Rebuilding Trust in Science

A Morton L. Mandel Conversation

2129th Stated Meeting | October 16, 2024 | House of the Academy, Cambridge, MA, and Virtual
 

On October 16, 2024, the Academy hosted a discussion on the importance of science communication and strategies to bridge the gap between science and the public. The event featured Sean Decatur (American Museum of Natural History) and Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) in conversation with Holden Thorp (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Shirley Malcom (American Association for the Advancement of Science) offered opening remarks and Cristine Russell (formerly, Harvard Kennedy School) provided some final comments.

The panelists discussed how scientists, scholars, journalists, institutional leaders, and others who shape public opinion and trust can engage with a divided public in constructive ways and rebuild the public’s trust in science. An edited transcript of the program follows.

Shirley Malcom

Shirley Malcom is Senior Advisor to the CEO and Director of the SEA Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and serves as the Academy’s International Secretary.
 

Good evening. I’m Shirley Malcom. I am Senior Advisor to the CEO and Director of SEA Change at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a member of the Academy’s Council and as the International Secretary of the Academy, it is my pleasure to formally call to order the 2129th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Our conversation on rebuilding, or perhaps building, trust in science is being held as a Morton L. Mandel Conversation. Morton Mandel was a dedicated member of the Academy who believed in the power of connecting across disciplines, professions, and geography in service to the common good. In the spirit of his vision and generous gift, we have designed today’s event as a discussion both among our distinguished panelists and between them and our audience, whether you are here in person or joining virtually. We welcome you and we welcome your contributions.

The Academy is deeply invested in the issue of trust in science and effective science communication. The Public Face of Science project produced three reports touching upon the complex and evolving relationship between scientists and the public. You can find those reports and related materials on the Academy’s website. I’m pleased that several members of the Public Face of Science project are here with us this evening. The project’s reports inspired robust discussion and arrived at a crucial time for those who care about successful science communication. They were finalized on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that underscored how essential it is to have a healthy relationship between science and society and how fragile and fraught that relationship truly is.

Today, as circumstances continue to evolve politically and culturally, the Academy remains committed to advancing public trust in science in the United States. Tomorrow we are convening a small group here in Cambridge to revisit the work of the Public Face of Science project and consider some updated recommendations. In the spirit of the Academy’s interdisciplinarity, those conversations really will begin this evening with all of you. Though there is so much uncertainty around this issue, what we know for sure is that scientists cannot solve this problem alone. It is wonderful to convene members representing so many different fields and perspectives as we turn our attention to the question of how scientists, scholars, journalists, institutional leaders, and others who shape public opinion and trust can engage with the divided public in constructive ways. The expertise and ideas you share this evening will inform our conversations tomorrow. We know that rebuilding trust in science will take time and can only be done successfully if we work together.

It is now my pleasure to turn things over to my friend and colleague, Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who will moderate our panel discussion.

Holden Thorp

Holden Thorp is Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
 

I’m delighted to be here this evening and for the next few days to talk about rebuilding trust in science. We have a large audience watching online, showing the deep interest that so many have about this important topic. I’m very excited to hear from our two panelists. Naomi Oreskes is a trained geoscientist and historian who has consulted various government offices about global warming. Her book, The Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, which was co­authored with Erik Conway, is an absolute classic in the genre, the Rosetta Stone by which all books in this area are written. She won the much coveted Watson Davis Prize from the History of Science Society in 2011 for this book, as well as many other honors, including having the editor of Science teach a class at George Washington University that’s based largely on her book. I have studied it in great detail with my students. In the first half of our class we discuss Naomi’s book, and in the second half of the class we look at what has happened since the book was published, which unfolded more or less as Naomi predicted.

Our second speaker, Sean Decatur, is President of the American Museum of Natural History. He joined the museum in April 2023, and has presided over the opening of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. If you haven’t been to the Gilder Center yet, I encourage you to go as soon as possible to see that magnificent facility. It is the embodiment of a lot of the things that we’re here to talk about this evening. Sean’s plans for the Center are both inspirational and instructive. I got my start in administration running the science museum on the UNC campus, which is about five orders of magnitude less impactful than the American Museum of Natural History, but I have some appreciation for informal science education.

