By Lena Zils.
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| Image credit: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images. |
A pandemic. A public trying to make sense of it all. In moments of uncertainty, science moves to the centre of public life, and so does the question of how much people trust it. A new longitudinal study from Switzerland asks: what actually moves public attitudes toward science, and does a pandemic change the answer?
Most research on public attitudes toward science captures a single moment, a snapshot. But attitudes don't work like snapshots. They shift, accumulate, and respond to the world around them. That's why we followed the same individuals across three waves of the Science Barometer Switzerland between 2016 and 2022, tracking how their views on science evolved through calmer times and through the upheaval of COVID-19.
The findings are nuanced, occasionally surprising, and carry real implications for anyone trying to communicate science to the public.
The Pandemic Changed the Rules
During the pre-pandemic period (2016–2019), the picture was relatively straightforward. Education and religiosity were the dominant factors shaping how science attitudes shifted. People with university degrees showed smaller increases in trust in science, not because they became more skeptical, but because they were already near the ceiling. Meanwhile, more religious respondents experienced steeper declines in positivistic attitudes toward science, perhaps reflecting a perceived tension between faith and technocratic worldviews.
Then the pandemic hit, and everything got more complicated.
Between 2019 and 2022, a greater number of factors started influencing science attitudes. Gender emerged as significant: women showed more pronounced increases in trust in science coverage. Political orientation mattered too, with right-leaning respondents showing smaller declines in self-perceived knowledge about science. And respondents with only compulsory schooling—the least formally educated group—showed a striking pattern: their positivistic attitudes toward science increased, even while their interest in science dropped sharply.
We interpret this apparent contradiction through the lens of the "rally-around-the-flag" effect: a well-documented phenomenon where perceived crises push people toward established authorities. During COVID-19, science became one of those authorities. People who might otherwise be disengaged from science were, at least temporarily, more likely to see it as a source of solutions, even if their day-to-day curiosity about it did not grow.
Digital Media as an Anchor for Science Trust
One of the study's most practically relevant findings concerns media use. We tracked how frequently participants turned to a range of channels—public and private TV and radio, newspapers, online news, science magazines, Wikipedia, social media, and video platforms—for science information.
The results complicate some common assumptions. During the pandemic period, online legacy media—particularly online newspapers and Wikipedia—emerged as buffers against declining trust in science and scientists. People who regularly used these sources were better protected against the erosion of confidence in scientific institutions. This suggests that the digital versions of established news outlets may carry something of the credibility of their print counterparts, and that Wikipedia—often dismissed as unreliable—plays a genuinely positive role in how people relate to science.
Interestingly, we found no clear difference between public and private broadcasters in how they affected science attitudes. This challenges a common assumption that publicly funded media inherently do a better job of fostering science trust.
Social media, meanwhile, showed no significant effect in either direction. This result warrants caution, however: the measure of social media use was broad and undifferentiated. Someone passively scrolling past science headlines is having a very different experience from someone actively engaging with researchers on a platform, and the study couldn't distinguish between these.
What This Means for Science Communicators
The study's most urgent practical message may be this: a one-size-fits-all approach to science communication isn't just ineffective; it may be actively missing those who need it most.
Audiences are not uniform. The factors that drive science attitudes among highly educated urban professionals are different from those that shape views among people with less formal education or strong religious commitments. During a crisis, these differences don't disappear; they become more pronounced.
For science communicators, this points toward a few concrete priorities. First, digital platforms matter more than ever. Investing in high-quality, accessible online science journalism and maintaining accurate, well-sourced reference content—of the kind Wikipedia strives to provide—appears to have real downstream effects on public trust. Second, reaching less-educated audiences requires targeted strategies that go beyond assuming interest will follow understanding. The data suggest that interest and positivistic belief in science can actually move in opposite directions for this group—a nuance that calls for creative communication approaches.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the pandemic showed that crises can be moments of opportunity for science communication, not just threat. When uncertainty rises, so does the public's openness to scientific authority. The question is whether science communicators are ready to meet that openness with messages that are clear, honest, and accessible.
The Bigger Picture
This study is one of relatively few to track the same individuals over multiple years, through radically different social contexts. That longitudinal design comes with real limitations: sample sizes shrank considerably across waves, and the final group skewed older and more educated than the Swiss population at large.
But the core contribution stands: science attitudes are not static, and the forces that shape them shift depending on what is happening in the world. Media use matters. Education matters. Religiosity matters. And when a pandemic arrives, all of these factors interact in ways that static surveys cannot fully capture.
Read the original research: Long-term media effects on public attitudes toward science in Switzerland: A panel survey of the Swiss population.
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