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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 03 2019, @08:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-science dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Public trust that scientists work for the good of society is growing

These days, it can seem as if science is under assault. Climatologists are routinely questioned about what's really causing global warming. Doctors can be disparaged for trying to vaccinate children against disease.

But for the U.S. public at large, scientists are generally seen as a trustworthy bunch. In fact, 86 percent of Americans hold at least "a fair amount" of confidence that scientists work for the public good,  according to a survey released August 2 by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

That's far better than how respondents felt about what motivates politicians (only 35 percent said they were fairly confident that elected officials acted in the public interest), journalists (47 percent) or even religious leaders (57 percent). And that general trust in the goodwill of scientists has grown steadily over the last four years, from 76 percent in 2016.

But confidence falters on narrower questions of scientists' trustworthiness. For instance:

  • The kind of scientist matters. Nearly half — 48 percent — thought doctors gave fair and accurate information, but only 32 percent thought the same of medical researchers. Dieticians also were considered trustworthy by 47 percent of respondents, while that number fell to 24 percent for nutrition scientists. Overall, scientists whose work involved engaging with the public tended to be more trusted than those focused on research;
  • How research is funded matters. More than half of respondents — 58 percent — said they are less trusting of studies financed by industry. And there's skepticism that scientists reveal all of their industry ties: Fewer than 2 in 10 people thought scientists always disclosed conflicts of interest with industry, or faced stern consequences for failing to do so;
  • Sometimes, who is being asked matters. On questions of scientific misconduct, black and Hispanic respondents were more likely than whites to see it as a "big problem." That could reflect wariness due to past cases of experiments being conducted without patients' consent, such as the decades-long Tuskegee Study in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were denied treatment (SN: 3/1/75, p. 134), the Pew report notes. Or it could reflect the fact that, when it comes to environmental justice, these communities are often more likely to be affected by unchecked pollution (SN: 12/6/97, p. 366).

"The issue of trust in scientists is part of a broader conversation that society is having on the role and value of experts," says Cary Funk, the director of Pew's science and society research. "What we wanted to do was get a look at the potential sources of mistrust."


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:38PM (10 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:38PM (#875185) Journal

    After looking over this (including the detailed results, which go on for many pages at the first link the in summary), I'm not sure that this says anything about "science" or "scientists." I'm not sure that the people who conducted this poll know what "science" even is, let alone the general public.

    Look at these summary results:

    The kind of scientist matters. Nearly half — 48 percent — thought doctors gave fair and accurate information, but only 32 percent thought the same of medical researchers. Dieticians also were considered trustworthy by 47 percent of respondents, while that number fell to 24 percent for nutrition scientists. Overall, scientists whose work involved engaging with the public tended to be more trusted than those focused on research.

    Sorry, but WHAT?!?

    Doctors are not "scientists." At least, the vast majority of them are not. They are medical practitioners, trained with a bunch of skills for a career in practice, not research. Many, many studies over the years show that the vast majority of doctors are not competent at interpreting even basic research results and statistics (certainly not doing their own). And dieticians are not "scientists," either. (Seriously?!) A carpenter may be very skilled, might even go to carpentry school -- that doesn't make him a "scientist." Or for an even better example, plenty of engineers have as much education and training as doctors, but most of them are not "scientists" either. (And -- sidenote -- what the hell is wrong with our culture when for no apparent reason doctors are assumed to be "scientists" but other people with more education and more scientific training like most engineers are not? Even dieticians?!)

    What most actual scientists refer to as "scientists" are people who are active researchers/investigators in science. They aren't just "practicing medicine" or making up dietary plans based on some guidelines -- they are helping to create medicine or nutritional guidelines and test them using investigative techniques and scientific research technology.

    So, when one of the critical findings of this study is that "scientists whose work involved engaging with the public tended to be more trusted than those focused on research" and their examples are that people trust doctors but not medical researchers, and they trust dieticians but not nutritional scientists, what this poll is actually clearly tell us is that the public does NOT trust actual scientists. Furthermore, they (and apparently the people running this poll) mostly don't know what a "scientist" is. And, not surprisingly, they probably don't trust "scientists" because they don't understand what scientists actually do.