My first question for both of you is, where are we with trust in science and trust in institutions in the United States generally? We see in the Pew data that trust in institutions in this country is declining. A new set of Pew data will be released next month, and many of us are eager to see what that data show. What do you think is going on with trust in science in America? Is it really declining? Or not? Is there a way for science to decouple from other institutions so that if trust in all the other institutions is declining then science doesn’t have to necessarily go down with them? To me that seems to be the challenge more than almost anything else. Naomi, we’ll start with you and then turn to Sean.

Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
 

Thank you for inviting me to be here tonight. I appreciate the way you have framed the question because we actually have a lot of data about trust in science. But what we know isn’t always reflected in the way the data are presented. Many of us have seen the raging headlines in some journals about the crisis in science and the crisis of public trust, and those kinds of headlines get a lot of attention. But I think they do a disservice to what we’re facing. As you suggested, if we look at the data, particularly if we go back to the 1970s, we see a couple of important trends. One is that trust in institutions broadly, like government, banking, and journalism, has been declining for a long time. That’s a big cultural trend. Science is part of society, so we’re not immune from the larger trends that affect society as a whole. If we want to think about the overall position of science, then we have to think more broadly about why trust in institutions has declined.

That said, there is some good news in this story. If you’re familiar with the Pew data, you know that trust in science has declined less than trust in other institutions. Now it’s not something to jump up and down and say, “We’re not as bad as the rest of them.” In fact, trust in science overall is second only to trust in the military in the United States. It’s a little different in other countries. Trust in science remained relatively unchanged from the 1970s until quite recently. So most of these scary headlines about a crisis of trust in science are not actually supported by the data.

However, there are two things that we need to pay attention to. One concerns what has happened in the last few years and, as you said, we’re eagerly awaiting the new Pew data because we do know that things have changed post-pandemic, and there is evidence that trust in science took a hit during the pandemic. What we don’t know yet is how bad was the hit? This year’s data will give us at least some indication of that, and depending on what we see I think it will affect what we need to do.1And the other factor is something I’ve written about in the journal of this august institution. I had a piece in Dædalus recently explaining that the crisis of trust in science in America, to the extent that there is one, is a crisis of conservative trust.2

If you unpack the data what you see is that, broadly, most Americans do trust science. Democrats and Independents trust science a lot and Republicans and people who lean conservative don’t. And the gap is very large. We’re not talking about two or three percentage points. We’re talking about ten, twenty, or thirty percentage points. This enormous gap is historically significant. If we go back to the 1970s, Republicans in general tended to trust science more than Democrats, but that flips and we see the curves crossing in the 1990s. This tells us that a major social change happened about thirty years ago. It’s not about anything that we did this week, this month, or this year. It’s not really even about the pandemic, although the pandemic may have altered or exacerbated those trends. There’s something bigger and deeper here, which has to do with the broader pattern of political polarization in this country.

How do we as scientists deal with that? How do we regain trust among conservatives? Given what we know about what’s caused the problem, it is not going to be easy. How do we decouple ourselves from some of these other broader changes? I think that’s going to be especially difficult, because one of the reasons conservative trust in science has fallen so much in the last thirty years or so has to do with conservative attitudes toward government and the relationship between American science and the American government. This is where I think we are facing something that is quite sticky and without a simple solution.

A tremendous amount of support for science in this country comes from the U.S. federal government, with additional support from state governments. Many of us in this room have fought hard to maintain, sustain, and expand federal government support for science, because we know that support is absolutely crucial to the strength of the scientific enterprise. Yet, the linkage between science and the federal government is a major part of the reason why many American conservatives, who generally distrust the federal government—who generally have a worldview of being suspicious of “big government”—distrust science. The coupling of science to government in the minds of conservatives, not just ideologically but practically, has created a problem in terms of gaining and sustaining the trust of American conservatives.

So that’s a diagnosis, and not a solution, because first you have to diagnose the problem.

THORP: That’s an excellent analysis, as always. Sean, you see the public coming by the millions into your building. For most of us who teach at a college or university, our view of the public is the undergraduate who has elected to come to our institution, which is not very representative. You have a different perspective. Where do we stand in terms of what you see?

