Trust in science? Well for neuroscientists, less so for political scientists

UvA psychologists published the results of the research in the journal PLOS ONE. How can the differences between scientists be explained? Folya asked doctoral student and first author Vukasin Gligorić.

Trust in science varies from one scientist to another. No surprise after all?
– No, but this has not been proven before. Most research on trust in science groups all scientists together, distinguishing between scientists. For example, people believe that neuroscientists are more competent than social scientists and that marine biologists are warmer and more honest than other scientists. We wanted to investigate whether these differences also apply to trust. In the study we characterized 45 types of scientists and asked nearly three thousand Americans to indicate their confidence in each type of scientist on a scale from 1 to 7.

Epidemiologists, virologists, medical researchers, immunologists, ecologists and data scientists score high, while economists and political scientists score low on confidence. How can this be explained?
“It would be a good idea to first say that the differences in confidence between scientists are not large and that all scientists scored very high. Moreover, the degree of confidence varies more For each participant Compared to each scientist: Participants who had lower trust in one type of scientist also had lower trust in other types.

“What is striking is that political scientists and economists can rely on the least amount of trust. This may have to do with stereotypes about researchers and political ideology: I think that people in general are dissatisfied with the current political and economic system and this does not contribute to building trust.”