People all over trust climate researchers less than scientists in general

People all over trust climate researchers less than scientists in general

Climate scientists, on average, are less trusted around the world than scientists in general, according to a preprint posted to the Open Science Framework last month. That lack of trust could weaken support for government actions to avert catastrophic global warming, researchers say. “I was reading this preprint on a 75°[F] day in Boston in November, which didn’t feel good,” says Boston University’s Matthew Motta.

Past research has identified this trust gap in the United States, but the new paper is the first to find it in a large, detailed international survey, says Motta, who researches trust in the scientific community. Motta was not involved in the new work but has previously collaborated with some of the authors.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted global concern over falling trust in science and scientists, but there was little data on the topic, says Viktoria Cologna, an environmental social scientist at the Collegium Helveticum/Swiss Institute for Advanced Study. To get a fuller picture, she and her colleagues teamed up with researchers in 68 countries to ask nearly 70,000 people about their trust in scientists, beliefs about science, political beliefs, and thoughts on climate change and climate scientists specifically.

On average, people assigned scientists a trust rating of 3.62 on a five-point scale. But for climate scientists, that rating fell to 3.5. The gap was much bigger in some countries—such as Bolivia, where scientists generally were rated 3.22 and climate scientists 2.78—and smaller in others, such as Australia, where scientists were rated 3.91 and climate scientists 3.77. Scientists shouldn’t be too disheartened, Cologna says. Trust in climate scientists may be lower, she says, “but it’s not low.”

This trust gap appeared in 43 countries. In 19 others, trust was roughly equal, and in six countries, trust in climate scientists was higher—including in China, where scientists were rated 3.67 and climate scientists 4.14. This could be a result of strong governmental support for climate action in China, Cologna says. The best predictor for the trust gap was someone’s political beliefs, the researchers found: People with more right-wing or conservative beliefs tended to trust climate scientists less than scientists generally.

“Lack of trust in science and in scientists doesn’t emerge from a vacuum,” says study author Edward Maibach, a climate change communication researcher at George Mason University. When climate scientists’ findings conflict with people’s political beliefs, that can lead them to discount scientists’ expertise and motives, he says. But scientists shouldn’t “throw up their hands and give up.”

People must believe scientists have solid morals before they can trust them, says Vukašin Gligorić, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam who wasn’t involved with the new work. In a paper published in April, he and colleagues probed trust in 45 scientific disciplines and found that for disciplines that were publicly contentious, such as virology and climate science, trust went more strongly hand in hand with a perception of morality: “If you believe that scientists are being honest, they’re being sincere, they’re doing something for the greater good, you will trust them more,” Gligorić says.

A crucial tactic for conveying climate findings, Maibach says, is to use “trusted and caring messengers”—people perceived as having the public’s best interests at heart. Motta adds that the right messengers can be especially helpful for crossing political divides. “I think climate scientists have to find ways to communicate the science in a way that is more amenable to folks on the ideological right.” For instance, he and his colleagues have found that conservatives express more concern about climate change after hearing climate messaging from military service members who describe it as a security concern.

And sometimes, Motta says, scientists should step back from the fray and lean on communicators such as social media influencers to spread messages for them. “Scientists are not alone in this battle. … Maybe part of the solution is from time to time taking our foot off the gas and saying, ‘There are other people who can do this for us.’”