Sean Decatur

Sean Decatur is President of the American Museum of Natural History. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
 

Let me start by separating science and scientific institutions. When we talk about trust in scientific institutions and trust in an institutional voice of science or an authoritative presence of science, I agree with Naomi completely that there’s been a conflation between scientific institutions and a broader set of institutions that people have had declining trust and confidence in for some time. When we think about the linkage of science with government, I would add private industry into the mix. If we think of science associated with the tech industry, which is one of the more distrusted entities for most people, those are all connections of science with voices that are not particularly trusted at this moment.

I think we sometimes use science and trust in science to refer to three different things. There’s science as an institution. There’s science as a body of knowledge, or at least it’s presented as a body of knowledge—that is, a collection of facts and information. And then there’s science as a process, like the epistemological view of science. I think there’s an issue with trust in science as an institution, but that’s coupled with trust in institutions generally.

For science as a body of knowledge or a collection of information, there are moments of suspicion because knowledge changes over time. And that uncertainty can be jarring to some: that what is a fact one moment may actually not be considered a fact at another moment. Scientists, but also the media and others, present a confusing picture of what we mean by a scientific fact, creating a sense of uneasiness when we say that something is scientific knowledge.

The third category, science as a process, may be the thing that people have the most trust and confidence in. There was a National Science Foundation study a little while ago that showed that if you ask questions about science—for instance, what is a hypothesis?—there’s a correlation between people who understand how the scientific process works, who understand the connection between evidence and conclusion, and who say that they trust science. People who understand science are more comfortable with science, and so they trust it.

There’s something about the process of knowledge generation that allows people to trust and have confidence in science. We need to shift the emphasis away from the idea that people should trust science as an institution and focus instead on fostering trust through investing in education about the process so that people have confidence in how the process works. That is the shift we need to make, and educational institutions and museums are doing that.

THORP: Sean, you have been very restrained about not plugging your new building, but that’s precisely what your new building does. There’s an election coming up in the United States. And while partisan attitudes are important to consider, so is reaching out to people who don’t trust science for perfectly good reasons—like science hasn’t been trustworthy to them over the years, or their religious views conflict with science. How are we going to win over these people?

DECATUR: Let me put my answer in the context of some reflections from a year and a half ago when I moved from rural Ohio to New York City, two very culturally different places. What’s fascinating is when I was describing to some of my friends and neighbors in rural Ohio that I was leaving my job at Kenyon and going to New York, if I just left it that I was going to New York, it was as if I was going to be falling off the edge of the planet. Folks were worried about me. What was going to happen? Did I know what I was getting into? But if I said I was going to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that had a fond connotation for many of them. Maybe they were thinking about dinosaurs and other exhibits. Those are things that folks can embrace. The museum has objects and evidence that you can observe about the physical world.

There’s a sense in which people across a broad range of religious, ideological, and political views can embrace something about the museum, which is reflected in the fact that we get four and a half million visitors each year and that on any given day we have a fascinating cross-section of people who come into the museum. There’s something that is fundamentally attractive to us as humans about wanting to understand our world that science actually speaks to. How can we get at that in terms of how we present an understanding of science? It may mean not starting with the things that are going to feel like they are ideologically heavy. We need to find common ground and then build up to things that are heavier. That approach is probably the best way to reach as many people as we can.

ORESKES: I agree completely. As you were speaking, it reminded me of something I learned early in my teaching career. During my first year teaching, I had a cat that had kittens. (In those days it was still socially acceptable to have an unspayed cat.) When my cat needed to move her kittens, she didn’t just stand there demanding that the kittens move. My cat would go to the kittens and pick them up and put them where she needed them to be. And that became a metaphor for me in teaching. I can’t tell you how many times I heard colleagues say, “Freshman should come to college with calculus. They should come to college with thermodynamics. They should, should, should, should.” And I remember thinking well, yeah, okay, they should, but they don’t.

