Study coauthored by NCSE's Branch featured in Bloomberg
The White House from Washington, DC - White House Coronavirus Update Briefing.
"How Shame, Blame and the Internet Eroded Trust in Science," F. D. Flam's contribution to Bloomberg's Republic of Distrust series (October 9, 2024), asked the question "Has America lost its faith in science?" — and cited a study coauthored by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch in the course of answering it.
Noting that trust in science seems to have dwindled among the American public but not as much as trust in other institutions, Flam wrote, "How do we make sense of these seemingly contradictory impulses? A study led by political scientist Jon Miller of the University of Michigan offers a compelling possibility: He and his research partners found that from 2016 to 2020, trust in science overall remained relatively steady."
"But look deeper into the data," she continued, "and you'll see a shift — people grew increasingly skeptical or increasingly trusting of scientific expertise, with the middle ground hollowed out. That trend held true when the researchers sliced the data by partisanship and scientific literacy. (Democrats, Republicans and those with either low or high levels of scientific knowledge all became either more or less trusting.)"
The study, "Citizen attitudes toward science and technology, 1957–2020: Measurement, stability, and the Trump challenge," was published in the journal Science and Public Policy. Besides Miller and Branch, the authors were Belén Laspra and Carmelo Polino, Robert T. Pennock, and Mark Ackerman.
