Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Lena Zils. 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...

 By Rod Abhari and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát.  Whether science is seen as “self-correcting” or “broken” depends in part on how the public understands retractions. Scientific retractions are increasingly used to correct the scientific record. Last year, over 10,000 academic articles were retracted, marking an all-time high. But while scientists may see retractions as an assurance of scientific integrity when a scientific topic has been the subject of political controversy, the public may see them as evidence of incompetence or even corruption.  Our recent article , available online in Public Understanding of Science, examined social media posts of the most discussed retracted COVID-19 articles in order to better understand the relationship between scientific retractions and the politicization of science.  When Retractions Failed In May 2020, The Lancet published a study concluding that hydroxychloroquine—a drug promoted by then-President Donald Trump—was ineffective a...

By Büsra Elif Yelbuz, Sümeyra Bengisu Akkurt, Sinan Alper and Onurcan Yılmaz. For years it was believed that the primary cause behind individuals rejecting science was merely a lack of knowledge. In line with this, a number of studies have suggested that individuals with greater knowledge tend to exhibit more trust in science and scientists. If this were as simple, the solution would be quite easy: Just share the facts and increase the communication of science-related topics. In fact, an entire field mostly focuses on this exact strategy, science communication, which is the practice of making scientific evidence readily available and easy to understand by practically everyone. Needless to say, however, the solution is not as simple as initially assumed. The COVID-19 pandemic, global warming, and the global energy crisis are just some of the examples in which we have seen science communication insufficient in raising public acceptance and trust in science. What seems to be the barrier,...