We have to meet our first-year students where they are. We have to go to them and carry them along. In a sense that’s what I hear you saying. That in any kind of education, whether formal or informal, we have to let go of our prior expectations of what our audiences should know, what they should believe, what they should think, and accept what they do know and think, and work with that.

This issue of lack of trust in science didn’t start with the last election cycle nor did it start with the pandemic. It’s been brewing for more than thirty years. Now the scientific community is doing many of the things that we need to do, and museums are helping with that.

We have done a lot to move in the direction that we need to, but a problem that took thirty years to develop will likely take thirty years to solve. I think one of the really important things we need to do, which is hard, is to be patient and to realize that this is a long game, and it is not about what’s going to happen in the next four weeks. Whatever happens in this presidential election we have to take a long view and think about how we continue to build the institutions, the programs, the approaches to teaching, in both formal and informal education, that will reach people in diverse ways.

We have already begun that. When I was in graduate school, if you wanted to do public outreach, if you wanted to take a class in writing or public speaking, if you wanted to write an opinion piece, your professors told you in no uncertain terms that you didn’t have time for that. That was their polite way of convincing you that those things weren’t important. I was in graduate school when Carl Sagan was famous, and I remember hearing scientists and professors say terrible things about Carl Sagan—that he was a popularizer, that he was a grandstander, that he was egotistical. Well, maybe he was. I didn’t know the man personally. But so what? He did so much good work for us as a community. So many people became interested in science, liked science, saw science as something that fed their curiosity and that they could enjoy, because he made it interesting and fun.

I think we’ve come a long way since then. Neil deGrasse Tyson gets a much better reception than Carl Sagan ever did. We’ve become much better at embracing and accepting that we should be grateful for those in our midst who can do that kind of work. But we still have work to do, particularly in universities where young faculty feel that if they do public work, it will be held against them. It will be viewed as a sign that they’re not really serious.

DECATUR: I think sometimes in these conversations we talk about a loss of trust and confidence in scientific institutions as if the institutions are fine and it’s the people that are misguided. And it’s worth reflecting on that. There are a lot of good reasons why people shouldn’t trust scientific institutions. There is a long history of exclusionary and problematic practices by scientific institutions. If you look at the Pew data, in addition to the divide on political party affiliation, there are also racial divides in terms of confidence in science with African Americans and groups that have historically been excluded from full participation in the scientific enterprise, who not surprisingly have less trust in scientific institutions. These institutions can be uncomfortable places for people who bring different perspectives, different views, or different experiences. We need to think about how we want to engage people, how we relate to a broad range of audiences, and how institutions may need to change some of their practices to address inclusion in a much broader way. I think there are moments when science communicates that it somehow stands apart, and that reinforces a lack of trust and confidence that folks have.

ORESKES: I think we’ve been better at the first part of this problem by allowing young people to do public outreach and not denying them tenure because they did that. I think we’ve been not as good about embracing in a deep way what the long-term implications of our exclusionary practices have been, and part of that may be the lack of good data. One thing I’ve noticed is that as scientists, we’re sometimes unscientific in our approach when we start looking at broader social questions and people assert things that might or might not be true. For example, on this question of trust in relation to historical practices, you’ll probably remember that when the vaccines first became available for the COVID-19 virus, newspapers were reporting that Black people weren’t getting vaccines because of the legacy of Tuskegee. I remember thinking: how do you know that? Have you spoken to the community? Are you talking to people? I was skeptical that the legacy of Tuskegee was the main reason Black Americans weren’t getting the COVID vaccine.

As the data came out, the studies showed two things. One was that it wasn’t so much about history, but about the experiences that people of color have today when they go to the doctor or try to get medical care. They may not have a doctor. At one point during the pandemic, Dr. Robert Redfield, then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “If you think you’re sick, call your doctor.” That’s a pretty clueless thing to say given that half of all Americans do not have a doctor—and they are not just people of color. There are plenty of White people in this country who don’t have doctors. The second thing that came out as the data became available was that the reason why many people were not getting vaccinated was because they couldn’t get a day off from work because of the practices of their employers or because they didn’t have paid vacation or sick time. If they got sick from the vaccine, which many of us did, they wouldn’t have a paid day off. It’s not that Tuskegee isn’t part of the story. It may well be, but there were other more immediate short-term factors that were also playing a role, and probably a larger one.

