And, well, we found that this dimension, this component of trustworthiness, is comparatively low globally. Which might indicate that people desire scientists to be more engaging be more open more to others’ views or, say, to the public. Which is then sort of, yeah… the task, or maybe a mission for science communication to use more, like, interactive formats where there’s actually dialog or conversation between science and publics, so as to provide forums where scientists can signal that they are open to yeah, others views in a way, or to revise their assumptions.
That being said, there’s still a normative dimension to that. So one could ask the question if scientists should actually be open to everyone’s feedback. I mean, in the end, they are experts and laypeople, quote unquote, laypeople are experts in some other shape or form as well. But, yeah, they are the trained professionals, so might not be the most beneficial thing in some contexts, if scientists would always revise their beliefs and or like their assumptions and findings in response to others criticisms and feedback.
VC [26:07]: And Niels made a very important point, right, about how this finding also, you know, is important for science communication. And in our study, we find that globally, 83% of the public agree that scientists should communicate about science with the general public. So this is, you know, an overwhelmingly large majority that really want scientists to talk to the public more. And so this is sort of one of the recommendations, if you will from this paper is, you know, for scientists to sort of act upon that and in the hope that this will also, you know, increase perceptions of openness, and then potentially also increase overall trust in scientists.
AR [26:47]: Your paper is soon going to be published, this research that you’ve done with nearly 72,000 people across 68 countries, and again, coming to your previous mention of openness, in the spirit of this openness, you also plan on publishing an online data-visualisation tool to allow readers to explore the data that you’ve collected – this wealth of data from nearly 72,000 participants across the globe. What features will this tool have and when do you expect it to be available? Because I can’t wait to play with it myself.
VC [27:18]: That’s great to hear. Yeah, so it was really important to us to really make our findings available to the media and to the public as best as we could. And that’s why we’ve invested considerable time – and this effort was led by Noel Strahm at the University of Bern – to really set up this online data-visualisation dashboard.
And what you can expect from that is basically you’ll be able to click through all the different countries, and so, you know, if you’re interested to see, to what extent do people in Switzerland or the UK think that scientists should communicate about science, for example, with the general public, then you’ll be able to just select Switzerland, or the UK, select individual countries basically, and just look at how public perceptions differ. You’ll also be able to see to what extent, you know, sort of the predictors of trust in scientists differ. So to what extent are, you know, men or women more likely to trust scientists in different countries.
So you will also be able to explore that and you’ll also sort of… Perhaps this is more relevant for, for other researchers, but you’ll also be able to see who was part of this global study specifically. So you can, you know, hover over a country and it will tell you, you know, these were to collaborators in Australia, for example, right? And then if someone’s interested in conducting follow-up studies on the topic, for example, or they’re looking for someone who has, you know, expertise in trust in scientists in Uganda, for example, then, you know, they can reach out to our collaborator there. So we also really hope that this will, you know, leads to more sort of collaborative research efforts.
AR [28:56]: Well, I just want to say thank you to the both of you for joining us on this episode of SciComm Conversations. And all the very best for the rest of your research, because this is by no means a done thing. So good luck with, any follow up studies that you’re going to be performing to try to understand the global nature of trust in science and scientists.
NM [29:14]: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us.
VC [29:17]: Thank you very much.
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