Children are taught about the conduction of electricity at a science festival in China.Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty
Around the world, the scientific community is confronting challenges to its cultural authority. Funding is under pressure, expertise is subject to political attack, and vaccine scepticism and disputes over climate policy are rife1. This is often interpreted as a problem of the public — a result of limited scientific literacy, declining trust in experts and misinformation — rather than of science itself. Yet, working with limited assessment tools, it is striking how little knowledge researchers have about the extent to which the public understands science2.
Science’s big problem is a loss of influence, not a loss of trust
Scientists and researchers who study public understanding should reckon with their own role in this cultural disconnect. In particular, they need to reimagine the ways in which scientific literacy and trust have long been conceptualized and measured. For decades, researchers have relied mainly on surveys — asking what people know or how much confidence they have in scientists and experts. These questions have yielded important insights. But they have also perpetuated gaps in knowledge.
A broader approach is needed, which I outline here. Scientists need to carefully examine the public’s understanding of how the scientific enterprise operates and how its institutions work, as well as the contexts in which people experience science, both positively and negatively.
Consider more than facts
The limitations of measures of science literacy over time and across populations are well established3. Early efforts assessed an individual’s capacity to engage with scientific information as a technical form of civic competence, such as the ability to comprehend popular-science magazines or the science section of a newspaper4. Over time, such measures came to stand in for broader claims around public understanding5. And the distinction blurred between knowing scientific facts and understanding how science operates as a social and institutional enterprise.
How to get science back into policymaking
Gaps in public knowledge are dramatized6. For example, widely used tools ask respondents whether the Earth revolves around the Sun — a question that, across multiple surveys, roughly one-quarter of respondents answer incorrectly. Questions about genetic probability test numeracy and reasoning around genetics, and also generate high rates of incorrect responses. Yet low science-literacy scores say little about how people evaluate scientific information, assess expertise or reason about science’s role in society.
Evaluations of trust are also too simplistic. Many people express confidence in scientific methods and expertise but also question how science is governed, funded or applied in public decision-making. Standard measures of trust tend to collapse these distinctions, and do little to explain why credibility is granted or withdrawn.
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