Religion is another important factor. It’s an issue that is close to my heart, both in terms of my research and as a long-time board member of the National Center for Science Education. One of the things that I’ve written about and studied has to do with what I call implicatory denial: when people reject scientific evidence because they don’t like its implications (or perceived implications). This comes up a lot in the domain of religion. We have studies that show that many Americans who reject evolutionary theory reject it because they believe that it implies the nonexistence of God. This is a form of implicatory denial.

But evolutionary biology does not disprove the existence of God. So this is a perceived implication, not a real one, which means there’s an opportunity to open a conversation about what evolution implies about God, including the possibility that it implies nothing at all.

There were some wonderful studies done at Arizona State Universities, in which teachers made clear to their students that evolutionary biology does not disprove the existence of God. They did that in a variety of different ways. They assigned papers written by scientists who are themselves people of faith, like physicist Sir John Houghton or Brown University professor Ken Miller. They talked about Stephen Jay Gould’s arguments about non-overlapping magisteria—that science and religion are complementary but not competing arenas; that science is about natural phenomenon and religion is about the supernatural. There are many different ways that you can make this point, and the studies show that when you do, it lessens the resistance of students in the classroom to engage with evolutionary theory.

I’ll give one more example. Many years ago when I taught at the University of California, my institution had a prize for science communication and we gave that prize to Richard Dawkins. Some of you may be fans of Richard Dawkins and I will admit that he’s a great writer and a fabulous speaker, but I believe that he has done more damage to the relationship between science and people of faith than anyone alive on this planet. The fact that my institution gave him a prize without apparently understanding that the message he was promoting about the relationship of science to people of faith was deeply troubling. So it’s important to consider the messages we’re conveying. We may personally think that people of faith are wrong to believe in God, but if you’re trying to reach diverse communities, that message is not the way to make friends and influence people.

THORP: I think a lot of scientists naively thought that when the vaccine came around it would be like 1945 when physics won the war. We would be greeted as people who saved humanity. Now the vaccine did save a lot of lives, but it wasn’t universally accepted in the way science was in 1945 when the approval rate of science was probably 95 percent and it led to the launch of the funded science enterprise in America. Were you surprised at what happened during the pandemic? I’m guessing no. But what would you say to the folks who were surprised? My answer would be to read some of your books.

ORESKES: But not just my book. Any books on the history of medicine would be a good resource.

THORP: So what do we do about vaccine hesitancy and resistance?

ORESKES: I wasn’t surprised. I and virtually every historian of medicine I know saw this coming. There’s a long history of vaccine resistance. There was a lot of resistance to the Salk vaccine, which we’ve now forgotten about and wiped away because we see that as a great success of modern science. It’s not my intention to insult anyone personally from the CDC who may be here with us, but I think the CDC was negligent in not taking seriously what the social part of vaccine delivery needed to look like. This is an area where I think the scientific community still has a lot of work to do. You cannot develop a medical treatment without addressing the social dimensions of health care delivery and expect things to go well.

DECATUR: If we look back, we see that we have had a golden era in which scientific discoveries were universally embraced. And it’s natural to have some skepticism about who owns and controls the scientific innovation, given the power and authority of institutions. People who have reason to question the broader systems of authority and power naturally question the technology and the science that goes along with it. They are connected.

I think museums are well positioned to do two things. One is to work to democratize science as much as possible, to open up ways in which folks from the broader public can engage in conversations about the process of science. And the second is to show how science actually works: that new observations can change a set of ideas. The more transparent we are about how science works and the more open we are to invite people into the conversation, the better we can dispel the notion that science is exclusive to elites connected to power or institutional authority. It is a risky position to put ourselves in, because we are inviting people in to engage in dialogue and ask questions about what we do. But I come back to the idea of going to where people are and a sense of humility that we can’t expect everyone to come to us. We may have to change our language and how we talk about religion in order to bring people into a conversation. And humility in the way we act and engage is important.

THORP: Let’s now take some questions from the audience.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do we mean by mistrust of science? Everybody in this room expects that when I flick the switch, the lights will come on. When I put my key in the car and it turns on, that’s trust in things that were made through scientific, engineering, and technological inquiry and innovation. I want to argue that we should try to be a little more specific about the locus of distrust. This program is being watched on Zoom. Ten years ago, we could never imagine being able to watch such a program live while being in another city or even another country. But that possibility now is a product of science. But there’s a distrust that comes in the door when science and society meet. There’s mistrust right now about things concerning our bodies, about disease, and about the control of epidemics. There are people who are actively manipulating facts that we know are facts. So how do we counter all of this if we don’t get specific about what we mean about the aspects of the scientific enterprise that are now front and center being distrusted by our publics?

THORP: Let me add one thing before I ask Sean and Naomi to comment. The journal Science is very deliberately crafted so that our audience is other scientists. Occasionally we have a news story that millions of people look at and we always love that because that’s good for our metrics, but our number one goal is to write for other scientists.

DECATUR: I think it is important to be specific about what’s being mistrusted. And it might be broader than health and the body. For example, the mistrust concerning the environment and other aspects of the natural world often focuses on food production, which we know is connected to our health. Let me also add that there’s a difference between trusting your doctor and trusting an institutional authority that may or may not have your interest aligned with the conclusions that they are making.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The research shows that Republicans with a lot of formal education are more skeptical than Republicans with less education. Is this a failure of our educational system or a tribute to the willingness to challenge accepted wisdom that should be encouraged by education?

ORESKES: I would say it’s not either one of those. The instinct of almost all of us is to think education is the solution. And yet we know, for example, that the more educated a Republican is the more likely they are to be a climate denier. That is a good example of motivated reasoning. Educated people are very good at finding the information that supports the view they want to hold. We know that many conservatives are ideologically motivated to distrust climate science or other science that implies a need for government intervention in the marketplace. So just giving those people more information doesn’t solve the problem.

What does solve the problem? Well, that’s a good question. We don’t actually have good data on this. And there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Many Republicans who reject climate science are very pro-technology. Many of them are supportive of the space program. It’s pointless to tell them how great technology is; they already accept that. So what is the solution? One strategy that I’ve sometimes used in public talks is to focus on market-based mechanisms to address climate change. For example, I’ll say, “Let’s talk about a climate leader, George H. W. Bush.” Now he may not be a hero to many Republicans today, but he was a Republican president. Sometimes you can begin the conversation by recognizing what’s at stake. These folks will not be persuaded by more information about satellite measurements of the troposphere. But if you say, “Here are some market-based solutions, and here is how they worked for acid rain, and the price of electricity didn’t go up,” that can be a way to create space for a conversation.

DECATUR: Now this might sound contradictory because I’m looking forward to the next round of Pew data, but I think the surveys are flawed. I’m not quite sure how to interpret many of the questions. For example, how much trust do you have in science or scientists? Or what’s the net good of science? Or do you think science had a positive impact, a very positive impact, a negative impact, a very negative impact, etc.? A lot of those questions depend on how at that moment you’re reading the word science. What happens if we swap science with technology when there’s a lot of negative swirl about the technology sector and the overall impact of the technology sector is negative? But if you put it in the broader context of all the things that technology has done over the course of the past few years, you read it in a different way. I think those surveys have enough ambiguity in them and so depending on how one reads it, the data are unclear. And that relates back to the lack of specificity.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: There are scientists who are untrustworthy, corrupt, or paid to mislead human knowledge. On the other side, there is an organized assault against the idea of checking each other’s facts and reasoning. And that is what science is. We check each other because we’re all fallible. Well, the people who are against being fact checked, the people who want to be able to tell any lie today and no one will notice it’s different from what they were saying yesterday or a week ago, they are in effect enemies of science. So what do we do? With regard to whether scientists do their work honestly, money is the source of corruption so we have to take business money out of the system. For instance, the evaluation and testing of drugs should not be funded by the drug companies. The government should tax those companies and then spend that money testing the drugs. In that way, even though the same companies may be ultimately paying for the testing, they won’t have control over which scientists are doing the testing. And then there’s the systematic attack on the idea of truth. Could you comment on that?

