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Abstract
Aim: In recent decades, the notion of addiction as a brain disease has become influential among scientists, public institutions, and addiction treatment professionals, and its popularity raises the question of how biomedical science affects public perceptions of illness. Although existing research has examined how laypeople interpret disease models of addiction, few studies address how they interpret the brain disease model as presented by the media, the version that most citizens are likely to encounter in their everyday lives. This article contributes to existing research by examining Swedish laypeople’s interpretations of a news article presenting biomedical research on addiction and analyzing how trust intervenes in their interpretations.
Methods: Drawing on an audience study design with qualitative interviews, the participants were asked to read and discuss a newspaper article that explained how alcohol, amphetamine, and nicotine affect the brain.
Results: The analysis shows that their interpretations depended on how they perceived their own ability to assess the science portrayed in the article. The participants trust doctors and scientists but doubt their own ability to assess the science, and trust is therefore provisional or pending until this situation changes. In addition, trust requires that the participants are able to recognize and identify with the contents of the news article.
Conclusion: This pattern can be understood as a way of dealing with the contradictory expectations laypeople face – they are expected to trust scientific knowledge and to evaluate knowledge claims rationally, but they do not have access to the knowledge that would, supposedly, enable them to do so.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the interviewees for their valuable contributions and the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Eight participants were interviewed by the project leader Alexandra Bogren and research assistant Katarina Winter, while the other 17 participants were interviewed by K. Winter. A. Bogren is solely responsible for the analysis and writing of the present paper.
2 The interviews also examined if the interviewees believed that the news article was somehow relevant to their own consumption, if they usually read similar articles in the paper, and what they thought about the article as compared to other articles on the topic, but this part of the discussion is not analyzed in the present paper.
3 Acamprosate, sold under the brand names Campral or Aotal, is a medication for treating alcohol dependence.
4 IP17 stands for interviewee no 17. The interviewees’ pseudonyms and ages are presented with the quotes. Quotes have been edited to increase understandability, but this was done as little as possible to retain colloquial expressions.
5 Unless in those cases when they talked about media reporting in general, criticizing evening papers for their unserious tone. This type of criticism appeared primarily in discussion of the evening paper article.
6 The exception, Johan (IP6), says that he fully accepts the contents of the article: ‘I don’t question anything, I buy it all. […] It feels like I distrust drug-related scientific articles less than other articles, because it’s like – it’s such a serious topic and it’s not like they would benefit from making things up. There’s no reward for lying.’