Science and public policy: Who distrusts whom about what? - Cultural Cognition of Health

More or less what I said at really great NSF-sponsored “trust” workshop at University of Nebraska this weekend. Slides here.

1.  What public distrust of science?

I want to address the relationship of trust to the science communication problem.

As I use the term, “ the science communication problem ” refers to the failure of valid, compelling, and widely accessible scientific evidence to dispel persistent cultural conflict over risks or other policy-relevant facts to which that evidence directly speaks.

The climate change debate is the most spectacular current example, but it is not the only instance of the science communication problem. Historically, public controversy over the safety of nuclear power fit this description. Another contemporary example is the political dispute over the risks and benefits of the HPV vaccine .

Distrust of science is a common explanation for the science communication problem. The authority of science, it is asserted, is in decline , particularly among individuals of a relatively “conservative” political outlook.

This is an empirical claim.  What evidence is there for believing that the public trusts scientists or scientific knowledge less today than it once did?

The NSF, which is sponsoring this very informative conference, has been compiling evidence on public attitudes toward science for quite some time as part of its annual Science Indicators series.

One measure of how the pubic regards science is its expressed support for federal funding of scientific research.  In 1985, the public supported federal science funding by a margin of about 80% to 20%. Today the margin in the same—as it was at every point between then and now.

Back in 1981, the proportion of the public who thought that the government was spending too little to support scientific research outnumbered the proportion who thought that the government was spending too much by a margin of 3:2.

Today around four times as many people say the government is spending too little on scientific research than say it is spending too much.

Yes, there is mounting congressional resistance to funding science in the U.S.–but that’s not because of any creeping “anti-science” sensibility in the U.S. public.

Well, how would you feel if your child told you he or she was marrying a scientist? About 70% of the public in 1983 said that would make them happy.  The proportion who said that grew to 80% by 2001, and grew another 5% or so in the last decade.

Are “scientists … helping to solve challenging problems”? Are they “dedicated people who work for the good of humanity”?

About 90% of Americans say yes.

Do you think you can squeeze the 75% of Republicans who say they “don’t believe in human-caused climate change” from the remainder? Better double check your math.

In sum, there isn’t any evidence that creeping distrust in science explains the science communication problem, because there’s no evidence either that Americans don’t trust scientists or that fewer of them trust them now than in the past.

Of course, if you like, you can treat the science communication problem itself as proof of such distrust.  Necessarily, you might say, the public distrusts scientists if members of the public are in conflict over matters on which scientists aren’t.

But then the “public distrust in science” explanation becomes analytic rather than empirical.  It becomes, in other words, not an explanation for the science communication problem but a restatement of it.

If we want to identify the source of the science communication problem, simply defining the problem as a form of “public distrust” in science—on top of being a weird thing to do, given the abundant evidence that the American public reveres science and scientists —necessarily fails to tell us what we are interested in figuring out, and confuses a lot of people who want to make things better.