Two sides of the same coin: Public trust in science and scientists‘ trust in the public

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Matthias Kohring; Professor Dr. Frank Marcinkowski
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458648062

In exceptional situations like the Covid 19 pandemic it becomes clear that Western societies are increasingly dealing with a transition from a self-evident acceptance of science to a perception of science as risk. Since political decisions based on scientific research and advice from scientists have met with criticism and, in part, social resistance, science has also been drawn into these conflicts. But when the scientific expertise itself is at stake, the focus of public debates switches from knowledge itself to the trustworthiness of the knowledge producers. Against this background, the Public Engagement (PE) with science plays a crucial role in building and maintaining trust. If, due to negative experiences with the media and public debates, scientists were to lose trust in the rationality of public communication and refrain from public engagement, an important resource for public trust in science would be lost.Public trust in science thus appears as a coin with two sides: One side is the perspective of the public realizing the risk to rely on (preliminary) scientific results in times of high uncertainty, therefore looking for indicators to base their trust on. The other side is the perspective of the scientists who might question the rationality of public discussion processes regarding them as risky for their reputation and even for their safety. The project presented here— which is as a joint endeavor together with Prof. Martin Bauer from the LSE, London —therefore aims to shed light on both per-spectives at the same time.The goal of the first subproject is to understand and to model the architecture of public trust in science, consisting of risk perceptions, expectations of trust, reasons for trust and consequences of trust—or distrust, with a special focus on the perception of the communication behavior of scientists. The program follows a mixed-methods approach by combining a detailed exploratory phase with the development and application of a standardized survey instrument. The second subproject focus on scientists’ perception of the public role of science during the first phase of the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020. The aim is to clarify how these experiences may have changed the attitude of scientists towards dialogue with the public, the media and interest groups, and what kind of communication behavior results from this. The program combines a standardized survey of scientists with a series of guideline surveys with particularly visible and largely invisible scientists.The synthesis of both subprojects allows a comprehensive stocktaking of the mutual trust relation between science and the public. Our goal is to derive recommendations from this comprehensive analysis that can guide science communication and in particular the communication behavior of scientists beyond the Covid 19 pandemic in order to stabilize and improve the relationship of trust between science and the public.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants