The Morgridge Institute and the general public came together on October 21 for a hybrid webinar in the Fearless Science Speaker Series to discuss why trust in science is eroding and what can be done to regain public trust.
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 Egulbrand Carl. Chairman and CEO of the Morgridge Institute and Professor of Medicine and Biomolecular Chemistry at UW–Madison.
Below is a condensed transcript of selected questions and highlights from the discussion. A recording of the webinar can be viewed in full above.
Introduction to faith in science
Brad Schwartz: Society treats science in a very particular way, and they do so from the implicit understanding that the things we do will ultimately return benefits to society. The University of Wisconsin and the State of Wisconsin have a long history of honoring this social contract. We think it’s just as important to spend time explicitly talking about this social contract, and that’s one of the reasons we’re meeting tonight to talk explicitly about trust, because there’s no good functioning contract if there’s no trust. among the participants. .
Pilar Ossorio: I think that being credible means essentially living up to our scientific obligations to each other as scientists and to the public. So this means applying our scientific methods appropriately and reporting our data fully and honestly. It means not jumping to conclusions beyond what the data supports, and I think to some extent, it means being willing to participate 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 does not function without science. Our politics, our social functions, do not function without science. So zero trust levels are not good. I will argue that 100% faith is also not good if we all blindly trust science. We need a critical discussion of what science can do and what science should do. We want to be somewhere in the middle where there is a broad respect for science as our best way to know and create knowledge, to curate knowledge with a healthy level of skepticism.
What Do scientists have a responsibility to help counter misinformation about science?
Osorio: We have to be careful not to overstate our expertise as people in the scientific community and sometimes say, “here are some reasons why I’m skeptical of this claim, and here are some places I can go to look for further information. Or here is a colleague who is actually very skilled in this area, who can give us more information.” Yes, we have responsibilities, but there are many ways to carry out those responsibilities, and the ways we do that don’t always involve us simply directly trying to counter disinformation.
How did the pandemic affect trust in science? Did the slogan, “Just trust science,” cause more harm than good?
Scheufele: I think there are things we did well during the pandemic and I think there are things we didn’t do well. Everyone took a different approach. Tried to act in good faith based on science. No one quite got it right – what we didn’t do well, what we didn’t anticipate and should have. So, as a result, often times, we took the bait to be also certain or pretending to be very certain about something we knew it wasn’t because it was an evolving body of knowledge. I think we’ve lost long-term, a lot of trust, especially among groups that didn’t like the policy choices that were informed by that science.
How much of the mistrust is specifically due to a general misunderstanding of the scientific method?
Schwartz: I think there’s a significant amount, but I also think it’s an interplay between a misunderstanding of the scientific method and human nature. If you think about human nature, we are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. The scientific method at its heart is really a recognition of the uncertainty and depth of uncertainty we have. But if the scientific enterprise would speak more in terms of the uncertainty of what we know and accept what we don’t know, I think that over time, society would understand a little, come to appreciate more the degree of uncertainty that we have to deal with. So I think part of the mistrust is due to a misunderstanding of the scientific method. But I think a big part of that is that we as scientists haven’t done a good enough job of relaying what the scientific method can tell us.
Scheufele: There’s a second element to this – too often trouble arises when we don’t separate what science can tell us, meaning evidence-based, and what we think policy should be as a result. So at some point, the realities of living in a democracy and making trade-offs between values and everything else. These trade-offs are informed by science, but they are not determined, and I think the extra level of uncertainty is often lost in the discussion that science can inform a policy, but it won’t determine whether we like it or not, and that’s regardless of whether where is your stance on any given policy.
Schwartz: A good point. And it also points out that as scientists, when engaged in scientific research, we must avoid the temptation to wander into policymaking. This is not our job.
Ossorio: I would agree with that, but I also think that if your senator or congressman comes to you with science questions and wants someone to advise them on the science, you should agree to do it. Right?
Schwartz: I think it’s important, but to make it clear that you are advising. This is what we know, how much confidence we have in the knowledge, but we also make it clear that it is the job of the policy makers to make the policy. It is part of the social contract. We’re happy to play our part in that very complicated process, but at the end of the day, we need to keep the Venn diagrams where they belong.
Could we find a gold standard for “slangy” language that would retain credibility for the general public?
Osorio: I think we can all learn to talk to 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 hardworking person can understand, that’s on me. I just think it’s a matter of more basic communication skills and, you know, some awareness of when you’re just spouting jargon like you’re talking to someone who works in this field all the time, right?
Scheufele: We often think about how people process new information – we don’t discover the new world every day, we have mental buckets. I think as scientists, we often struggle with the idea that our mental buckets look fundamentally different from where most other parts of the public are, and in many cases, we are actually those parts of the public when we are not. in our area of expertise. So what good communication is really about is taking new information and relating it to the audience with one of those buckets. If your communication does not reach, it is not in the audience. And I think that’s a really good lesson for us as scientists.
How do you think social media affects our understanding or misunderstanding of science?
Scheufele: What social media has done, and I would make it much broader than just social media, is even legacy media. So even our news, our legacy news, is now more and more algorithmically curated, geared toward our specific interests as a person, rather than broadcasting all the news and sending it to everyone in the same way. I get more and more likes and clicks. This is the idea of algorithmic curation. So if I’m inclined to believe certain types of misinformation, I’ll get more of it. So I would also take it back a little bit to all of us coming out of our silos. And I think being shocked by the other side is actually, democratically, a really healthy thing.
Osorio: It’s about figuring out how to be both accurate and not funny and allaying people’s fears, right? And still be attractive. I think there’s, you know, there’s got to be a sweet spot there where, you know, we can start communicating science really effectively in these new ways. And I personally think, you know, there should be a lot of cute animals and humor involved.
Schwartz: And I think that, you know, the dynamic in the communication ecology is that there’s a lot of opportunity out there to learn about things, but it all comes back to how much the general public will believe the things that they learn about science . and the things they learn are the 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 start with the solution.
Ossorio: *laughs*
Scheufele: I think our biggest challenge right now as a scientific community is not just 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’s a unique amalgam of influences—a social media environment that forces and encourages us to filter our belief systems into like-minded bubbles and like-minded echo chambers, a political environment that was very unique, science that was very uncertain and a devastating pandemic—that we ended up tying science to partisan politics. I think that’s where our real weakness lies when we become an institution that is subject only to party victories or whims, whatever. Then I think we have a real existential problem. Less about science, which will continue to do really good work, but about democracy relying on that science to inform its decisions, and I think that’s when we’re really going to be in trouble. This was not quite a solution.
Osorio: I don’t know that I will propose a solution either. I may have a solution, but not a complete one. You know, we’ve been talking about belief in science as if it’s a unique thing, and people either believe all science or none of science. I actually suspect that for most people, it’s more nuanced than that. And so my only idea of approaching a solution is to think of ways to meet people where they are. If they have had diabetes in their family or cancer in their family, or any condition that has been helped by science and medicine. If they’re here in Wisconsin, and they have a farm, and there might be some way that we can help people that’s really practical. This is part of the way you can approach people in aspects of science that they may still believe in, or that they may not find as politicized as some other aspects of science.
Schwartz: Yes, I think we run the risk of people taking advances for granted and I don’t have an answer how, but it would be nice if we could remind people of all the amazing things that have happened along the way and how most of they actually derive from scientific research in one way or another.