ORESKES: One of the important issues you raise is that we need to clean up our own house. I think universities have been either naive or in denial about some of the corrupting influences of funding. As you may know, I’ve written about Harvard and Jeffrey Epstein. Princeton recently said they would not accept funding from companies that had been involved in disinformation or corrupting the scientific process. But then last week they said they were going to take money from Exxon Mobil because it’s too much of a hardship for their faculty if they don’t! In effect they are saying: we’ll stand on principle until it hurts and then we won’t. We’re asking people to trust our moral compass at the same time that it’s clear that our moral compass is being deflected by the magnetism of money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I want to follow up on trying to figure out which parts of science people are uncomfortable with. When you drop a ball it falls, when I turn my car on it runs—those are things that happen every time. But when you talk about vaccines and whether I will get a disease or not, or climate change, that has to do with probability, statistics, averages. Could it be that people don’t understand or are uncomfortable with the science? What is the difference between saying, “This vaccine helps 80 percent of people, but I know a guy and the vaccine didn’t work for him” versus the kind of science that predicts something that happens every time? What can we do to help people understand that when science gives us probabilistic or statistical results instead of certainties, that’s still important information?

DECATUR: For me it comes back to being very clear in how we communicate what science is, what the process is, and what it means when we make a statement. There’s a lot for us to unpack about the COVID-19 response. It was a chaotic time, and the folks in the middle of that chaotic situation were trying to communicate in the best way they could. When we express things in absolutes and then those absolutes turn out to be not so absolute, people pull back.

And so the notion that you should take a vaccine and you’re going to be fine, and then everything isn’t fine, or being fine doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, that leads to distrust. We need clear communication about how science actually works, and we need to be clear when we’re talking about something in terms of probabilities. It is on us to communicate better. We can’t just say that this is complicated, and you don’t need to know about it. Just take the shot and trust us. We need to go through the process of being clear in explaining where we are and how we arrived at this point.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you talk about the mistrust of federal agencies, like NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission?

ORESKES: There are a lot of different federal agencies and they behave in different ways. My former postdoc Viktoria Cologna has a set of papers that are in press right now about a study she did of trust in science in sixty-eight countries. One of the questions she posed in the survey had to do with the alignment between people’s values and scientific research. She found that in many countries distrust of science is aligned with disagreement with scientific priorities. In many countries, people would like to see scientists do more work on health, medicine, and the environment, and less work on the military.

This is an elephant in the room. We all know that a huge amount of science in this country and also in Europe is linked to military applications funded by military agencies. The Department of Energy came out of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was historically linked to the atomic bomb, but we almost never talk about that. Ronald Reagan said the eleventh commandment was not to speak ill of a fellow Republican. I feel like the twelfth commandment is thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow scientist. We’ve been reluctant to have an honest conversation about the priorities of science as an enterprise. DOE is spending millions of dollars right now to persuade people to like nuclear energy. To me that is wrong on so many levels. Even if you thought that was a good goal, DOE is not the right agency to do that. Holden, as the editor of Science, you are in a good position to help us have this conversation.

THORP: I think there is a way for us to decouple ourselves from other institutions, which would include the agencies and the universities because they always circle the wagons when there’s a problem but they are reluctant to stand up for things that are correct if those things are controversial. For example, we have this neutrality movement in higher education that is really not about neutrality. It’s just staying out of things when it might get you into trouble. It would be so much better if they would tell the truth. For instance, if a faculty member wrote a great paper about climate science or abortion or guns and you ask if the university has anything to say about those issues, they answer, “No, we’re neutral. We don’t talk about these things.” But if a paper is wrong, and I write to Harvard, for example, and say we need to work on this, the research integrity officer will write back and say, “Thank you for letting me know. Research integrity is very important to Harvard University.” And that’s it.

