Public trust in science

ABSTRACT

It is widely recognized that the public benefits from well-placed trust in science. While expert advice may be wrong at times, nonexperts, on balance, benefit from following scientific experts rather than ignoring them. In short, the public needs science. Numerous professional codes such as the 2017 European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, scientific reports (e.g., American Association of Arts and Science. 2014. Public Trust in Vaccines: Defining a Research Agenda. https://www.amacad.org/sites/ default/files/publication/downloads/publicTrustVaccines.pdf) and academic scholarship emphasize the importance of public trust in science and recommend a variety of ways to promote it.¹ Less attention, however, is given to the converse relation between science and the public, namely how much science needs the public. This article examines this two-way relationship by considering the role of trust in science, both within scientific communities and between science and the public, where and how public mistrust arises, and what can be done to improve public trust in science.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust; expertise
• public understanding of science
• credibility
• science and society
• public resistance to science
• scientific authority
• science skepticism

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Victoria Wang for reading and commenting on an early draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The public trust building efforts include science education (especially K-12), ensuring research integrity and legal compliance by scientific institutions, as well as including the public in various areas of scientific governance (e.g. membership on research ethics boards), scientific practice (e.g. citizen science projects), and policy decision making (e.g. mini-publics/citizen juries). The importance of shoring public trust is sometimes seen as reason to avoid certain policies. For example, public trust may be compromised by relaxing protections on human research subjects (Resnik 2011) or mandating vaccines (Tampio 2021). In both cases, ensuring public trust arguably justifies such policy decisions even when the scientific benefit of permissive human subject research or the health benefits of mandating vaccines are compelling.

2 Some of the measured increases in public trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic were dramatic. An April 2020 survey of Great Britain showed a 19-percentage point increase from a 2015 poll into public interest in having scientists communicate about their research (Wellcome Monitor 2021; Wellcome Monitor 2016). In the USA and Canada, the number of people who agreed with the view ‘I am sceptical of science’ dropped by 8% from mid-2019 to late 2020, (3M State of Science Index 2020). The 2020 German science barometer survey showed levels of trust in science and research between 73% in April and 60% in November, compared with 46% in 2019 (Wissenschaft im Dialog 2020a).

3 There may be crisis situations where trust must be given more freely, for example, trusting an emergency room doctor to execute life-saving treatment. Alternatively, the crisis situation might shift assignments of trust from the individual physician to the institution as a whole, where trust in the Emergency Room or hospital infrastructure is sufficient to warrant accepting care. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this alternative reading.

4 This type of research environment has resulted in instances of poorly executed research and publication bias, as well as the ‘10-90 gap’. The 10/90 gap is the term adopted by the Global Forum for Health Research to describe the finding by the Commission on Health Research for Development in 1990 that less than 10% of global funding for health research is spent on diseases that afflict people in the Global South, where 90% of the world’s population resides and over 90% of all preventable deaths worldwide occur (Vidyasagar 2006). This health equity problem is largely attributed to a skewed incentive scheme to that values market returns over global health impact (Health Impact Fund ND).

5 Social science research shows that the public are extremely uncomfortable with the current social arrangement between industry and health research and practice (Hargreaves, Lewis, and Speers 2003; Lenzer 2004; Narayanan and Mathew 2019).

6 For public trust and adherence to public health measures enacted during the COVID pandemic, see Devine et al. (2021) and Goldberg et al. (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maya J. Goldenberg

Maya J. Goldenberg is Professor of Philosophy, researching the fundamental epistemic question, ‘How do we know what to believe?’ in health care. She has addressed this question in the pressing context of evidence-based medicine, the decision-making framework that relies on clinical trial evidence (especially randomized controlled trials) to inform individual patient care. Recently, she has broadened her research into the science-values complex to investigate vaccine hesitancy as illustrative of poor public trust in scientific institutions, published in a book, Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).