The Science Trust Gap: Overcoming Skepticism and Winning Hearts and Minds

Credit: NASA

During the pandemic, a third of people in the UK reported that their trust in science had increased, we recently discovered. But 7% said that it had decreased. Why is there such variety of responses?

For many years, it was thought that the main reason some people rejected science was a simple deficit of knowledge and a mooted fear of the unknown. Consistent with this, many surveys reported that attitudes to science are more positive among those people who know more about textbook science.

But if that were indeed the core problem, the remedy would be simple: inform people about the facts. This strategy, which dominated science communication through much of the later part of the 20th century, has, however, failed at multiple levels.

In controlled experiments, giving people scientific information was found not to change attitudes. And in the UK, scientific messaging over genetically modified technologies has even backfired.

The failure of the information-led strategy may be down to people discounting or avoiding information if it contradicts their beliefs—also known as confirmation bias. However, a second problem is that some trust neither the message nor the messenger. This means that distrust in science isn’t necessarily just down to a deficit of knowledge, but a deficit of trust.

With this in mind, many research teams, including ours, decided to find out why some people do and some people don’t trust science. One strong predictor for people distrusting science during the pandemic stood out: being distrusting of science in the first place.

Understanding distrust

Recent evidence has revealed that people who reject or distrust science are not especially well informed about it, but more importantly, they typically believe that they do understand the science.

This result has, over the past five years, been found over and over in studies investigating attitudes to a plethora of scientific issues, including vaccines and GM foods. It also holds, we discovered, even when no specific technology is asked about. However, they may not apply to certain politicized sciences, such as climate change.

Recent work also found that overconfident people who dislike science tend to have a misguided belief that theirs is the common viewpoint and hence that many others agree with them.

Other evidence suggests that some of those who reject science also gain psychological satisfaction by framing their alternative explanations in a manner that can’t be disproven. Such is often the nature of conspiracy theories—be it microchips in vaccines or COVID being caused by 5G radiation.

But the whole point of science is to examine and test theories that can be proven wrong—theories scientists call falsifiable. Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand,

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