Earning Trust: How Can We Navigate Public Skepticism and Science Misinformation

The Morgridge Institute and the general public gathered on October 21 for a hybrid webinar in the Fearless Science Speaker Series to discuss why trust in science is breaking down and what can be done to earn public confidence.

The panel of experts included Pilar Ossorio, Morgridge Investigator and UW–Madison Professor of Law and Bioethics, Dietram Scheufele, Morgridge Investigator and UW–Madison Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Taylor-Bascom Chair in Science Communication, and Brad Schwartz, Carl E. Gulbrandsen Chair and CEO of the Morgridge Institute and UW–Madison Professor of Medicine and Biomolecular Chemistry.

The following is an abridged transcript of selected questions and key takeaways from the discussion. A recording of the webinar can be viewed in full above.

Opening remarks on trust in science

Brad Schwartz
Brad Schwartz

Brad Schwartz: Society treats science in a very special way, and they do that out of the implicit understanding that the things that we do will eventually bring benefit back to society. The University of Wisconsin and the state of Wisconsin have a long history of honoring this social contract. We think that it is equally important that we explicitly spend time talking about this social contract, and that’s one of the reasons we’re getting together tonight to talk expressly about trust, because there’s no good functional contract if there is not trust between the participants. 

Pilar Ossorio: I think to be trustworthy means to basically to enact our scientific obligations to each other as scientists and to the public. So that means applying our scientific methods appropriately and reporting our data completely and honestly. It means not drawing conclusions beyond what the data support, and I think to some extent, it means being willing to participate in and accept that we have some oversight. 

Dietram Scheufele: How much trust is good for society? It’s a scale. It’s a spectrum. This country doesn’t run without science. Our politics, our societal functions, don’t run without science. So zero levels of trust are not good. I will argue 100% trust is also not good if all of us blindly trust science. We need a critical discussion about what science can do and what science should be doing. We want to be somewhere in the middle where there’s a broad deference towards science as our best way of knowing and of creating knowledge, of curating knowledge with a healthy level of skepticism. 

What responsibility do scientists have to help counter misinformation about science?

Pilar Ossorio
Pilar Ossorio

Ossorio: We have to be careful not to over oversell our own expertise as people in the scientific community, and sometimes to say: “here are some reasons why I am skeptical of that claim, and here are some places I might go to look for further information. Or here is a colleague who is actually very well versed in this area who might give us some more information.” Yes, we have responsibilities, but there are a lot of ways of carrying out those responsibilities, and the ways we do it do not always include us just directly trying to counter misinformation.

How did the pandemic impact trust of science? Did the quote, “Just trust the science” cause more damage than good as a slogan?

Scheufele: I think there are things that we did well during the pandemic, and I think there are things that we didn’t do well. Everybody took a different approach. Tried to act in good faith based on the science. Nobody got it fully right — what we didn’t do well, what we didn’t anticipate, and we should have. So as a result, by every so often, we took the bait on being too certain or claiming to be too certain about something that we knew wasn’t because it was an emerging body of knowledge. I think we lost long term, a lot of trust, especially among groups who didn’t like the policy choices that were informed by that science. 

How much of the distrust is due specifically to a general misunderstanding of the scientific method?

Schwartz: I think there’s a significant amount, but I also think it is an interaction between a misunderstanding of the scientific method and human nature. If you think about human nature, we are profoundly uncomfortable with uncertainty. The scientific method at its heart is really a an acknowledgement of uncertainty and the depth of uncertainty that we have. But if the scientific enterprise more habitually spoke in terms of the uncertainty of what we know and admitted what we didn’t know, I think over time, society would come to understand a little bit, come to appreciate more the degree of uncertainty that we have to deal with. So I do think that some of the distrust is due to a misunderstanding the scientific method. But I think a big part of that is that we as scientists have not done a good enough job transmitting what the scientific method can can tell us.

Dietram Scheufele
Dietram Scheufele

Scheufele: There’s a second element to that — very often trouble arises when we don’t separate from what science can tell us, meaning the evidence-based, and what we think the policy needs to be as a result. So at some point, the realities of living in a democracy and making trade offs between values and everything else. Those trade offs are informed by the science, but they’re not determined, and I think that additional level of uncertainty is very often lost in the discussion that science can inform a policy, but it won’t determine it if we like it or not, and that’s regardless of where your stance is on any given policy.

