Trust in science: assessing pandemic impacts in four EU countries Discussion paper by Cissi Askvall, Massimiano Bucchi, Birte Fähnrich, Brian Trench, Markus Weißkopf1
Trust in science can be considered an important aspect of science’s situation in society; in a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, these trust relations are accentuated and severely tested. Facing the novelty, complexity and wide impacts of the new coronavirus, the limits of scientific knowledge have been exposed and scientists have appealed for understanding and trust that they are doing their best to overcome these limits. Public health experts, virologists, epidemiologists, immunologists, infectious diseases experts, and increasingly also social psychologists and political scientists, have been challenged to advocate with confidence for social measures with wide effects even while their knowledge of the virus and the means to control or eliminate it is provisional. Either explicitly or implicitly they have been saying to their national and international audiences: This is the evidence we have. This is why we advise as we do. Trust Us. Political leaders, representing their societies, have claimed to be “following the science”, even as it became clearer that the science is diverse and contested. Trust ideas are very popular in many business fields, for example, in market research on brands, or in attempts to theorise the practice of public relations. Edelman, the global PR company, has been tracking trust in business, government, media and NGOs for twenty years. Their 2019 barometer2 shows that the top six countries in the world for trust in general are all Asian, China being the clear leader, followed by several other notably authoritarian countries. In their table of 26 countries, six of the seven with the lowest trust (or highest distrust) are European. This strongly suggests
that the barometer is actually measuring differences in political systems and civic cultures. Some academic writers have challenged this kind of survey work and the conceptions of trust on which they are based. The distinction is often made in sociology between personal trust and institutional trust on the basis that trust of individuals is relational, in a way that is not possible for institutions. Political scientist Russell Hardin (2006) suggests that confidence is a better term than trust when speaking of public attitudes to institutions, including science. Philosopher Onora O’Neill and science studies scholar Brian Wynne have challenged the notions of a crisis in trust that has particularly strong resonance in discussions of science in society. O’Neill points out that trust in judges and nurses has always been relatively high, and politicians and journalists relatively low, and that such poll findings show little variation over time. But it has been common for many years to situate discussions of trust in science in a lament about the decline in trust – or growth in distrust – of science. The British-based advocacy group Sense About Science still recalls 20 years after its founding that in 2001 “media scare stories were rife, and public confidence in science was at an all-time low”. Wynne (2006) challenged this view as a new deficit model of the public, referring to the “incessant agonising about the ‘public mistrust of science’ problem … there is no general, indiscriminate public mistrust or rejection of ‘science’; indeed, there are lots of enthusiasm for it – but this is discriminating enthusiasm”.
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