Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story

Why we don’t really know what the public thinks about science

Measuring trust isn’t enough. Furthering knowledge about the institutions and norms of science is the best way to build credibility.

A Data Utopia for Science-of-Science

Here I want to briefly sketch out a vision for how to solve a key set of problems facing science-of-science researchers, using the relatively new idea of a ‘data trust.’ In my ideal wor…

Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps stress the role of ideology: when people perceive scientists of a particular discipline to be ideologically like-minded, they tend to trust them more. Here, we report two findings: first, trust gaps between disciplines also exist in France—a representative sample of the French population (N = 1012) trusted researchers in biology and physics more than researchers studying climate science, economics, or sociology. Second, the more precise and consensual participants perceive scientific findings to be, the more they tend to trust the scientists (across and within disciplines). While these findings are correlational, they align with a non-ideological explanation of trust in science: the rational impression account. This account proposes that people can come to trust scientists by relying on basic cognitive inference processes, which tend to be generally rational.

Can we measure trust in scientific publications? - LSE Impact

Jonathon Alexis Coates outlines how a constellation of static and dynamic indicators could provide a means for assessing the trustworthiness of published research

Why Should I Trust You?

News Commentary Podcast · Updated Weekly · Bold, unfiltered, and uncompromisingly honest, Why Should I Trust You?  is a weekly podcast that looks at the breakdown in trust for science and public health. It drops every Thursday, with occasional…

The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

Research ethics: 3 ways to blow the whistle

Reporting suspicions of scientific fraud is rarely easy, but some paths are more effective than others.

Why I don’t trust most human-AI interaction experimental research – Jason Collins blog

Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.

Science Must Decentralize

Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat

What stories should we tell about scientific progress now?

In search of the mysterious fruits of basic science

Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it

Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…

Breaking the silence

Research on science communication has largely focused on teaching scientists how to describe their studies in ways that interest the public while deepening their understanding of scientific exploration. However, there is another, often overlooked side to science communication—how scientists respond when questions arise about the integrity of their research. Often, the tendency has been to stay silent and wait for any controversy to pass or be resolved in professional forums. But in an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny. For better or worse, journalists, social media professionals, and the public may take a response of “no comment” as a concession that the critics are correct, so forthright communication about research questions is more urgent than ever.

Can anyone fix science?

Science has always been in crisis. This is fine.