Schwartz: A good point. And it also points out that as scientists, when we’re engaged in scientific research, we should avoid the temptation to wander into policy making. That’s not our job. 

Ossorio:  I would agree with that, but I also think that if your senator or congress person comes to you with scientific questions and wants somebody to advise them on the science, it would behoove you to agree to do that. Right?

Schwartz: I think that’s important, but making it clear that you’re advising. This is what we know, how much confidence we have in the knowledge, but also make it clear that it is the policy makers job to make the policy. It’s part of the social contract. We’re happy to play our role in that very complicated process, but ultimately, we should keep the Venn diagrams where they belong.

Could we come up with a gold standard for “de-jargoned” language, which would maintain credibility to the general public?

Ossorio: I do think we can all learn to talk to the people who are not in our field. I just have to figure out how to talk about it, and if I can’t figure out how to talk about it in a way that a hard working person can understand, that’s on me. I just think it’s a matter of more basic communication skills and, you know, some self awareness about when you’re just spouting out jargon as though you’re talking to somebody who works in this area all the time, right?

Scheufele: We often think about how people process new information — we don’t discover the world new every day, we have mental buckets. I think as scientists, we often have a hard time with is the idea that our mental buckets look fundamentally different from where most other parts of the public are, and in many cases, we’re actually those parts of the public when we’re not in our expert field. So what good communication really is about is taking new information and connecting it for audiences to one of those buckets. If your communication doesn’t land, it’s not on the audience. And I think that’s a really good lesson for us as scientists. 

How do you think social media impacts our understanding or misunderstanding of science?

Scheufele: What social media has done, and I would make that much broader than just social media, it’s even legacy media. So even our news, our legacy news, are now increasingly algorithmically curated, cast toward our specific interests as a person, rather than broadcast all the news and send it out to everybody in the exact same way. I get more and more of what I like and what I click on. That’s the idea of algorithmic curation. So if I am prone to believing certain kinds of misinformation, I will get more of it. So I would also throw that a little bit back to all of us that we get out of our own silos. And I think getting rattled by the other side is actually, democratically, a really healthy thing.

Ossorio: It’s figuring out how to be both accurate and not ridiculous and whipping up people’s fears, right? And still be attractive. I think that’s, you know, there has to be some sweet spot in there where, you know, we can begin communicating science really effectively in these new ways. And I personally think, you know, a lot of cute animals and humor have to be involved.

Schwartz: And I think that, you know, the dynamics in the communication ecology are such that there are lots of opportunities out there to learn about things, but it all gets back to how much the general public will trust the things that they learn about science and the things that they learn that are a result of scientific advances.

What do we do next? Where do we go from here?

Scheufele: I’ll start with the problem, and then Pilar can jump in with the solution.

Ossorio: *laughs*

Scheufele: I think our biggest challenge at the moment as a scientific community, it’s not exclusively our fault, but we have contributed to it. What ended up happening during COVID is somewhat unsurprising that we saw widening gaps along partisan lines. I think there is a unique amalgam of influences — a social media environment that enforces and encourages us to filter our belief systems into like-minded bubbles and like-minded echo chambers, a political environment that was very unique, highly uncertain science, and a disruptive pandemic — that we ended up tying science to partisan politics. I think that’s where our real vulnerability lies the moment we become one institution that’s just subject to partisan wins or whims, whatever. Then, I think we have a real existential problem. Less so for science, which will continue to do really good work, but for democracy that relies on that science to inform its decisions, and I think that’s when we’ll really be in trouble. That was totally not a solution.

Ossorio: I don’t know that I’m going to propose a solution either. I might have one sort of, but not a full solution. You know, we’ve been talking about trust in science as though that’s a unitary thing, and people either trust all science or no science. I actually suspect that for most people, it’s more nuanced than that. And so my only idea approaching a solution is to think about ways to meet people where they are. If they’ve had diabetes in their family or cancer in their family, or some condition that has been helped by science and medicine. If they are here in Wisconsin, and they have a farm, and there might be some way that we could be of really practical help to people. That’s part of the way that you might approach people on the aspects of science that they might still trust, or that they might not see as politicized as some other aspects of science. 

Schwartz: Yes, I think we run the risk of having people take the advances for granted, and I don’t have an answer as to how, but it would be good if we could remind people of all the amazing things that have happened along the way and how most of them really are derived from scientific research in one way or another.