Trust in science and where the U.S. ranks

 

Nature had a paper about global patterns of trust in science. Given the attacks on science that are going on in the USA today, it's worth a look. 

It's open access, so anyone can look.

Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries

The abstract:

"Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists."

What about the good ol' United States?

In Figure 1, where the scale is " 1 = very low (trust in science), 3 = neither high nor low (trust in science), 5 = very high (trust in science), the USA scores a 3.86. Which doesn't actually seem too bad. Several countries I'd expect to be higher (like the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland) score lower. 

What about political orientation?  That appears more like I would expect.

"Our study also sheds light on individual attributes that are associated with lower trust in scientists—namely, conservative political orientation, higher [social dominance orientation] SDO and science-populist attitudes. Previous studies, which mostly focused on North America and Europe, have found right-leaning and conservative political orientation to be negatively associated with trust in scientists. Our study partly confirms these findings. We found a negative association between trust and conservative political orientation. However, we found a very small, positive relationship between right-leaning political orientation and trust. Given that some recent global social science studies used a left–right measure to assess political orientation while others used a liberal–conservative measure we used both measures and analysed how the results vary depending on the measure in question. We found that the relationships between the two measures of political orientation and trust vary substantially across countries (Fig. 3a,b and Supplementary Figs. 11 and 12). For example, in the USA, trust is associated with a liberal orientation but not with one’s self-placement on the left–right spectrum. More generally, right-leaning and conservative political orientation are negatively associated with trust in scientists in several European and North American countries, so previous research, which has disproportionally focused on these countries, has tended to stress right-leaning and conservative distrust."

But still, it's not as much as I would expect. The following, however, makes a LOT of sense.

"We also found that low trust in scientists is associated with science-related populist attitudes—that is, beliefs that people’s common sense is superior to the expertise of scientists and scientific institutions. This corroborates findings on single countries and provides evidence that populist resentment against science, a prevalent component of the trust crisis narrative, may undermine public trust in scientists."

Populist defines Donald Trump and JD Vance to a T, if I may say so. And I do.  Think COVID, anti-Fauci, RFK Jr., anti-vax, etc. Common sense beats science, and some adherents couldn't let it go even as they died of COVID. 

Then, of course, there's this, underscoring the importance of the denier community:

"While no country has low trust in scientists on average, lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority needs to be taken seriously. Distrusting minorities may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking, as well as decisions by individuals that can affect society at large, especially if they receive extensive news media coverage and include people in positions of power that can influence policymaking. A minority of 10% can be sufficient to flip a majority, and when a critical mass value of 25% is reached, majority opinion can be tipped. In the context of climate change, an agent-based model showed that an evidence-resistant minority can delay the process of public opinion converging with the scientific consensus." 

That last sentence is the truth, right there.

So, my bottom line is that while most people in this country (the USA) generally trust science, the distrustful are more vocal about their distrust, and they have captured the MAGA political movement. Until the MAGA shackles are shaken off, the USA will be a poor environment for science and the nurturing of the next generation of scientific talent. And willy-nilly across the board DOGE budget and staffing cuts certainly don't help that situation.