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Beyond Trust in Science: Why Understanding Institutions Matters

By Gordon Gauchat. Image Source: Harvard University. For decades, researchers have asked the public two basic questions about science: What do people know, and how much do they trust “science”? These questions have shaped an enormous body of research on scientific literacy, public attitudes, and confidence in scientific institutions. Yet another, arguably more fundamental question receives surprisingly little attention: What do people think science means? Consider the different ways science appears in public opinion surveys: “science and technology,” “scientists,” the “scientific community,” or even “the people running these institutions.” Sometimes researchers attempt to clarify the referent. For example, the Wellcome Global Monitor explains: “On this survey, when I say ‘science’ I mean the understanding we have about the world from observation and testing. When I say ‘scientists’ I mean people who study the Planet Earth, nature and medicine, among other things.” Such definitions are...
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When science becomes a threat–what can science communicators do?

By Luzia Heusler and Marlene Altenmüller. Image source: Rutgers. Most science communicators work hard to be accurate, transparent and clear. But what if accuracy is not enough because the problem is not what people understand but how the evidence makes them feel? Try a thought experiment. You read a study on a topic you care about. The methods look solid, the researcher sounds competent, the findings are clear. There is just one problem: the results contradict what you think is true and right. Would you judge the study the same way if it said the opposite? Research on motivated reasoning—the tendency to receive and judge information in a way that fits with existing preferences and beliefs—suggests most of us would not. We look at scientific evidence through the biased lens of our desires and priors, and we might not even notice that we do. Testing it on a topic that divides In our new paper , we asked how people respond psychologically when evidence clashes with their views. We cho...
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Humboldt's Literary Form of Science Communication

By Ghadeer Alsabah. Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806. In 1834, Alexander von Humboldt wrote to a friend of a ‘mad notion’ that refused to leave him. He wanted to encapsulate ‘the whole of the physical aspect of the universe in one work’, from its celestial wonders to its terrestrial events, as attentive to the nature of nebulae as he was to the ‘mosses clinging to a granite rock’. The book was to be called Cosmos, the word vast enough to accommodate the multifarious nature of Humboldt’s vision. It means the universe, of course, but also order and harmony. Similar to his fellow Naturphilosophen , Humboldt believed that the universe functioned as a unified organism, its internal order ever-shifting, with harmony arising from active, opposing forces balancing each other out. Cosmos has a third meaning, too: ornament, or adornment; beauty as the finishing touch to a whole that could well do without it. But perhaps that is where Humboldt diverges most cle...
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Conspiracy belief is a conspiracy

By Philip J. Wilson. My article takes a critical look at the scholarship of conspiracy belief and concludes that it is unfair to associate it too closely with those on the political right. The British physicist Sir John Pendry is reputed to have said: "Science is like a group of children chasing a ball on a playground. Everyone runs after the ball, and where the ball goes the crowd follows." Scientists (or their funding agencies) chase innovation. The article notes something similar among social scholars, except that the impetus for them is more like conformity:  "All too often, many of the fallacies that liberal commentators see as constitutive of the conspiracy theories they oppose can in fact be ascribed to their own analyses of current affairs." This quotation, from Harper & Sykes , suggests that a left-leaning political outlook finds its way into some scholars’ writing about conspiracy belief. Bearing in mind the need for reflexivity in social scholarship,...
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How scientists may unintentionally encourage exaggerated interpretations of their findings

By Uwe Peters. Source: Pixabay. Most scientists strive to communicate their findings as accurately as possible. But our latest research suggests that they may sometimes encourage exaggerated interpretations without intending to, not because they overstate their findings, but because their audience understands seemingly ordinary scientific language differently. For instance, if you read sentences such as “Statins reduce cardiovascular events" or "People benefit from a Mediterranean diet,” you would probably understand them immediately. They are short and clear. They also share an important linguistic feature: they make claims about whole categories (statins, people) without saying how many people or situations they apply to. Linguists call these statements generics. Scientists use them very frequently (e.g., in biomedical research articles ), as generics make scientific writing concise and readable. But when scientists write these sentences, do readers understand them in the ...
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