Have the public EVER trusted scientists?

Probably not...

Alexander the Great demonstrating that he trusts his physician, Philip of Acarnania by drinking a medicinal draught prepared by him, despite allegations it was a poison (although his expression seems to ask ‘are you sure?’). Oil painting by Benjamin West, c1771 (Wellcome Collection, CC)

Over the years, scientists have done a lot to earn our trust, but they’ve also squandered it in some spectacular ways. The natural philosophers who applied scientific principles to argue for the abolition of slavery also insisted that women were physiologically unfit to manage their own money or to vote. Scientists working on the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis between the 1930s and 1970s worked for the benefit of humankind, but they also knowingly withheld treatment from black men, causing many to die as unwitting, non-consenting research subjects. Modern science is inarguably one of humanity’s crowning achievements. But the savagery and cruelty inflicted in its name is one of our greatest sources of shame.

When you’re telling stories about science, it quickly becomes clear that you’re often dealing with co-existing extremes: altruism and callousness, exploration and closed-mindedness, tolerance and bigotry. ‘No tree … can grow to heaven’, the psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote, ‘unless its roots reach down to hell.’

Science is just as messy as the rest of life and some people – maybe even most people – get screwed over, insulted, exploited, dismissed. And we should recognise this, I think, when talking about the perennial obsession with ‘restoring trust in scientists’. While it’s easy for some people to trust scientists, in other words, lots of people have incredibly good reasons for their mistrust.

With this in mind, I thought I’d try to take seriously the pandemic-era clarion call to ‘restore trust in scientists’. Starting from where we are now, I thought I’d look back for a time when science was trusted¹.

As you’ll have noticed, science and trust have been prominently on the agenda for a couple of decades, though for obvious reasons have come into sharp focus over the last few years. Think tanks and research centres like the Wellcome Trust and the Pew Research Centre have brought mixed messages, but recent figures are bleak. According to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Centre, only 29% of adults have ‘a great deal of confidence’ in medical scientists. That figure was 40% just two years earlier, which is a bit better, but still not great. When it came to COVID, YouGov found that 28% of Americans believed Bill Gates intended to use the vaccine rollout to give them an armful of microchips (a further 32% at least entertained the thought, ticking the ‘unsure’ box).

As commentators never tire of pointing out, it’s hard to pull anything meaningful out of such broad questions about trusting scientists. For one, not everyone has the same notion of ‘trust’, and not everyone agrees what a ‘scientist’ is. Plus, those on the political left are more likely to trust the science around climate change, but are suspicious of genetic modification. And vice versa for those on the right. And that’s because science doesn’t exist in a pure form. It’s shaped by (and it shapes) human culture and society. And that makes studying trust and science into a problem for the humanities.

It’s not a problem I’m going to address myself. I’d like to, but my agent has already made it clear that a book about the history of public trust in science would be a hard sell. But all this talk of restoring trust piqued my interest. It suggested there was a time when ‘we’ trusted scientists. So, riding roughshod over all the methodological problems with even asking that question seriously, I decided to go in search for this halcyon era when we could say with confidence that the public trusted scientists.

Judging by the editorials and articles written this century, the golden age we’re searching for can’t have been very recent. In 1999, Nature featured an article that could have been written last week, asking precisely the same question. ‘The relationship between the scientific community and the general public’, the author concluded, ‘has never been worse in living memory^⁠’.

Over a decade earlier, and we find articles reaching similar conclusions, telling readers how recently ‘untrustworthiness has seemed to increase’. If that was the case, it was increasing from an already sky-high level, since studies have also shown that during and after the Second World War, the public felt ‘threatened’ by science after having witnessed its genocidal ends. No trust there, then. Let’s go back a bit more.

^⁠Throughout the nineteenth century, organisations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and its British equivalent (now British Science Association) were trying to make science palatable to a sceptical and even hostile public. Before that, in 1830, Charles Babbage was able to write about the ‘decline of science in England’. Technically the ‘decline of science’ isn’t quite the same thing, but that’s because if we took our timeline back any further no one concerned themselves with whether we could trust science or not. We’d instead reach a time when the public openly took the piss out of ‘men of science’ who they saw as rich idiots earnestly trying to weigh air.

It seems we’ve never trusted scientists. Not, at least, beyond vague recollections that we used to trust the men in white coats. And I’d be willing to bet that this hazy sense of past trust is only true for a small proportion of the population – those who had the vote, a voice, power – and for a mere blip in time.

Science leaders see a ‘decline’ in trust as mainly a communications issue (though they identify a range of problems from a lack of diversity in the workforce to the inaccessibility of experts). They have to get better at dealing with the media and tackling social media misinformation, they say, and otherwise being clear about what they do and don’t know. If they can do those things, they wouldn’t leave so many information vacuums, and the public would be more ready to trust them. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid Response Coordinator, said as much in November 2022. Here:

New York Tech News called it ‘science’s challenge’ to ‘teach people how to discern fact from fiction’. Scientists writing in the prestigious German Chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, also felt the way back to trustworthy science was for scientists to ‘be more intelligible to the public’.

This is all good advice for individual scientists – for anyone, in fact, who has a public-facing job – but, in my view, such a fix papers over the cracks. No amount of good communication is going to change the fact that science is part of a deeply unjust society, shaped just as much by politics and profit motives as the desire to cure disease and feed the hungry.

Here’s a question I’d like to ask: is it time to acknowledge that perhaps we’re not really ‘restoring’ trust in science, but building it for the first time? And, if we’re building trust for the first time, how should we be doing things differently?

1. This isn’t an academic exercise, just a rhetorical point about the fleeting nature of ‘our’ trust in scientists, and how easy it is for mistrust to become entrenched.