    Where did this poll ask people what their opinion was of -- oh, I don't know -- physicists? Chemists? Even engineering researchers? You know, actual scientists doing scientific research? Oh wait, it doesn't.

    Meaningless.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:18PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:18PM (#875198)

    Doctors wear the white coat like scientists do in the movies.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:58PM (4 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:58PM (#875205) Journal

      Doctors wear the white coat like scientists do in the movies.

      They also frequently check a special box so they can be called "doctor" in social contexts, but most actual scientists with earned research doctorates are called "fake doctors" or pretenders if they attempt to do the same. (Note that I'm NOT saying that we should call researchers "doctor" in social contexts either -- to me, it seems silly to give anyone a title in a situation outside of contexts where their title is meaningful.)

      And about the "white coat" thing -- yeah, doctors even have a ceremony thing [wikipedia.org] for it, treating it like a cult you joined. Weirdos. Actual scientists who still wear white lab coats do so for utilitarian purposes and don them without ceremony.

      There's a lot of pretentiousness around the whole medical profession, which appears to seep into the general public's opinion that they must be "more important" than they are.

      (And no, I'm not disparaging all doctors. And I'll freely admit the good ones are amazing and serve an incredibly important function in society. But the pretentious insistence on titling and silly things like white coat ceremonies actually makes me respect the overall profession less.)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:13PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:13PM (#875207)

        The only thing smarter than a doctor is a doctor with grey hair and glasses.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:56PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:56PM (#875217)

          *male

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @08:58PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @08:58PM (#875249)

        Better a bit of pretentiousness than the heaps of self-deprecation in the IT field. Getting some of the respect lawyers and physicians get would be nice in reflection of our responsibilities and the education, formal and continuing, the field requires.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:43AM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:43AM (#875357) Journal

          I take your point, but this pretention is not without cost. It leads to overconfidence, something that can be disastrous in an emergency life-or-death situation. Decisiveness and reasonable confidence is fine and necessary for someone in that profession. Believing that you gain some sort of magical powers when you wear a white coat (or having your patients believe so) is probably a major contributor to the many preventable medical mistakes that happen.

  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:10PM

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:10PM (#875206) Journal
    Yeah, this is one of the things that just makes public discussions so frustrating. People don't even understand the words they're using. You and I may know what 'scientist' means but to the news media and most of the population it's equivalent to 'priest.'  You know, they wear white coats and know important things and speak with authority, those people.

    I call it scientism. It's the religion of a whole bunch of people who think they aren't religious.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 03 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 03 2019, @09:10PM (#875252) Homepage Journal

    It looks as if the survey treated the word "scientist" to mean "people in science-based professions". With this meaning, the article makes more sense.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:55AM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:55AM (#875362) Journal

      Except where are the physicists or chemists or engineers? Or biologists or virologists or epidemiologists, if we're going to talk about actual scientists who practice in the field of medicine?

      Or for that matter, the carpenters? Most carpenters I know (and I actually know a few) are pretty diehard empiricists. They hit nails in ways that work. If they hit a nail in a way that doesn't work, they avoid that. They learn through experience and construction what works well and is durable vs. what isn't.

      I'm not being facetious here. I literally believe that carpenters do as much and perhaps more practicing of the "scientific method" and using empirical results as doctors and dieticians. Given what I know of the inability of doctors to interpret study data (from repeated studies on this), I would trust a doctor's judgment about the same as a carpenter's in their ability to come to a novel empirical conclusion.

      Why not accountants? They certainly have method to what they do. And math is the underpinning of science.

      I'm not saying one can't have a broader conception of "scientist" than what one does in a lab, but medicine has provably been roughly 25% science and 75% lore for a lot of its recent history (even more lore prior to that), which is the reason behind the evidence-based medicine movement in recent decades.

      So no, I'd say the entire field of medicine has only gradually been transforming into a science and still has a long way to go. And the doctors who practice is certainly are not generally scientists by any rational measure.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:11AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 04 2019, @02:11AM (#875346) Journal

    Great write up.

    "scientists whose work involved engaging with the public tended to be more trusted"

    My take was "People trust PR people more than they trust people who do stuff."