Rapidly Diverging Public Trust in Science in the United States

E. Keith Smith and Manjana Milkoreit

No fr6xk, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Trust in science is crucial to resolving societal problems. Americans across political ideologies have high levels of trust in science—a stable pattern observed over the past 50 years. Yet, trust in science varies by individual and group characteristics and faces several threats, from political actors, increased political polarization, or global crises. We revisit historical trends of trust in science amongst Americans by political orientation. We find steadily diverging trends by political views since the 1990s, and a drastically and rapidly opening gap since 2018. Recent unprecedented changes are driven by decreases in trust among conservatives but also increases among liberals. Existing theoretical accounts do not fully explain these patterns. Diverging attitudes towards the institution of science can diminish capacity for collective problem solving, eroding the shared foundation for decision making and political discourse.

Date: 2024-06-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-soc
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/665df8ffd835c427e64ce6b9/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:fr6xk

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/fr6xk

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().