Every time I write to them, they’ll write back with the same response. Meanwhile people are angry that the paper hasn’t been corrected. And then there are graduate students who are reading the paper and deciding whether they’re going to repeat the experiment or use it in their thesis. We should tell them that we’re working on the problems with the paper. But I get absolutely nothing from the institutions when it comes to this, and the agencies are the same way. We just had a news story in Science about misconduct that happened at the NIH. There was no comment from the NIH the whole time we were working on the story. And then right before we published the story, NIH said, “Actually, we’ve been investigating this and we found two instances of misconduct”—by the way, in the story we identified hundreds of cases of misconduct—“and we’ve dealt with them and have no further comment.”

There was nothing from the NIH about how we take this seriously, that we’re sorry if anybody was harmed, that these are the things we’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Zip. The universities and the funding agencies are afraid. So that leaves us with saying, I’ll correct the papers when they’re wrong and I’ll stand up for them when they’re right, but it sure would be nice if I got some help from the institutions and the agencies. I think the way that science could decouple itself from the decline in trust in institutions that we’re seeing is to be much more open and direct about when we screw up, and when we do something that’s controversial that we’re willing to stand up and acknowledge it. Because there’s almost nobody else doing it with us.

ORESKES: Isn’t it ironic how scientists of all people will not admit and correct their mistakes?

THORP: That would help us avoid the kind of decline seen in other institutions that are constantly focused on damage control, relying on PR firms and attorneys to stay out of trouble. But let’s end on something positive. What makes you hopeful? I’ll start. What makes me hopeful is that there’s a culture that’s slowly developing in science to hold ourselves more accountable, and I’m doing everything that I can to promote the people who are doing that. As younger scientists come into the fold, I think they’re much more open and understanding about this, and I think there’s a pathway for science to be a much more approachable and interactive enterprise if we all commit ourselves to that. Sean, what makes you hopeful?

DECATUR: The thing that makes me hopeful is the curiosity that I see in young people. There’s something about wanting to understand the world around you, and to watch that develop gives me a sense of hope. Also institutions are evolving and becoming more transparent. The current generation of graduate students and postdocs are committed to that more open and transparent way of operation, and they may be the folks in charge of those institutions twenty years from now. So the fact that kids today are curious and invested in learning about the world and hopefully remain so when they are adults and that the folks who may be in charge of our institutions twenty years from now will have moved things forward to be more transparent—both of those things give me hope.

ORESKES: I must say I hate this question. It’s become formulaic that we end programs with it. I get invitations all the time that go like this, “We want you to tell the truth. We want to know what’s going on. But let’s end on a happy note!” I feel like I’m being asked to be the mommy and tell the children everything is going to be okay. Everyone here is a grownup and you recognize that these are real and serious problems. I don’t know if everything is going to be okay. I do think there’s been a lot of positive change. Young people and graduate students are much more engaged on these issues. But we still have a lot of work to do. We need to think hard and seriously about what short-term and long-term actions could make a difference.

THORP: Your answer did make me hopeful; thank you. I would like to thank Sean and Naomi for a great discussion. And now it is my pleasure to turn things over to Cristine Russell, who’s been my partner in putting this program together.

Cristine Russell

Cristine Russell is a former Senior Fellow in the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
 

Let me start with saying that I’m a science journalist, not a scientist. I want to thank our panelists for sharing their wonderful expertise, insights, and perspectives. And many thanks to Holden for moderating this program and getting his arms around a really big subject. And let me thank all of you in the audience for your participation, thoughtful questions, and engagement.

We covered a lot of different topics today. I want to highlight one important point that Naomi made: that trust in science has declined less than trust in other institutions, with journalism, banking, and government down near the bottom. We also talked about the decline in trust in science among conservatives. But that’s not new. This decline in trust has been building for thirty years. As we approach the very polarized presidential election in the coming weeks, we’re hearing more about distrust of science. What I hope we can get to is some understanding about the steps that we need to take to rebuild trust in science, and our exploratory meeting tomorrow will be discussing some of those issues. The conversation today has reinforced the importance of building trust within our communities and the country at large and the need for continued dialogue and action. We know there are new challenges ahead, but there is also unprecedented interest in making a difference in the way that science is communicated. I’m excited that the Academy is facilitating expert discussions on this topic and helping to generate new ideas and a path forward. This issue is not new, but it is important that we continue to make progress by reaching out to the general public to rebuild trust in science.